00:00After five long years, it's finally here.
00:03Valheim 1.0
00:04The Deep North
00:06The Final Boss
00:08And anime sequences?
00:10Sure, why not?
00:11Look, it's a little weird reviewing Valheim now because I've been playing it since 2021,
00:16but it's finally left early access.
00:18In Valheim, you're a fallen Viking warrior sent by Odin to vanquish his enemies.
00:23But this is no RPG, it's a survival game, and there are no real quests to follow.
00:27The procedural world is separated into biomes, and defeating each biome's boss gives you something you'll need to conquer the
00:33next.
00:33But other than the occasional marker on your map, Valheim is a self-guided tour that doesn't tell you how
00:38to progress.
00:39That's entirely up to you.
00:40And it succeeds wonderfully.
00:42I've spent nearly 150 hours in the game, and I've never felt the need for NPCs to fill my ears
00:47with exposition,
00:48or wanted a quest log to give me direction.
00:50New biomes and features have been added over the years, culminating in the Deep North,
00:55a massive, frozen final realm where you finish your work for Odin.
00:58And rare as this is for a survival game, there's an actual ending to Valheim now,
01:02though you can continue playing in your world once you've seen it.
01:05After five years, Valheim is showing its age a bit,
01:08and is somehow still missing a couple common survival features,
01:11such as being able to craft directly from storage chests.
01:14But it's still one of the best survival games around,
01:17and it's one I know I'll return to again and again in the years ahead.
01:20Half a decade after I first played it, Valheim still has plenty of magic left.
01:24Follow PC Gamer for more news, previews, and reviews like this.
