So Iron Gate decided to create a world out of one magical gigabyte. They sowed the seed of Unity in it, and the engine sprouted mighty forests, swirled with viscous fog, and spread over the world's waters. Then legends and tales came to life, stretched across the world with honeyed halls and ringing smithies, turned into monsters and restless mountain spirits, and challenged the warriors who aspired to Valhalla. Why skalds write praise songs about Valheim in Steam - let's find out in the preview.

I wasn't expecting much from Valheim when I prepared to explore it. As a rule, in order not to spoil my first impressions, I refrain from watching videos and player reviews of a product before I take a look at it myself. Such was the case with Valheim.
Despite the suspiciously high rating in Steam and a lot of activity in social networks, I didn't expect anything at all from a online game from the developer Friv2Online of one gigabyte in size, from a game in a genre that for the last ten years, starting from Minecraft and ending with the marvelous Grounded, as it seemed to me, could surprise me, and as it turned out, for nothing. That's why I put this combination of emotions in the subtitle - a mixture of admiration and delight, which, despite skeptical moods, accompanied me and my companions during the first 24 hours of getting acquainted with Valheim.

The project welcomes players with a well-composed and quite ordinary forest landscape with a hot fire in the clearing and the evening sky above the tree tops. The composition is simple in execution, one can even say - unremarkable, but for some reason I wanted to put aside my business and look around properly.
A couple of touches in the character editor, in which only a few settings (choice of gender, hairstyle, skin and hair color), and here he is clear-eyed you - already basking by the fire. Just like the landscape - artless and even ordinary, and yet very natural.

Next, you either go to create your own world, generated on the basis of "random grain", as in Minecraft or RimWorld, or to the browser, which will unfold before you without exaggeration thousands of worlds of other users. You can also turn your own world into a server if you wish, hang a lock with a password on it, invite friends via Steam and make it private back at any time.
More popular now are survival projects with a story background, and Valheim was no exception. In Scandinavian mythology the universe consists of nine worlds, connected by branches and roots of the giant ash tree Yggdrasil. We are in a certain Tenth World, where, according to the friv game's legend, Odin banished his enemies, cut off the branches of the World Tree and left the gods to languish unattended.

Now that Asgard's old enemies are once again gaining strength, the Allfather has sent the Valkyries to search the Tenth World for warriors who were unlucky enough to make it to Valhalla. In order to gain eternal, heroic life in the heavenly hall, the warriors must slay the fallen and bring their heads to the sacrificial stones - this becomes the main task for players in Valheim.
Instead of giving the game some unusual features, as it is done by the authors of modern survival games, seeking to distinguish their project from the rest, Iron Cloud used mostly traditional friv game mechanics, but thought hard about how to improve the process of implementation of each of them.

As in any other game of this genre, gamers will need resources and sustenance. And they will have to go to the forest in search of nature's gifts, build a spear from a thick branch and try to hit an animal. But deer are timid, they see a man from afar, and wild boars are aggressive and roam in herds. Wild raspberry bushes love the sun, and mushrooms play hide-and-seek and are rarely caught. You can't catch a fish with your hands, but with a spear you can catch a fish, and a bird will fly out of the bushes and into the sky before you even notice it.
Yes, you'll need resources and sustenance, and you'll be looking for them in dense forests overgrown with bushes and young trees. Stumbling over deadwood, climbing hills and jumping over streams. And on lush meadows, passing dolmens and abandoned villages. You will pick blueberries in the coniferous forest, cautiously listening to every rustle, and carefully treading through gloomy bogs with gnarled, dead trees.

For just half an hour spent in the friv game, you disappear in this natural and recognizable world of one gigabyte, generated, I remind you, randomly. You watch mesmerized as the sun plays with the sun's glare on the water surface, or as the fog rises over the night field, or the night extinguishes the peachy mareva of the day, spreading across the sky with a thousand stars, and you just can't believe what heights can be achieved sometimes with simple, but properly selected audio-visual ingredients.
When we watched the reflection of a tired horse in the mirror of a river in polygonal Kingdom, when we admired a port town after rain in voxel Teardown, or wandered through a silent morning forest in Long Dark, made in the style of sel-shading, we have already encountered similar phenomena. But each such encounter is like the first time - thrilling and amazing.

By the way, the Allfather has sent not only Valkyries to the Tenth World in search of you, but also Hugin, a raven whose name means "thinking" in Old Icelandic. Hugin will accompany you on your wanderings and mentor you every time you encounter something new.
Your character will develop according to the principle of "the more I do, the better I get". Almost all of his activity, from running and jumping to wielding tools and weapons, will be accounted for in the skills section. If the hero dies, he will lose all his equipment, collected materials and part of his experience, but all his belongings will be waiting for his return at the tombstone.

Characters are controlled from a third-person view. In combat, they use normal and special blows unique to each weapon. They defend themselves with rolls and blocks, open the enemy for critical attacks by parrying and backstabbing, and also possess stealth skills.
Sometimes the specificity of battles causes associations with souls-like games, because the opponents are different and often very dangerous, and stamina is not spent except for the movement at a normal pace. If you can easily disperse a bunch of stunted ancients, which, according to the game's legend, sprouted from the souls of sinners, with a wooden spear with a flint tip, then a thoughtless hunt for a forest troll can cost the life of your entire tribe.

Players servers accommodate very few, but this number is enough to form a whole Nordic village or split into two camps and periodically make raids on neighbors. PVP mode is enabled at will and individually, and a special totem will protect the settlement from encroachment.
By the way, construction in Valheim is much more of a constructor than just four walls, floor and ceiling. There are quite a lot of parts, they are attached not so freely, but the requirements for their connection here are much softer than in most survival games, and the physics engine of the game will positively affect the direction of design thought.
I wrote above that Iron Gate took advantage of traditional friv game mechanics, but did a great job on each of them. Valheim doesn't put unhealthy obstacles in the way of survivalists, but it penalizes stupidity and makes life far from easy.
If you chop a tree, you will have to swing your axe properly and dodge a falling trunk. If you go hunting, then move quietly and listen to the forest, so as not to scare the prey. If you go for ore, take a cart and go at dawn, because metals are heavy and it will take a lot of time to extract them, and a troll may come out at the sound of a pickaxe.
If you build a fire indoors and start choking on smoke, or if you wander through the forest in a thunderstorm, you'll slip on a muddy stone slippery from rain and fall into a cliff. You'll be lucky if there's a river below, but only if you have the strength to swim out of it.
We can't say that Valheim is a meditative survival game, but you can't call it tense either. Everything in it is measured, everything is balanced and well thought out, and most importantly - executed. It's not for nothing that reviewers call its performance on Steam almost unprecedented. Valheim is already worthy of a high score, and it has every chance of becoming one of the best survival friv games of the last decade by release.