Telemachus:
It is first thing in the morning and the argument over
readiness is in full swing, one player is gathering the last of their gear,
debating on what and which to bring; weighing the cost in a purposeful
deliberate but slow process. Across a small stretch of grass sits the jetty and
the waiting boat. Another player sits by the oars, calling out and making the
urgency of their need to depart felt. I myself dither between two positions.
Nestor:
Let me explain to the class, we’re playing Valheim, a Viking
styled survival game it’s got a smattering of other games features, with some
of its own charm. A flawed game, for sure, but a useful vehicle for this
review: this is my third play through.
I strut along the pier to the waiting ship; the pier was as
Stephen Daedalus puts it, ‘a disappointing bridge.’
Proteus:
We set off crawling against the wind and turn off to go up a
river, there sits my own equally disappointing bridge, shoddy around the edges,
and well…at once we realise the mast is too tall, and so the midsection of the
bridge is unceremoniously brought down, and hastily altered.
I consider it the antithesis of London Bridge. This is where
the book first really lost me, somewhere in the endless milling of thoughts, I
lost the thread of what Joyce was really writing about, but I feel that was
somewhat the point. The seemingly chaotic jumble of thoughts, yes thoughts,
warts and all. Strangely punctuated? Did in-fact present themselves, very
convincingly. My own attempt to invoke confusion here is far less clever: a disappointing
abridge, though one without pier, for that was left behind by this point.
Adieu.
Calypso
It’s at this point the book brings us round to our
protagonist. Takes it a fair ol’while tho.
Valheim is structured into a series of regions, with bosses
for each, in an open world. Each region has its own tiers of mobs and
environmental hazards, going up in layers that require by design the previous
to be completed before real progress can be sought in the next.
This is less based on grinding personal stats and more around
grinding food, armour and weapon types; which means you essentially are what
you eat, and are only as big as the stick you carry. When cooking it perfectly
possible to burn ones food and get coal. Much like Leopold bloom in this
chapter of the book, where he burns his breakfast kidneys, while bring his
adulterous wife: Molly, breakfast in bed. I had a similar arrangement with a
smelter.
Lotus eaters
Back on the boat we take a different course to our previous,
avoiding the grave markers from our previous expedition. Before I can tab out
and look for some relaxing music to slap on during what is likely to be a
lengthy trip, we instead reminisced about that prior adventure and decide that
this voyage will be hopefully be different.
It is in this chapter we learn bloom has an erotic penpal,
and uses a pseudonym to avoid getting caught. My own character in Valheim is
named sten ormlegger meaning stone-snake-leg or as I like to think of it, rock
hard big cock. There are three other infrequent players on our server not
participating on the voyage, one using my real name, another using my screen
name, and the third simply titled, “better than you,” an attitude I find I have
an affinity for.
Hades.
The prior voyage was one of suffering; we build a low tier
raft and sailed down the coast into the second tier area called the black
forest. The boat was painfully slow, and so we pulled in at a set of ruins that
we mistook for a cave and were set upon by a horde of angry forest creatures.
Three died as we ran it back to the boat, the creatures followed into the
water, pelting us with rock until the raft was smashed, and we drowned.
Aeolus
Out on the waves, with the winds at our backs, we started
chatting about the day’s news and the general politicking of Westminster. There
is very little else for us to do in game at the point other than hope the winds
stay favourable, which they won’t.
In this chapter Leopold bloom narrowly misses running into
Stephen Daedalus at a newspaper office, they’ll be of much importance to one
another later in the story however, at this stage I can’t see what the two
threads of analogous discourse are in the review, perhaps we will never know.
Lestrygonians
In the black forest lurks the trolls, they are blue, wear
loincloths and are tall as trees. One must use the forest as a shield between
you and them, or else one will find themselves quite dead. The only issue is
they are strong enough to topple trees and smash rocks with their fists. In a
reversal of fortunes of dear Odysseus, we have only lost a single craft to the
man eating giants, during an ill-fated voyage by one of our players up a river.
They can in fact toss rocks.
Scylla and Charybdis
The game has a fairly low level of graphical splendour; it’s
nice enough to look at sometimes, just not in that perfectly rendered horse
plop kind of way. Think ps1 graphics with shaders and better lighting. The
debate on this issue, during our voyages, has been considerable and repetitive.
One player asserts, “it looks like arse,” the other counters saying it’s
stylised, and really good actually”
This misses the point entirely. The game is really quite small:
Only a few gigs. I don’t much care to bloat my hard-drive with 4k textures that
I wouldn’t give two shits about even if I could load them.
Why, oh why, do games ship with high end textures as bloat
ware, this shouldn’t be necessary on a PC. How hard would modularity be to
implement, given some games have additional optional textures packs in excess
of 30gb, not super hard I’d gather.
Wandering rocks
In the book this chapter consists of a bunch of short views
from a whole host of characters, if you think I have a way of alluding to that
is the scope of this review you are sorely mistaken. It took me a while for conceive
a debate on hamlet as being close enough to a rönt on graphics bloat.
Sirens
It’s fast approaching 4pm (3.39pm) as I write this and I
need to throw my pizza dough together for my supper. So to save on chatter I’ll
talk of that thing that so often tempted us off course. The open ocean in Valheim
is populated with sea monsters that stalk any so misfortunate to enter. Island
hoping is safer but far slower. The voyage we undertake after this one would
take a full hour and a half, on the way out and a mere twenty minutes on the
return, after a player joined the server and said travel on the open sea is far
safer than we had assumed. This is the voyage I will write about from now on.
Cyclops
During our circumnavigation of the coastlines, we came close
to third and fifth stage biomes, so that as we rowed slowly over choppy seas,
leaches from the swamp swam after us in a meagre attempt to pester. We largely
ignored them, and hoped in turn they would ignore us. Yet they kept probing in
an attempt to unsettle, mindlessly blind and hostile, unthinking things.
Bloom is this chapter is confronted with a set of Anti-semitic
remarks directed at his person while in the pub. Not bothering to hang around
long after that, he first politely ignores, then corrects them, and leaves. In so
doing he displays a degree of wit, in his use of deflection and decorum, that could
never be expected of his monstrous detractors. The rules here are inherently unfair
because where bigotry is normalised they are held to an entirely different
standard. They are blind to this privilege of course, bigots being narrow
sighted Cyclops.
The chapter stuck with me, it’s a very accurate depiction of
interacting with a bigot; which in truth has little to do with Valheim,
thankfully.
Nausicaa
One need not romanticise this game, turning around to see it
wondering the shores: it is as dishevelled as our Leopold bloom, but mistake
not: like him, it has charm in abundance. There are simple flat textures when using
portals. The sounds in caves are looped in a very predictable pattern, and graphics
are very simplistic, as is the games structure and progression (yes, unlike Ulysses)
The open ended nature of it, and the capacity for a
situation to go from fine to fuck very quickly makes it really quiet engaging
on occasions; while at other times it’s relaxed and laid back. it’s a nice mix
and it feels good enough to play, at least early on that none of these are
really deal breakers. The same cannot always be said of Ulysses, see the next
chapter.
Oxen and the sun
I don’t know if
this review will be at all amusing, alea iacta est, In Ulysses this chapter is
a progression of writing styles culminating in the present of 1920,
consequently it becomes more comprehensible as it goes on, simply because Iċ ne sprece Englisċ. Perhaps the same can be said for this
review? For it is debatable after reading if i can really speak English.
Circe
We find our Promised Land, where the second boss was
located, we set up a little portal home, ran back to get some much needed food
for the voyage; then off again to bring the boat to home. We waited a little
time for our other player to join us, but didn’t really want to hang about, so
left promptly.
Eumaeus
Back at the village one of the players was defending it from
a mob attack, luring them away from the settlement before they can smash it all
to bits. These happen periodically and generally set about ruining’s one’s day.
The game has a fair few “fuck you,” aspects and this is one of them. Combat is
largely about managing stamina, and stunning one’s opponents, it’s definitely
in the same vein as dark souls but less tight in its execution. I’ve still yet
to decide what the point is in the special attacks.
Ithaca
The building system is a lot of fun. There a need to
properly support structures, and allow smoke to leave closed rooms; mistakes
are easily rectified. These limitations are little challenges to seed
creativity, just to get the ball rolling. Everything snaps together nicely and
it still looks fine when it doesn’t so it’s quite visually forgiving too.
My own home morphs and expands as required but others are
more purposeful. Some building tree houses, elaborate in detail. While others
build interlocking struts that are angled in a way that make the entire
structure feel precarious. There is fun to be had if one wants it, but building
something just good enough is done easily enough, if it’s not your bag.
The nice feature of this is that a well-furnished the home improves
the rested buff, meaning that having a nice home does actually confer a
gameplay advantage.
Penelope
In summery Valheim is definitely a game, and one best played
with friends. If you’re wondering who is Penelope/Molly Bloom in this review,
it is you dear reader, faithful or not, I wait until the very end to consider
your perspective and do so in the custom of sailors, fleetingly.
