Dead In Vinland

I am a viking geek and instabuy anything remotely related to Old Norse and Viking Cultures so when this game was released I was immediately interested was absorbed in storytelling and gameplay and logged quite a few hours. But the more time progressed the more I fell victim to the RNG and decisions being taken out of my hand with a downwards spiral that let me inadvertently lose without me as a player being able to stop it. The game fell apart because I lost resources, needed sheep but could not get them because exploration meant fighting and my already damaged crew could not handle it and so on. In short: it became frustrating despite the nice graphics, interesting characters and cool story. I stopped playing it. On other platforms I saw the complaints about the relentless RNG even on easy mode and could not agree more. But with the new update all the complaints have been addressed: Now the difficulty is totally up to the player and things that are annoying or too difficult can be toned down or avoided alltogether. Kudos to the devs for listening to the complaints and making this possible! Now I can give it another try. :)

Dead in Vinland is a solid game with great visuals, characters, story and runs smoothly without bugs. However, the sheer amount of dice rolls and other stupid design choices is simply cringe-worthy and rage inducing. You cannot plan ahead of time and decide which character will fill which role as their stats are randomized and the list of traits you can choose for them at every level up is random as well, so you better hope the people you wanted to do the fighting do not end up filled with gathering traits. Such system essentially forces you to save-scum, because it is way faster to do it (and much less frustrating) than having to restart over and over again because you could not turn one person into a decent a fighter. Combat is a tedious, unavoidable task that requires no strategy whatsoever. Once you figure a good combo, just keep spamming it at every encounter, prioritizing targets as necessary. You'll only have to do some thinking when you're boss fighting, and that's when you'll be pissed for not having been given better trait choices for your fighters. Or you can just save-scum until you get a huge critical hit. That works as well. A lot of foreknowledge is necessary for this game. Way too much. You can literally lose ALL the unique items you gave to a character simply because he/she decided to do "X" and if you don't ban him/her (and banning means death) from your camp, he/she will keep doing "X" and screw everything up no matter what you do. For these reasons, I cannot recommend this game, at least not at full price. Grab it when it is at least 50% off.

I bought the game on a whim because I liked the theme and the artstyle. I don't regret it, perse, but I don't feel it's gonna be a favorite of mine. Here's why. It's basically a player vs gameboard digital boardgame with some plotflavour. You have a set number of moves during your turns, which get determined by the number of people you have in your camp. Every person has traits - positive and negativ - and numerical skill/stat-values, which determine their chance of wining dicethrows. The game is basically about useing your limited moves to procure resources to develop your camp, uncovering more of the map to further the plotline, while managing to sustain a baseline of resources to keep your people working, since every action drains a stat/skill and has to be eventually replenished. It suffers from the same problems that games like " Robinson Crusoe" or "Dead of Winter", in which it all comes down to random number-generators. You can have 99% chances on winning the skillcheck and still get "snakeeyes", which both keeps you on toe, but also makes mostly the early game very dependant on luck. For example: I made maybe 6-7 remakes, before I got a decent skill/stat-distribution and wasn't fucked by droughts/storms in the early game. Once I got a baseline of buildings-up, I was able to, so far, salvage sittuations, allthough I don't know if I didn't allready "softlock" myself from going much further, seeing how luck can allways ruin a otherwise "good and conservative" run. There is a "save-on-exit"-option which you can abuse. Makeing new games is needlessly cumbersome as you have to go through 3 menues. The story, so far, is entertaining and gives a nice context to the dicethrowing. Can't say much about it for now. All in all, I should've checked to see that it's the followup for "Dead in Bermuda". I recommend to play on vacation, you'll save yourself some nerves and time.

I've enjoyed the game and the history. The mechanics are simple, quite random, it's a downside that it's determined so much by chance, but i've liked the strategy involved and the history surrounding it. But what realy bothers me about this game it's the time you spend feeding and watering your people. Every night you have to feed every member of the community individually, and after more than 100 nights (you can see i played and enjoyed it much), and having the maximum pop capacity it gets very boring to attend to their needs individually. I hope they release a patch to improve this.