Dead In Vinland

Great comfy game on custom difficulty, not so much on the official difficulties lol. Can't imagine being masochistic enough to play on anything harder than the easiest official setting, but I'm also not great at pushing through and recovering from set backs. I'm the kinda player that wants a x2 surplus of all resources and bench characters if they have above 1/4 depression or exhaustion and that's just straight up not how you're supposed to play, but the game lets you change the settings enough that you can at the expense of achievements. Not for anyone that's hated by RNG, that's for sure! But the actual mechanics and gameplay are fun, and the characters are great. It's the sorta point and click game you can play easily while curled up listening to something else but also has enough depth and management to keep you thinking. Good for bad brain and sick days, imo. (Also, if you have a cat that likes to play with you but doesn't like it when you move your arms too much.)
There are some puzzles I don't have the patience for on repeat playthroughs, but there's nothing I couldn't figure out through trial and error on my first playthrough. The characters are really good, there's only one character I didn't enjoy overall, and that's mostly because I liked another character so much and they butt heads. The combat ui is a bit annoying, but the combat itself is good and rewards you for being clever about placement and comp. And, it's turn-based, which is a big bonus in my books.
My one major complaint overall is that the relationship gains are brutal, it takes so long and compromising efficiency to raise people's relationships if they aren't naturally bffs, and several weeks of work can be wiped out by a single scripted event where you don't even get a say. Doing so is also rarely rewarded with special scenes, and don't effect the endings you will get at all. In most cases, except a few RNG questions, you really can't effect the character's trajectories. That story line will play out no matter what you do if they're both present, and a single bad RNG roll on the few imputes you do get will permanently cut off certain endings you were going for. I don't mind the RNG for survival gameplay, but the relationship sims side of things should be more controllable, because it just doesn't feel good and there's no way to recover.
Overall, a lot of minor flaws and it would make certain types of players ragequit pretty quick, but if you like unfairly difficult games OR you are fine abusing the hell out of the difficulty customisation it's a fun, replayable game.

Dead in Vinland is one of my favorite games of all time:
- It has great characters and a great story line
- It has an awesome Colony Sim aspect
- And it has Interesting fights based on a risk-reward system

The characters and story line are probably the first thing you notice. You like some characters, you hate some, but I think they all have personality. And you will start to hate the main Antagonist and his Hunchmen sooo much.

The colony Sim part is probably the best aspect of the game. I think Dead in Vinland does it better, than any other game out here. Especially the Tribute system (which is packaged nicely in the story) always keeps you on your toes and ensure you are never really "settled". You always have to look out to increase your productivity. There is always several important upgrades to build and several characters you could need healing. And you have to chose what is most pressing.

And while the fight system itself is not praised, I think it does a great job. There is a lot of depth to it and more importantly there is a great Risk-Reward system in several dimensions. If you fight, you get XP and some loot, but also can get injured. And if you level up, you can level up your fighting skills or some productivity aspect of your character. So the fighting ensures, that you have interesting choices to make at each step.

This game has some drawbacks and maybe some "balancing issues":
- Some mood related negative modifiers or illnesses you can get in the early game, are probably to devastating.
- Finding Loki in the late game is too gamechanging, because it makes certain economy aspects trivial.
- Blodeuwedd`s fighting skills are probably too uniquely strong (but maybe that is intentional, as she is a Viking Shieldmaiden Mother who protects her kids).
- Some buildings have questionable usefulness, such as Drying rack or Garden.

But overall these negative aspects are minor. Every Management and every Sim Game I ever encountered has some of these issues and in this game they at least seem minor.

So if you like Sim and Management games, where you have to "earn" your win, and if you like a story that keeps you connected to the characters: Then you might love this game as much as I do.

Infuriatingly satisfying.

recommended

TLDR: 10/10. Worth its price and more. Great story, not too repetitive (although you will die at least twice).

My Survivor's Village 1/13/25: Blodeuwedd, Eirik, Kari, Shanaw, Gudrun, Moira, Cisse, Solveig, Knut, and Eustache.

Playable Character Tier List (Remember, this is my opinion): Overall, I think the developer did a great job building such rich character backstories, happy/sad endings, and how you encounter them in the quest for survival. This is not commentary on whether the devs wrote the characters well. This is my subjective opinion of each character as if they were a real person. To avoid spoilers, I will not be elaborating.

Useful and enjoyable: Blodeuwedd, Moira, Shanaw, Kari, Gudrun*
Not useful, but enjoyable: Solveig, Cisse*
Not enjoyable, but useful: Knut, Eirik, Lady Tomoe
Neither useful nor enjoyable: Eustache, Yaghoub, Parvaneh
Kill on sight: Angelico

* = testing my patience

Gameplay: You absolutely can beat survival mode, even if you're a bit dumb like me. It's a well built story and you need solid strategy to survive.
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Nothing special
☐ Okay
☐ Bad

Graphics: Accessible to the modern (if not specifically designed for gaming) laptop. Artistic choices made give the game a very immersive atmosphere.
☐ Masterpiece
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Will do
☐ Bad
☐ Awful

Audio: Excellent musical soundtrack
☐ Amazing
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad

Audience: I would be very hesitant to recommend this game to someone at or under the age of 12...If I had my own child who was 12yo, I would not hand them this game and walk away. IDK if I would "supervise" them, though. Know your child's personality and maturity level. People older than 12 should be fine. Most of the mature topics are written, not depicted graphically. There is some blood. It is a survival game... meaning the goal is to avoid death. Avoid this game if lots of different types of death would be distressing to you.
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Everyone

Story: The lore for this game runs so deep. Even once you've beaten the game, there are endings for each character that you might not have anticipated...and I might have restarted a Survival run solely to rescue one specific character from her bad ending. You sort of form relationships with these characters, or at least form strong opinions about them and react accordingly.
☑ Lovely
☐ Good
☐ Average
☐ Not great
☐ None

Difficulty: Straightforward control system and game rules. Survival is a completely different story.
☐ Just press a bunch of buttons
☐ Easy
☐ Significant brain usage
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Not so easy
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

Game Time: You will not master this in a few hours. There is enough variety built into the game that you won't feel bored no matter how many times you die and restart.
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ Depends on you
☐ Endless

Price: Very reasonable $20 full price tag. Buy it before the devs realize they could charge more!
☑ Just buy it
☐ Worth the price
☐ Wait for sale
☐ Maybe if you have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended

Very nice game, nice exploring, building and crafting is a bit slow, Battles are tough, feels like some battles you have to lose to progress? the daily cycle of feeding and watering gets a little repetitive waiting for buildings to be built. Lovely art. Wish there wasn't so much negative traits though

One of those "wish there was a meh button" but if I have to choose, its further into the negative.

I picked this up as I loved The Pale Beyond and this was recommended based on that. As someone who enjoys random events, and really tough survival choices and management, this game is fun for the first ten hours. Then it dawns on you, that you're twenty hours in, clicking the same buttons, and you are only on day 30 in this latest run and it's *hours away* from any sort of resolution or change in pace. It's simply too long of a game once you get into an efficient rhythm of survival, and past that first rush of trying to get the village going through the odds; I think I liked Pale beyond because it didn't overstay its welcome.
Dead in Vinland's story telling is also not strong or amusing enough to carry it past that boredom wall. It is just okay, and there's no way at 20 hours to feel any satisfying sense of completion with it, since so much of it is through random ongoing conversations. If you are a completionist with stories, I wouldn't even bother picking up this title.

And the combat *sucks*. I can't put in words fully what that is about, as I enjoyed darkest dungeon enough. Its very much a clone of that. I think it feels like a more boring, slower, less high stakes version of that. It made me dread exploring, which is the only mechanic I'd keep playing the game for. And there is no way to speed through combat or turn it off. Even on sneak mode, aka reducing chances to find fights when exploring, you'll still run into them often enough.

At five dollars sale, I don't entirely regret it. But I would be very unhappy if I paid full price for this, especially since I am walking away at a point I feel no satisfying conclusion to the game. Life's too short to invest 70 hours in a game when you're tired of the gameplay, just to see what happens to the characters.

Crash land on an unknown island with family, lucky enough to find a warm shelter, food, woodlands, fresh water source etc... Characters resign from life on day 4 because rain and scavenging their boat made them sad. Seriously, one of the first structures you HAVE to build on your new home is a bar just for you and your family members to sit around and raise their moods. The game doesn't tell you you need to either, their moods just get worse and they die unless you have one.

I really really like this game. It's sort of sadistic but not in a negative way, you can set your limits and savescum if you really object to the way something turned out but if you let it the game will give you a bounty of narratively meaningful/character defining nasty little surprises in addition to the rng survival surprises which all add up to a deep sense of satisfaction if you're able to overcome them and build a (mostly) stable community in this hostile world. Even when you aren't able to overcome them there's usually (at least for me, I might just be weird) value in accepting some of its seemingly random/unfair outcomes because they add that bite and viciousness to the game that makes whatever payoff you reach hit harder. Having poked around the forums a bit it seems like at launch the game was significantly more brutal and random and openly unfair in certain instances but with player feedback they toned down many things and outright removed certain run-ending mechanics that weren't telegraphed very clearly so I feel like my assessment that the game is trying to be harsh but still fun is relatively accurate and that it isn't just fucking with you for no reason.

Having said all that, the dog dlc can absolutely snap the game balance in half if you invest enough resources into him (and he's fucking adorable and adds a little to the narrative so why wouldn't you) so big recommend if I've made it sound too daunting and big recommend the "Norse side stories" dlc so that the optional characters will talk to each other at night instead of only the core family, having played the game with and without it makes a massive improvement to the feeling that you're building a village and providing stability for people and the writing is pretty universally excellent.
The game isn't really something you can get a sense of whether you will or won't like it within steam's refund window so if you're unsure after reading this maybe wait for a sale.

Cautious recommendation. Nice story and characters, interesting encounters and puzzles. RNG is a bitch though. 2h of playing it is suifficient to decide whether to go on, or refund.

Winning or losing has little to do with skill, and almost everything to do with how RNGsus chooses to bless you or curse you. I had a skill fail to execute 6 times in a row at 85% chance, killing off a character. I've had combats go on for AGES because nobody could hit.

It just makes the game feel like a slog.

My favorite game by far . Very very smart game setup , easy going turn base with very beautiful indie enviroment and very cool scenario . 100% worth !!!

I think this game has so much to give that I wrote two fanfics and two parodies (so far) on the material! The developers combine varied, engaging gameplay with Telltale/Skunkape standard dialogue/story. If you like Norse lore, village-building turn-based RPGs, turn-based battles and/or good storytelling, you will love this game too.

Overly dependent on RNG and not actual planning / mechanics / skill. Fights are boring and again dependent on RNG. It's a shame because the character development and story is quite good, and well written.

The art style is nice. So are the characters. The survivors are a diverse bunch, and seeing them interact and learning their stories is fun. The villains are easy to hate.

But the gameplay is terrible. Everything is based on chance. Even the traits you get offered as your survivors level up. A few days of bad weather can cripple your run, with no way of you being able to hedge against it. Every day/turn, you distribute your survivors among the available work stations based on skills and condition. The assignments are usually obvious. The main choice you will make is what new station/station improvement to research. This is rarely enough to compensate for the randomness coming your way.
Combat is straightforward and mostly dependent on the traits you manage to roll. At the end of the day you have to distribute food and water, which quickly turns into a chore.

A lot of this could be overlooked, or at least tolerated, if the game didn't also overstay its welcome. A single run takes many hours. Good roguelikes have you fail fast initially, and then open up into different builds, offering interesting decisions. Not so here. If anything, the game becomes less interesting, the further you get in. Initially you might have to take difficult choices, because you don't have enough survivors to cover all your resource needs. Later the camp is mostly self sufficient (baring catastrophic RNG) and you mostly pass the days exploring, looking for the necessary locations to complete the game. If there were a way to manually trigger the end game, i would like this a whole lot better. Even then, i don't see this having much replay value based on the poor mechanics.

sooo fun loved the first game and this one just added things I wanted !!

Way too much RNG. A month or two into the game both characters got 2 bad diseases 2 days in a row, and nothing you can do about it other than reloading saves and trying again. In combat I miss 5 times in a row with a 93 percent hit chance. Then I search some item with a 87 percent success chance and fail 6 times in a row again... So I just reload previous save and try again and again. Reloading non stop and all that save/load spamming takes away from game experience, not to mention to story ends like 1 month into the game. Then it is the same collect item, do the same boring combat, and if RNG is bad save/load try again. Started out good but gets frustrating and boring after few hours...Only by if it is like 80 percent off.

On sale? Definitely get it. Otherwise, no. I can see what other reviewers meant by the dialogue; that and the art often feel amateur at worst and just rough draft version at best. I enjoyed Dead in Bermuda less than this, I'll give it that, and I enjoyed Banner Saga more; this is essentially a blend of the two. It really needs another pass from an experienced dialogue editor and character artist.

8

Fun game but it for sure over stays it welcome with the length. I hope they make another in the series one day because it could be great if improved.

Yes.