Dead in Vinland – True Viking Edition

Genre: Simulation / Survival Adventure / Turn-Based RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Dead in Vinland was released in 2018 on PC and ported in 2019 to Nintendo Switch with the added subtitle “True Viking Edition”. Like its 2015 predecessor Dead in Bermuda, Dead in Vinland combines multiple gameplay elements in one package, with Simulation, Survival Adventure, and Turn-Based RPG elements combining into a story about a Viking family whose home is attacked, forcing them to flee, with their ship eventually wrecking on a distant island, where they seek to survive the harsh elements, disease, and hostile enemies.

Players assign responsibilities to each of the four family members within each period of time in the game, whether that’s scavenging for resources, building helpful structures, or exploring the island. Meanwhile they’ll need to keep an eye on dwindling resources, as well as five health criteria for each of those family members. If one of your family members becomes too dehydrated, hungry, injured, sick, or depressed, they’ll die and the game will end. The main goal here is to survive as long as possible.

When you find yourself in a hostile encounter, the game changes to a Turn-Based RPG, with characters on both sides of the conflict swapping between front and back rows, with different abilities for each position. The game forces players to keep at least one character in each row, and combat makes frequent use of status effects to influence battle.

Overall, I think the gameplay here provides some interesting variety and potential for character progression, but it can seem overly-complex with numerous factors to keep track of. What’s more, luck plays a huge part in everything, and sometimes all it takes to completely wreck your stable situation is a few encounters where the game’s random number generator decide against you.

The presentation here makes use of hand-drawn 2D visuals for its characters against painted backgrounds, and these look fine but not extraordinary. The game does a good job establishing these characters and making players care about them, which helps quite a lot in this otherwise bleak game. This presentation is backed by some pretty somber music that fits the game’s dark tone well but can get a bit annoying at times.

Overall, I think fans of resource management and Survival Adventure games may find Dead in Vinland to their liking, but most players will find this to be a dour experience where luck plays too strong a part to make it satisfying. Unless you are a fan of this genre, I suggest skipping Dead in Vinland.

tl;dr – Dead in Vinland combines Simulation, Survival Adventure, and Turn-Based RPG elements in a game about a Viking family driven from their home and trying to survive on a harsh distant island. There’s some interesting depth and variety here, as well as some well-crafted characters, but the dour tone and gameplay that depends a bit too heavily on luck all makes for an experience that won’t appeal to players unless they’re big fans of Survival Adventure games… and even those players may find that they have better options.

Grade: C+

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