Dead In Vinland

TL;DR it's a very, very much hit-or-miss game. This game is great if you: - specifically enjoy teetering on the edge of defeat - the game's resistance to your victory only makes your determination harder - if you worship RNGesus This game is bad for you if: - you play games as an escape from the misery of your life and generally unwind - you prefer to outsmart a problem than enduring it like a donkey - you hate leaving your fate to RNGesus - you hate the type of game design where RNGesus is the state religion, each encounter has correct and incorrect answers (meaning that having them all written up for you trivializes many of them), and the saving system reeks of tryhard sweat (in this case, checkpoints each morning, meaning that if you so much as misclicked, you'll have to do at least an entire day all over again, which is just wasting your time, meaning that they might as well have used the traditional saving system) The story was promising, I liked how the characters grew and interacted - then I got hit in the face with the "muh survival game" horseshit, combined with the "muh leveling system" (which would be fine if merely surviving was manageable and I could afford to gear specific characters for combat but in the end, it's entirely up to RNGesus (like when you're hitting for 3 dmg on average then a random guy with a bow does 14 on a crit (have I mentioned that the save system was bullshit?))) which I can respect as an option for those who enjoy this type of adversity but not when I can't avoid it. I would have given it 5 stars if the devs could keep in mind that there's a difference between a survival game and a misery simulator like this. The most important skill in pulling through this game is emotional and physical endurance to sit through hours upon hours of your characters being miserable. That's not my cup of tea but I know it is for some, hence my recommendation.

If you're like me, a 30-something parent with a penchant for masochism and obsessing over dice rolls, then you've likely been trying to play more table top games. This is essentially a campaign-lite legacy game driven by our good friend, RNG; no DM required. Risk management is the name of the game, slavic Family Ties is the flavor text of the day that keep the skill checks rolling. Throw out any notion of trying to game the odds into your favor. As history has shown, 9th century folks notoriously rolled poorly. Which likely led to the D20 nearly being lost to time until being rediscovered in 1974 at an archelogical site in Norway** (citation needed). Plan for bad rolls, then plan for more bad rolls, and then hope no one dies of dysentery, injury, fatigue, suicide, and so on.... All in all you'll have a good time if you're into resource / risk management. Don't stress out over failing skill check after skill check (seriously RNGesus what did I do wrong?), just solve the situation by throwing more dice at the problem. Buy it, and keep a log of the many many deaths that await you on the Viking Oregon Trail.

Good thing: mechanics wise the game is very interesting and keeps opening up new options as you progress. Disturbing thing: the story is pretty much about your characters being bullied around and shaken down, not only by brutes who use pure strength, but also by their weak but sadistic lackeys who come just to rub it in and delight in your inability to do anything about it. You are not really given any choice but to select in what way you want to be humiliated. This continues pretty much throughout the entire game and the conclusion of the story did not leave me with a feeling of closure. Thus the main line of the story took away most of the enjoyment of the game I might have derived from the mechanics and side stories, which are interesting. So, if, like me, you have been subject of bullying at young age you might buy this game expecting fun and trigger flashbacks instead. I have finished this game as a kind of therapeutic exercise, but I can't say I would wish to come back to it or look for something similar. Anachronistic thing: the dialogues and relationships between characters portray Vikings just like an American family from a modern sitcom, including a hefty amount of very modern profanities. I found it somewhat hard to suspend disbelief around it.

So it's a roguelike resource management game. Everyone can perform 2 tasks a day. You assign people to tasks to gather resources and build stuff while managing fatigue, hunger, and whatnot. Survive to the end to get strong enough to take on the oppressive warlord. It's a solid enough system. What makes it more interesting is it being heavier on story than your typical roguelike. Conversations between characters pop up every day, with an impressive number of custom conversations between specific characters depending on who is in your camp. So here's where it falls apart. The game is PLAGUED by both overly ridiculous randomness, and cheap scripted events. You can be screwed before the game even starts. Starting traits are random, and characters can start with a trait that carries a crippling XP penalty. You're all but forced to restart if that happens. So you go through ~10 rerolls just to not be hobbled at the start. Then you might get hit with endless drought an hour in. You're screwed, restart. Do everything right and work your party just enough to get resources, but within acceptable fatigue levels? Too bad, here's a scripted story event where the protagonist decides to skip sleep and chop fifty acres of forest, exploding his fatigue and killing him if you were anywhere above 50%. Too bad, restart, and file that away with a dozen other story events you HAVE to know are coming. And that's where the dialog heavy system falls apart. There is no way to effectively skip conversations. You're constantly forced to restart, and have to sit through the same conversations every time. They should have either toned down the story and made a pure roguelike, or toned down the RNG roguelike and made it more story heavy. It's also too punishing. It's nothing but negative effects, all feeding into each other and spread out over 4 screens worth of icons that the interface isn't set up to handle. Now do that for 8 characters. Lot of promise, lots of frustrating mess.

As soon as you let a certain indicator slip and your character's performance in certain areas drops, it automatically leads to other indicators slipping, performance drops, and you find yourself in a situation of guaranteed defeat, which cannot be prevented, no matter how much you flounder. This turns the game into a search of a workable build by trial and error. This search is complicated by a very player-unfriendly randomizer, in which everything can be decided literally by what the weather will be, which cannot be predicted in any way. In one playthrough it rains for weeks, in another it's drought. That said, the narrative material of the game and the way it is presented does not match this kind of gameplay. When you start over, you'll be watching dialogues you already know for hours without any changes, for example. It's a pity, the story of the characters is interesting... But I can't recommend this game.