Need to know
What is it? A Viking-themed survival game set in a procedurally generated open world.
Release date: September 09, 2026 (1.0)
Expect to pay: $30/£23.49 [Remember: if the price is 49.99, round it up to 50.]
Developer: Iron Gate AB
Publisher: Coffee Stain Publishing
Reviewed on: Intel i7 9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAM
Steam Deck: Verified
Link: Official site
After a day-long battle with one of Valheim‘s big bosses, I return to my modest cabin in the woods to recover. I’m exhausted, my weapons and armor are mostly broken, and I’ve burned through my meager supply of food and arrows. I don’t even have a spare torch left to light my way home. Even though I was victorious, the cold and rainy night doesn’t put me in the mood for a celebration.
Then I spot a shadowy figure in the gloom, leaning on a walking stick, one blue eye gleaming from beneath its hood. Odin. It’s frickin’ Odin himself, y’know, Thor’s dad? He’s visiting the exiled tenth world of Valheim to peep me in person. Suddenly my mood lifts and I feel like a complete badass. Odin knows who I am.
This isn’t my first visitation from the ancient god: I’ve been playing Valheim since its early access release in 2021, and I’ve seen Odin a few times before. But darn it, it’s still a thrill whenever he appears to silently approve of my valor. And after a long wait, I can finally prove myself worthy: Valheim 1.0 is here, and even though I’ve been playing this game for five years, it’s still got plenty of magic.
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I’m a fallen norse warrior, delivered via Valkyrie into a cursed world to vanquish Odin’s enemies. But this is no RPG, it’s a survival game, and those always start with a lot of backbreaking work: chopping down trees, shattering boulders, hunting deer, and constructing a base where I can sleep and do some crafting. There’s no rest for the dead.
The procedurally generated world of Valheim is a massive disc, separated into biomes and split by oceans, and the deeper you explore from your starting point at the disc’s center, the more dangerous the world becomes. Originally with six biomes (including the ocean), more were added over the past several years, culminating in the deep north: the frozen final realm where you finish your work for Odin. And yes, rare as this is for a survival game, there is an actual ending, though you can continue playing in your world once you’ve seen it.
For such a massive world, there are no quests in Valheim, not really: early on you’ll stumble across an altar that will summon the first of several boss monsters, each which drop an item you’ll need to survive and thrive in the next biome. But other than an occasional marker on your map, Valheim is a self-guided tour that leaves progression to your discretion and motivation.
In that, it succeeds wonderfully: I’ve spent nearly 150 hours in the game and I’ve never felt a need for NPCs to fill my ears with exposition nor wanted a quest log to give me direction. Valheim 1.0 does add animated dream sequences after each vanquished boss, and while they’re pretty cool, the game was perfectly fine without them. The world is beautiful and mysterious and the urge to explore it comes simply from wanting to discover what’s across the sea or on the other side of a mountain range.
Hearth and home
Most survival games have a cozy element to them, but I find Valheim the coziest of all. I’ve never been much of a builder, but I still love my creaky, crude little bases: one in the meadow, one in the forest, and even a small stone hut I built in one of the more dangerous biomes just so I could grow a particular crop. The horrors of the world, from the icky monsters of the swamps to the almost comically hellish swarms of furious skeletons in the ashlands makes for a nice contrast with how relaxing it is to be at home after a long, brutal adventure.
There’s a real joy to puttering around my base, tweaking and decorating the structures I’ve built, doing some farming and animal breeding and putting off the next dangerous expedition until I’m good and ready for it. I especially love cooking: searing enormous lox drumsticks over the roaring hearth, baking bread in my huge stone oven, and brewing mead in my distillery—which takes multiple in-game days. Hey, fine. I’m in no rush to leave my comfy little homestead.
The food system of Valheim is still one of my favorites in any game (and has inspired similar systems in other survival games that have launched since 2021), where your stomach functions like a three-slot inventory: stuff a mushroom, a blueberry, and some cooked meat down there and your health and stamina bars will be fuelled until you digest them. Simple, at first.
I still remember the first time I ate a proper meal in Valheim. I’d left my starter island on a tiny raft, sailing across the sea to unknown lands in the middle of the night, to eventually find a rotting town full of undead Vikings. After barely escaping with my life and a handful of entrails dropped from the few draugr I’d managed to kill, I sailed cautiously back home. In my kitchen I stuffed the entrails with boar meat and thistle and cooked my first sausages in my cauldron, then chowed down—watching wide-eyed as my heath bar abruptly grew twice as tall as it had ever been. I had no idea I could be that strong. From then on, downing draugr was a snap and I never left home without a pocketful of sausages.
In Valheim, eating meals made from your enemies gives you the freedom to boldly tread in extremely dangerous places, and every new recipe unlocked is a chance to take on tougher challenges. Food is as important, if not more, than your armor, making your kitchen the mightiest crafting station in the game. In any forum post where a player complains that they keep getting their asses kicked, the first question Valheim veterans ask is always the same: “What are you eating?”
Where Valheim gives you a break in some aspects of survival—as important as food is, for example, you can never starve to death—it restricts you in other ways. Even when you build fast-travel portals around the world, letting you teleport to different biomes in an instant, you can’t pass through them carrying precious metals like silver or iron (at least not until much later in the game).
I’m grateful for that restriction because it’s led to so many great adventures. In co-op, we spent hours sailing our longboat across the ocean while battling sea serpents (their meat makes for a fantastic stew, btw), enduring blizzards as we fended off werewolves and ice-spitting drakes on a mountainside, all to mine silver from one of the biome’s frozen peaks.
Then we loaded up as much ore as we could into a cart, had a chaotic time trying to safely steer it down the nearly-sheer side of the mountain while still intermittently battling monsters, transferred it all to our ship’s hold and had a tense trip back across the stormy sea to our little island base. It’s so much damn work, so much time and effort, just to gather a bit of silver, yet so incredibly satisfying to succeed. Enduring hardships is what survival games are all about, and even on a little resupply mission, Valheim always makes you feel like you’ve been through a major trial.
Norse north
And so five years after my journey in the Norse afterlife began, I finally sailed to Valheim’s final biome, the deep north. My ship slowly smashed its way through ice floes as I noted the wreckage of dozens of similar Viking vessels, until I stepped onto the new continent, crossing slippery ice to stand waist deep in blinding white snow.
Truthfully, I found the deep north a bit disappointing at first, especially because there’s a quite a bit there that feels like recycled material: more greydwarfs, those squat little dummies we’ve been mindlessly massacring since our starter biome, more narrow underground tunnel networks to fight through, and yet another iteration of the blob-type monsters that always felt like a placeholder for something better.
But there’s also a rather surprising overland enemy that’s genuinely exciting to see every time you fight it, some new underground structures that are shocking in their size and scope, and a new type of crafting bench that operates differently than the ones we’re used to.
And I love (but won’t spoil) the method of gaining access to Valheim’s final boss. Talk about hardships to overcome: if I can cross mythologies for a moment, it’s a Herculean task, as if Odin wants to be sure you’ve really mastered the world of Valheim before you do your final round of ass-kicking. I didn’t particularly care for the final boss battle itself, but the journey to reach it was a real adventure.
Odinson
There are things I don’t love about Valheim, like the swamp biome, where mining its precious iron requires spending ages in dank and cramped underground corridors smashing a pickaxe into a bland heap of metal, a task with zero enjoyment. I don’t like the mistlands, either, one of the biomes added in early access, which combines the ickiness of the swamp with fog so thick that just walking around is a frustrating endeavor.
I’d also hoped certain elements of Valheim would have evolved alongside the survival genre it’s been so inspiring to. Somehow, there’s still no way to craft directly from storage chests, despite it being a pretty common feature in most survival games these days. And despite fans begging for years for armor to have dedicated equipment slots so it doesn’t take up precious inventory space, that’s still not a feature—though in 1.0 there is finally a way to increase the size of your inventory by a couple of rows, at least.
I love this game, and it’s going to be one I return to again and again.
But my few complaints don’t stack up to much. I love this game, and it’s going to be one I return to again and again. Whether it’s looking up during a terrible thunderstorm and spotting Thor speeding across the sky in his chariot, or seeing my health bar double because I’ve eaten a powerful new meal for the first time, or catching a glimpse of Odin’s glowing eye watching me on a cold and gloomy night, these are moments that never lose their thrill. As familiar as the world of Valheim has gotten over the past five years, it’s still filled with the same magic that enchanted me the first time I played it.