I’ve got a theory about why people enjoy playing survival games. From Minecraft (or Unreal World if you’re cool) all the way through to Valheim’s 1.0 launch today after five years in Early Access, they all have something in common. Starting with nothing and building up to a mighty fortress is great, but what these games really offer is a sense of discovery – a journey into an unfamiliar world.

It’s something Welsh poet Dylan Thomas explores in his poem Fern Hill. Here, he writes about being “green and carefree, famous among the barns” in “the sun that was young once only”. That pretty much sums up my first few hours of Valheim: it’s a game that nurtures and encourages a childlike sense of wonder.

Waxing poetical

Valheim’s epic wonder is there from the jump. You arrive into the Tenth World in the clutches of a Valkyrie, with only a raven named Hugin for amenable company. Hugin provides you with some helpful tips as a new arrival in the peaceful Meadows – a world away from the moody, stormy lands you saw during your flight.

With almost nothing to your name, like a child angry about a lost kite, you start punching trees only to realize with sore hands that you’re actually meant to gather branches from the ground.

From there, Valheim flows into the usual routine you’d expect from a survival game. I spend most of the time foraging rocks, flint, and becoming a kind of Genghis Khan figure to local wildlife. If the survival game loop was all that there was to Valheim, it’d be a fun, if somewhat disposable slice of Viking life. But one aspect that really makes the game stand apart is the sensory experience.

Valheim’s late-PS1/early-PS2 aesthetic has some modern flourish hidden beneath its horned helmet. The lighting is one standout aspect, with night skies seeing countless stars spill across a firmament of pure black. Meanwhile the Meadows biome is underscored by a bucolic clarinet melody, caught somewhere between folk and soft jazz, that never fails to soothe. And it all links back to that poetic sense of expanse and wonder as penned by Thomas.

There’s some entertainingly bouncy physics, too. My first death on day 1 isn’t attributed to one of the goblin-like Greylings or an aggressive boar, but to gravity, a tree, and my own hubris. Chopping down a tree makes it fall. It’s a very tricky concept to grasp, I know, and it turns out that chopping up a huge trunk also splits it in two. I’m standing downhill from one of the large logs as it falls to the ground, and thus begins my first corpse run.

Valheim is also a full-on RPG, which is a point I have used to sell it to my survival-skeptic friends. There are skills ranging from magic to cooking to wood-chopping, as well as a shockingly competent combat system, complete with a parry mechanic. All of these hang together to make exploration extremely fun, my character taking shape alongside the world around them as I learn more about myself and this strange new land.

Man of the land

Tracing the shoreline, venturing out on your first raft, building a simple homestead – it’s easy to forget that there is more to this game than simply existing within it, green and carefree. And there is so much more, with each major biome culminating in a boss fight against a suitably fantastical enemy. After each boss, you move on to the next biome, building forward bases and exploring – ever exploring, like a true Erik the Red.

Despite my generally wonderful time with Valheim 1.0, my one sticking point is the building mechanics. Level ground prime for building is hard to come by in the Tenth World, even after setting-to it with a newly-crafted hoe.

This means that making your homestead look like a building rather than a load of panels that have been chucked together is a matter of some genuine skill. I was left with huge gaps that, if nothing else, let smoke trail out beautifully from my campfire. It holds some of the game’s creative potential hostage, and I can’t truly feel like the author of my own pastoral poem as a consequence.

Still, I have to hand it to developer Iron Gate Studios. The sun may be young once only, but if you ever want to wander, Valheim’s near-endless scope for epic journeys is hard to beat. What a fantastic synchronicity there is to the fact that 1992’s Unreal World, one of the first survival games ever, doubled as an RPG about surviving the Far North. Valheim 1.0’s addition of the Deep North biome echoes it beautifully, calling forth the bravest souls who wish to venture further and marrying the RPG and survival genres in a genuinely fantastic way.

These games like Valheim offer stunning worlds to explore and survive, if you dare…