FATIGUE, HUNGER, SICKNESS, INJURY, DEPRESSION, AND FUN.
Nearly every Saturday for the last three years I have played Pathfinder (Dungeons & Dragons) with friends. From this experience I have grown to enjoy more complex role playing games and be more willing to play as characters with flaws rather than well rounded everymen. Dead in Vinland very much appeals to me now after playing traditional tabletop games for three years, however I have a feeling it will not appeal to everyone.
After being chased from their home, a family of four Vikings flee to the sea only to wash upon an unknown island. In order to survive, the family will have to manage supplies and shelter while exploring the island to figure out where they are. As the days go on, the family expands the camp to be able to perform more activities integral for survival as well being able to recruit more survivors to their camp. Every character who enters the camp has their own personality and back story that starts to intertwine with the family’s story as they work together for survival on the harsh and unforgiving island. Early on the family is attacked by a vicious man who demands tribute every week, and this is essentially the secondary goal of the game beyond simply not dying because they were sad.
PLATFORMS: PC
MSRP: $19.99
PRICE I’D PAY: $19.99
Mechanically this game is a lot to understand at first glance. Each character has their own stats and traits that affect what they are good at. One character may have a higher scavenging rank so I let them do that while another chops wood. These particular stats are important when it comes to exploring the island because each spot of land has an event that is usually reliant on stats like hunting or harvesting, and the higher the stat is the more likely the character is to succeed in that action (this is very much like a skill check in Dungeons & Dragons). Certain skills can be increased by characters simply doing the action enough, so if the best hunter dies I am not without a hunter forever.
On top of the aforementioned skills, each character has five meters that go up based on player action and random events: fatigue, hunger, sickness, injury, and depression. Fatigue increases simply by performing actions and can be decreased by sleeping or resting. Hunger naturally goes up over time, but is easily managed. Sickness is usually affected by eating spoiled food. Injury is received generally from taking damage in battle. Depression goes up by doing tasks characters don’t want to do, disagreements, finding dead bodies while exploring, etc. and is extremely hard to decrease without alcohol. Weather can also affect these meters as well as the settlement, so just existing at times of heavy rain will increase depression. If any of these meters reach 100 the character dies and if it is one of the four family members the game is over.
The second part of gameplay is the battle system. Battles play out with the player fighters on one side of the screen and the enemies on the other. Each side has two lines of combat, with the back being the archer range as long as there are fighters in the front. Each character has their own set of attacks and their previously mentioned stats affect combat as well. Initiative and RNG (random number generation or a digital dice roll) determine the turn order. Each character has a set of action points that will determine which moves and how many moves a character can take in a turn. The combat in this game is fairly straightforward, however the tutorial (on by default) will walk new players through both elements of this game in detail.
I like this game because it is not real time, but works off a turn based system. Despite the music and sound design being great, I found myself turning the music down and playing this as my relaxing game, not dissimilar to the way one treats an idle/clicker game. Because it’s all about managing resources I’m not required to ever mash on buttons to survive, but rather rely on my choices to see me through as long as possible. The writing is quite good as well, with characters being more than just stereotypes; the characters come from all corners of the Earth and bring their culture with them. Art in the game is very stylized, but has this unique diorama parallax effect that makes the game pop visually.
The difficulty options are quite friendly as well with explaining what each difficulty option entails, however I played this game on normal and made it as far as twelve days before one of the family members died ending my game. On the easiest option I made it fourteen days before I died, and that was only because I was lucky and had rain for multiple days meaning I could take someone off of collecting water. That’s the biggest problem with Dead in Vinland; a lot of the events are determined by luck. It’s fine to throw a monkey wrench into my plans, but four days of drought can greatly hinder my chances to progress and there’s no way to prepare for it. Even though one of my characters may have a 90% success rate to chop down an odd tree to harvest its wood, he could fail and critically injure himself. Sometimes characters just break out into fights at night when they sit around the fire and increase their meters and then one dies and it is game over. However when it comes to poor decision making from the player, I found the autosave function more than helpful as it marks key points to return to if I really botched it and got someone seriously sick or injured.
Despite its insistence on valuing luck over pure number crunching, I enjoyed Dead in Vinland. It’s a game I can put on and relax (despite the fact people are struggling to survive on an island) because it does not demand me to engage with it every second. I set up a plan and the characters carry them out. Dead in Vinland is a survival game I really appreciated, and I will dive into it again. My only wish is that the developers had a randomization option that focused strictly on how long I can survive rather than focusing on a story as well as the campaign, but for what it is, Dead in Vinland is a great survival management game for those who panic at seeing hunger meters rapidly increase in real time.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
