Role-playing · 2021 · Iron Gate AB · online
Valheim
Make a Viking world habitable as a pair: fell trees, raise a hall, put out to sea.
What it is about
You land in a Norse world with nothing but a torch. From there it starts: gather branches, get a roof over your head, find something to eat before dark. The shelter becomes a hall, the raft becomes a longship.
The world is divided into zones that get harder from the inside out — meadows, forest, swamp, mountains. Each brings its own enemies, its own materials and, at the end, a boss whose trophy unlocks the next tier. You build freely, with a structural system: anything that juts out too far collapses — usually at the moment the other one is standing underneath.
With two of you it is one shared world and usually shared labour. One stays behind building, one goes out for materials — or you set sail together and discover you underestimated the sea.
Our verdict for couples
You start with a stone and a piece of wood, and half a year later there stands a hall with a roof truss, a harbour and a ship you built yourselves. The roles sort themselves out along the way: one becomes the builder, one heads out and brings back whatever is missing, and nobody ever agreed on any of it. The opening is unkind, and the first evenings consist of cold, hunger and a boar that runs faster than you do. Get through that and you have a world nobody else owns. Only the walk back to your own corpse never gets any shorter, and that stays true to the end.
Pros
- Each of you finds a role: building, fighting, sailing
- Adjustable difficulty when your skill levels differ
- The world persists even when only one of you is on
Cons
- No local co-op
- The opening hours are unforgiving
- Every death means the long walk back to your corpse
Suitable from
Hobby
- Conflict potential
- Spirited
- Cosiness
- Mixed
- When you can stop
- Any time
- How long it lasts
- Over 40 hours
What other co-op fans say
What the community writes reads like a collection of shared memories rather than a review: people write about the house they built together, the ship that sank, and the night everything went wrong. Strikingly often they note how well the game works when your skill levels differ — the adjustable difficulty is praised explicitly, and the roles sort themselves out between building, fighting and sailing. The other side: dying is expensive. The walk back to your own corpse comes up again and again as an annoyance, and the tone gets noticeably sharper about the later stages.
- “I like that you can adjust the difficulty to tailor the game to your playstyle.”
- “Bought a relaxing survival game, ended up spending 47 hours building a house, getting murdered by a mosquito, and arguing with my friends about whose fault it was.”
- “die --> go to get stuff back --> get clapped by something along the way --> repeat.”
Summarised by machine from 60 Steam reviews, not written by our editors. The quotes appear verbatim in those reviews.
If you like this one
Runs on the same devices as this game.
Survive the next winter together. Nothing is explained, dying is frequent.
Grounded
Shrunk to the size of an ant in your own back garden: the sprinkler is now a natural disaster.
Terraria
Dig out a two-dimensional world, build it up, and clear its bosses one at a time.
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North unreviewed
A Middle-earth role-playing game for three that finally gets a split screen on PC.
Related in the magazine
- Guide
Two hours, that's it
How long a game is tells you almost nothing about whether you can start it on a Tuesday night. The question that matters is a different one — and it leads to surprising picks.
- Guide
When you're both good at this
Almost every co-op recommendation is written for uneven couples — including our last one. For two experienced players the problem inverts: difficulty isn't what's missing. Needing each other is.