Valheim (2021/2026)
Valheim is one of the great success stories of the “early access” sales model. Its initial 2021 release was a strong demo for a game that would receive a steady stream of updates over the next five years, and which is now “complete” with a 2026 1.0 release. The viking-themed survival/crafting game of course did not invent the genre but it helped solidify some of the genre’s now durable features: “biome”-based progression, elaborate crafting recipes requiring rare and time-consuming materials, and an extensive base-building component that doubles as a toybox for “creative mode” players.
Valheim’s success has also ensured many more imitators, and despite thematic differences (Windrose is pirate-shaped, Return to Moria is Tolkien-licensed), all these games are basically the same. Sorry to developers and players who have poured millions of hours into these projects, but yeah they are. It is the reality of video game saturation in 2026 that any popular game generates not competitors but pseudo-mods. Players who enjoy one game can then dabble in many flavors of the same experience.
Perhaps the greatest difference between Valheim and later games is the preponderance of “quality of life” features, a loaded term that warrants definition. In principle, QOL refers to gameplay which is hard or tedious but “should” be easy. Crafting games, for example, often require players to organize chests of resources. When a player returns from a resource-gathering expedition, the game can automate much of this organization, automatically sorting items into chests of similar items. Many games also allow you to “craft from chests,” pulling any needed resources from a nearby chest rather than requiring the player to carry it in their inventory.
Valheim has very few of these QOL features, and for years basically none, having only recently added a barebones “quick stacking” mechanic. Mods can solve this problem, but one will notice how easily this conversation shifts to “problems” to be “solved.” Surely the Valheim developers could have implemented many more QOL features–the game was certainly successful enough–and they did not. There is a level of fussiness Valheim demands and, at least in my opinion, that fussiness is what makes Valheim fun to play.
It is not just chest organization. Valheim’s building mechanics include semi-realistic physics calculations, and so both slapdash nordic huts and grand feast halls “make sense,” they look sort of like real buildings would. (The game also models smoke inhalation, so buildings must contain chimneys for smoke to escape.) The enemies in Valheim are frankly infuriating, having some of the most obnoxious pathfinding and movement patterns I’ve ever seen in a video game. I have never been quite sure how much of this behavior is intended versus accidental jankiness, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.
But here we get into the real appeal of survival/crafting games, and also why “QOL” has become a loaded term. These are chore games, games where the chores are the point, where finishing chores is satisfying and how you finish chores is a form of self-expression. Some players are content to grind it out, throwing time at a task until it’s finished. Others enjoy optimizing chores, finding the best or cleverest way to collect copper ore or farm moose pelts.
For all players except those who purely see these games as toyboxes to be played at the lowest difficulty possible, the “friction” (a popular term these days) is a desired feature. Dragging 450 pounds of copper ore back to base so you can spend even more time smelting it down so you can eventually build a forge so you can eventually smithy a sword is, for Valheim players, exhilarating. That it takes time is why it’s fun.
In video games, it is a recurring argument how and to what extent difficulty, tedium, friction, etc are part of a game’s creative identity. What does it mean to spend an hour gathering virtual raspberries for a mead recipe? How many hours can a game ask of you before the relationship becomes in some sense exploitative? (Or, stop me if you’ve heard this one, would Dark Souls be diminished if it had an “easy mode”?)
However, we, as humans, only have so much time to spend on these games. Whether you find the questions above interesting or endlessly rehashed bullshit, it doesn’t matter to the person who comes home after a long day of work, does their own real-life chores, and then has maybe half-an-hour-to-an-hour to play a video game. If it takes an hour to gather raspberries for significant thematic reasons, the person who doesn’t have an hour to burn gathering raspberries will nonetheless never do so. And so “QOL” should really be understood as a subjective term, as “quality of my life.”
And much as QOL should be a subjective term, I think the survival/crafting games that are so popular now should basically be understood as a subgenre of a larger “chore game,” which encompasses everything from MMOs (huge time investment) to bitesize daily or idle games (minimal time investment). These are to-do list simulators, gather-em-ups, “wait for the progress bar to fill up”-likes.
I am not the first person to notice many games are just collections of virtual chores, and it is up to others to decide what (if anything) this means. Do these games tickle a fundamental part of our brains that likes sorting different rocks into different boxes? Does the fantasy of a productive life fill some gap in the meaning of our real lives? Are these games important cultural artifacts or examples of video games’ worst impulses, of mindlessly killing hundreds of hours just to make numbers go up? All I can say for sure is that these games are fun for a lot of people, myself included.
And so one reason I like Valheim might be that it is a chore game that fits perfectly into my quality of life. It’s not the marathon grind of a classic MMO but it still has some rough edges. Some chores take longer than they “should” but exactly as much time as I want them to. Every player will have their own survival/crafting Goldilocks zone, making comparisons between games difficult. Despite the superficially different themes, I think Valheim is basically the same as Subnautica is basically the same as No Man’s Sky is basically the same as Terraria. I like Valheim the best of all of these, but I’m not sure I could articulate a reason why besides that the porridge is just right.
Is this rude to the developers of these games? Is it insulting to so plainly evaluate these games as entertainment machines designed to kill a certain number of hours (and not too few or too many)? I don’t mean to insult anybody. The worst of these games are badly designed, ugly and unfun, and so they need to clear a bar beyond occupying an evening. Valheim contains craft and vision that elevate it beyond countless also-releaseds on Steam. But I do fundamentally regard these games as time-wasters. I just don’t always think that’s a bad thing.