Dead in Vinland

Dead in Vinland is a mobile game hiding out on Steam and while that isn’t a terrible thing don’t buy it if you want a game to play for hours on end. The game is steeped in all the usual trappings of mobile games: timers, resource management, and random chance. However, before we delve into that lets set the stage.

Dead in Vinland follows a family of Vikings who wash ashore on a strange new land. Excelled and without much to go around they must scrounge to survive the natural causes of death, but also avoid the wrath of the bandit king who rules the island with a blood-soaked fist. Now on paper, this sounds like a really fun idea, a survival management game where you need to forage enough to get by but also keep your ever-expanding clan of family and new friends healthy and alive sound like a great idea. An idea that sounds even better when you throw point and click exploration and turn-based tactical combat on top to kill downtime. This could have been a pretty enjoyable game if better executed.

To elaborate, the game is on a very slow drip with events only happening once or twice a day. Leaving the player to do little but twiddle their thumbs and try and maximize what little input they have. Which comes in the form of assigning jobs to your various survivors. Another one of their good ideas, seeing how each job requires different stats speeding up production and lowering, or raising, the chance of negative effects. However, it takes forever for anything to get done and all the while you’re smelting ore to make more arrowheads to get more food everyone’s starting to death because there’s no other source of food. This is on top of that fact that characters get tired after working and if they don’t rest they can die. So, every now and then you’ll have to remove someone leaving one or more jobs open and you might as well start writing the eulogy at that point; because resources run out very quick and the barbarians will crack your skulls open if you don’t have a tribute ready for them by the end of the week.

A problem that wouldn’t be so drastic if we could speed things up or increase the number of items produced, but sadly that’s just a pipe dream. And while yes, you can make the claim that this was their intention and that survival is very hard, but you know what, its still a God damn video game and if I don’t feel like I’m accomplishing anything then your game isn’t fun. Like if in Dark Souls whenever you die and they took all your souls imagine if they also knocked you down a level as well undoing all your stat upgrades. That’s what its like in Dead in Vineland, every time you think you’re doing well the game will pull something away at random to undo your hard work. Trying to make items to lower depression? Takes two people to make and only makes one item that has a 40% chance of reducing depression. Think a character will be able to work the next day after he rests? Ends up exhausting and hurting himself in a random cutscene.

All and all I found Dead in Vinland very frustrating, mostly due to all the things holding me back from enjoying the game but also it constantly taunting me with what could have been. There were a few moments while playing that I was having fun and the management parts were doing their job and integrating into the entire game. I was exploring the island finding new people and items, fighting bandits, making progress. It was fun, until something out of my power happened and threw a wrench into the whole thing. There’s just not enough agency on the players part for my taste and if anything I said makes you agree then take a pass at Dead In Vinland.