Dead In Vinland

This is basicaly a visual novel without any meaningfull choices and a survival simulator tacked on top of that without any meaningfull strategy just a constant rolling of dice for the same boring chores everyday.

I decided to drop a review based on the 15 or so hours I've played so far, since so far there are none. Dead in Vinland is a survival/management game wrapped in a shiny RPG ribbon with a dose of tactical combat. Just to get it out of the way - combat itself is just one of the elements, without as great of a stress on it as, say, Darkest Dungeon. Yes, your characters will fight, but so far it has been nowhere near as important to me as making it to the next day with everybody in decent shape. The survival part is very intricate. There are a number of areas that daily actions (and random events) will affect. The basics are Fatigue, Hunger, Sickness, Injury, and Depression - get any of it to 100% with the main four characters, and it's game over. Aside from those there are plenty of timed modifiers resulting from events, as well as character traits. All characters come with a few randomized traits, and they will gain further either through leveling or participating in game events. Some traits are also temporary (whether timed or removable with certain items), others are permanent. All in all, the whole system is complex enough to allow specialization without being punishing. You still want to set up redundancies at least for core survival activities, but so far it seems like a good idea to get everybody to a reasonable level in a number of activities anyway. Since different "jobs" provide different stat increases, and there is a lot of interaction between the oh-so-numerous "stat" fields, putting somebody unskilled to train up though an activity complementary to their specialization is a pretty viable method of improving the characters. Just probably not in the first few days of the game ;) A lot of the game is based on procedural generation (the map of the island with various locations, assignment of starting traits and skills, level up options, random event...), so the replayability factor is really high. Definitely recommend to anybody interested in the genre.

It is a solid turn-based game. You have to manage resources, health and nutrition for you little village. Each night there are campfire dialogs, you explore the map and fight bandits. The camp managent is pretty cool, but the fights are not terribly interesting in the long run. The main issue I have with this game, is that you have to learn these dialogs and map events. So basically, you will fail in this game, unless you save scum or read up in the internet. However not all events are documented there so prepare your own notes. If you managed to grow your econony, the game gets tedious in the end. Basically all your people are in decent condition and you wait for certain key exploration findings, or until the crops are finally grown. Meanwhile you rotate your people the same way every day to provide food and resources, while preventing the natural resources to become exhausted. I finished the game after 90 hours and will probably not come bad. It is a same, since the ideas and the art style are very good.

I don't often finish a game anymore, there are so many good ones out there. But Dead in Vinland kept me in and didn't become a drag. Here's a couple tips to help you enjoy this treasure. If (when) you fail the first time, you'll probably do fine the second time. The beginning story is the same every time, so just put up with it. Get the dog and stories DLC right at the start, they are worth it. If you don't, and are loving the game, add them in, it works fine on existing saves. You need to use defense skills during combat. Now get out there and enjoy this game!

In the beginning its quite fun to try out how to sustain your community. Also the interaction and dialogues between your community members are quite nice. These part fells like these kind of narrative games. But it gets repetitive after a few hours. Your goal seems clear but still you have to go on exploring and sustaining everything.