Dead In Vinland - Review Roundup

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Spaceman
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Dead In Vinland has been reviewed favourably by a number of sites.

Each location you explore on the island has something to interact with. Sometimes it’s a simple hunting ground, others it can be a gate to Hel itself. See above. Some are mysteries waiting to be solved, others are simply a place to get more goods to survive by. But the best thing is that each new game means that the locations of these items and the outcomes are completely different. The skills of your people mean success or failure in getting the most from them too. It’s just… brilliant design, and like a really pretty and engaging single player board game.

Dead in Vinland is out TODAY on Steam, and if you want a character-driven, thinking man’s RPG – this one’s right up your alley.

Gamespace 8/10

Dead in Vinland surprised me a bit. I was expecting a robust survival game, for sure, but to have such a robust RPG experience tacked on to it was nothing short of impressive. As with most of these games, RNG can be particularly brutal though. While it makes sense in the narrative of the story, getting additional survivors from a variety of areas jarred me initially (from Vikings to African poets to Tomoe Gozen, the game has all sorts). I also highly recommend playing at least on normal, as the game’s easy mode seems to trivialize a lot of the strategy and content. Music and sound were adequate — combat’s Darkest Dungeon-esque sounds were particularly nice — but I definitely felt the characters could be a bit more expressive. Sure, there’s a lot of emotion packed into this story, but only Eirik (the father) seemed properly capable of showcasing it at times. All in all, though, Dead in Vinland combines survival and role-playing into a very complex package, so fans of either may want to check it out.
Note: A game key was provided for review purposes.

onrpg 3.5/5

The other reason I kept playing was because I really wanted to reach milestones, like building every camp station and finding Bjӧrn’s camp. The game’s difficulty is definitely a factor as you’ll probably die and be forced to rethink your strategy. On my first playthrough, my Moira died on day 4 because she became too depressed scavenging the shipwreck. Each time the challenge became too much for me, I was forced think about what I could have done differently. For instance, I learned that it’s extremely important to build the tavern and the rest area early on, even before securing a source of food.

Dead in Vinland is not an easy game, but it can definitely be overcome if you think about what resources and upgrades you need, and how to allocate the people in your camp to overcome the challenges the game throws at you.

indiegamewebsite 8/10
More information.
 
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Took some time to analyze articles and some vids.

/Chien mode on

While looking nice, visuals and UI are adapted to touchscreen where mouse emulates your finger. Yes, you read me right. It looks as a phonegame in disguise.

RNG is abyssmal, but I guess that's expected in all recent roguelikes shovelware. For no reason people get sick, injured or something. Which means you should keep everyone in top shape all the time as you never know some god's punishment will occur for no other reason but because dice emulated by CPU said it has to happen.

Fresh food, unless dehydrated or smoked, gets spoiled or rotten over night. It's a game so I won't go explaining why in RL it wouldn't be possible for at least some of it, but what's horrible is that you can't get rid of rotten food - it stays in inventory till doomsday. Okay, maybe there is an option to use it as fertilizer as should be possible, but oddly noone mentioned it anywhere.
Note that hunger escalates fast and has the same fatal consequences as dehydration in this game which in reality is not possible. We need "tons" of water daily, but food? Not that much.

Combat is simplistic and usually starts by placing your rangeds in front row and melees in back row. So your ranged is always being hit immediately to force you to treat their injuries. You'll of course waste an action point to move them in the proper place afterwards.
Yes, WTF, that was my reaction too.

People get depressed fast as if they're in some mental diseases facility and fatigued on anything as if they grinded in some MMO all day long. Why? I'd understand if those were some spoiled children who never carried anything heavier than a spoon and who always had what they wanted and now that cannot be.

In short, this ain't life sim game but basic RNG "machine" where you'll be trying to tone down whatever that RNG dropped on your head every day. If I'm to trust what I read/saw, there is absolutely nothing in there that'd be interesting to me.

/Chien mode off


Still, these impressions are not based on actual playing the game but on texts and streams. Which means these impressions of mine could be totally wrong.
Thus I'll will wait till crpgnut tries this one, recently he's only into this "survival" stuff before deciding if I'll buy it sometime in the future.
Till then, I don't trust any of those 8+/10 scores.
 
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It looks as a phonegame in disguise.
Coming from literally anyone else, this might have some actual meaning...
 
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Coming from literally anyone else, this might have some actual meaning…

No, you're wrong - it has great meaning. If he says its a phone game than you know it's not a phone game. Just reverse his logic on everything and it all makes sense. =)
 
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/Chien mode on

While looking nice, visuals and UI are adapted to touchscreen where mouse emulates your finger. Yes, you read me right. It looks as a phonegame in disguise.

RNG is abyssmal, but I guess that's expected in all recent roguelikes shovelware. For no reason people get sick, injured or something. Which means you should keep everyone in top shape all the time as you never know some god's punishment will occur for no other reason but because dice emulated by CPU said it has to happen.

Fresh food, unless dehydrated or smoked, gets spoiled or rotten over night. It's a game so I won't go explaining why in RL it wouldn't be possible for at least some of it, but what's horrible is that you can't get rid of rotten food - it stays in inventory till doomsday. Okay, maybe there is an option to use it as fertilizer as should be possible, but oddly noone mentioned it anywhere.
Note that hunger escalates fast and has the same fatal consequences as dehydration in this game which in reality is not possible. We need "tons" of water daily, but food? Not that much.

Combat is simplistic and usually starts by placing your rangeds in front row and melees in back row. So your ranged is always being hit immediately to force you to treat their injuries. You'll of course waste an action point to move them in the proper place afterwards.
Yes, WTF, that was my reaction too.

People get depressed fast as if they're in some mental diseases facility and fatigued on anything as if they grinded in some MMO all day long. Why? I'd understand if those were some spoiled children who never carried anything heavier than a spoon and who always had what they wanted and now that cannot be.

In short, this ain't life sim game but basic RNG "machine" where you'll be trying to tone down whatever that RNG dropped on your head every day. If I'm to trust what I read/saw, there is absolutely nothing in there that'd be interesting to me.

/Chien mode off

No.

This product is somewhat a followup to dead in Bermudas and expand on mechanics.

The quotation is a pile of incorrect statements.

This product as the previous had a few things right about survival.
Survival implies most of the time to operate on insufficient intakes. Which happens commonly in this product: characters are underfed. They usually do not operate on top level, they are most of the time weakened.
People die of starvation, hunger increases as fast as thirst because they are not satiated. This is the accumulative effect of being underfed that kills them.
Dying from being underfed happen every day in the world. At the moment, somewhere, when this is written, one kid has died from being underfed.

Working on insufficient intakes leads to fatigue and depression.
Getting the proper environment to get them out of survival is part of the process: kind of RPG rags to riches storyline so called RPGers are so hungry for.

Abstractions happen: food do not decay overnight, they appear non edible. This depending on the quality it starts off. That being said, there is no butcher or grocery store around so harvesting food might be non edible from the start. Fruits collected might reveal non edible when eating.
Improperly cut meat might also appear as non edible when about to eat.

The chain from harvesting to eating is abstracted, it adds nothing to go into detail.

Non edible food is kept in storage because it can still be fed at the expense of health. Cooked food, non cooked food, non edible food.

Non edible food can also be used as bait for fishing and fertilizers for a garden etc

RNG is seldom dicey, it happens usually at high chances, near quasi certainty.

Injuries, diseases: people do not get sick for no reason, they are vulnerable and sometimes, story events add to the mix.
Injury time of recovery is shortened beyond belief as it happens quite often in vid products.

Another feature is community building, characters must learn how to live together to overcome the adversity. There is the now common traitor mechanics etc
 
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I'm not even sure what are you saying there.
I was saying the game is basically yahtzee for phones where you pay for a different skin. Where dice got only different cosmetics.

To check my real life odds, I just threw mine 5 dice vulgaris and got myself a hand poker. Thanks to lady luck I guess I won't starve to death even if I get fired today.
 
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The probability brackets used into this product disqualify it as a yathzee clone.
The metagame is different.
In this product, players work their way toward quasi certainty, events can be postponed until the party is ensured to stand a very high chance of success.
It bends toward making the most of unlucky rolls. Yathzee means managing both sides: lucky and unlucky rolls.

A yathzee product at the moment would the thought for streamer product welcome to the game 2. RNG all the way down. Actually nothing like Yathzee since that one has management of RNG.
 
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