Imagine you decided to leave the city, your dayjob as a coder and decided you want to return to the origins of human kind, you know ... mother nature.
Now further imagine that you quite LITERALLY decided to do that RIGHT NOW, not bringing any of your belongings with you except your jeans and t-shirt, and you asked an helicoper pilot to blindfold you, fly you out into some random Canadian or Swedish nature, far away from any civilization, and just leave you there and forget that you ever existed.
That's the game.
At first, your dream has come true - nature around you look realistic and incredibly pretty, albeit a bit repetitive since you will soon discover that the forest you've been placed out in - is some kind of secret cloning research government program where they have sucessfully cloned everything so every tree is exactly the same.
Run forest - RUN!
And that's exactly what you will be doing for hours, days even - running around in a forest, like Gump himself, and no one knows where you get that world class running power from, because you don't run out of stamina at all. You run like a champ, like no coder ever did.
So, I run! Now what?
If you've managed to figure out where all the menues are (tab being the most obvious one, with a not so obvious way to get OUT of the tab (inventory) once you click on something there but once you're past that little 200 IQ challenge, then you might as well pick up stuff.
Well about that...
You realized soon enough that you need stones, and stones are literally everywhere around you, but you can't just pick these up like a regular person. You have to pick up special pick-upperable-stones and they differ in color slightly and is a bit bigger than the million stones you have around you, so in no time you'll be running around for hours picking sticks'n'stones.
And when you're done doing that, and being pretty proud of yourself, you're going to meet the locals, that is hunter NPC's Boars and Bears. Don't worry - the Bears will either hug you in a surprising way and make grunting sounds while you enjoy standing in the middle of them, or they will eat you, with zero gore, you're just dead.
NPC's? This game has NPC's?
Yes, and they're armed, but don't worry here either - the NPC's are contemplating life in the game just like you are, they will go from spot to spot, oh, it's a deer, oh dear...it's another deer, oh there's a rabbit, there's another wabbit, oh there you are, better run after you, oh there's another deer...
...And it goes on.
The animals are constantly on the run, just like you. And so are the GHOST animals! YES Ghost animals, because before you know it, you'll hear something ROAR past you and you didn't see a thing. You check your speakers and your surround settings and realize there are no surround settings, it's just the sound of a ghost animal running around you trying to eat you without actually having a body. But it DOES sound scary!
Speaking of sounds...
Sounds are plentiful and random. If you see a beer or a boar - you will hear it roar instantly - or not, because even though the coder has put some effort in sound distance, you'll be amazed of on how far or close the animals really are to you before you all of a sudden hear that loud ROAAARRR. Did you know thar ROAR is a Norwegian name? Betcha didn't know that.
Building stuff...
Depends on how much you collect, and you will run for hours just to get the satisfaction of owning a few sticks, and collecting sticks is just a matter of finding a half pint sized bush where you need to aim to the left and at an EXACT pick-up-spot in order to make it light up like a burning bush and actually be able to pick it up. Someone ever told you - YOU NEED GLASSES? Well, this game would SELL GLASSES by the millions, should be sponsored by every optician in the world.
You will be equally surprised how much wood you need to collect, and there's plenty of trees, right? Well...yes, but not trees you can just chop down, as a lazy city coder, with world class marathon running powers, your arms are as weak as noodles, so you need to find driftwood to chop, and those are even more scarce than the pint sized bushes you've been collecting for the last 4 days.
When you finally get some flooring up, and maybe even a forge to melt some ore, you'll notice that your axes basically look all the same, and you chop haplessly around just to find out, well - an axe is just an axe after all, iron, stone...it's all the same, you STILL can't chop down those darn pine trees due to your fish-budding like coder muscles.
So, after all of this - should you buy this game? Well - I looked at it this way, it's 9 bucks... A complete 6-minute-in-and-out the other end Burger King meal cost about the same, so I treat the game the same. My friend (who's totally ghetto) asked for a refund, which I don't blame him for, but how is the coder going to be able to quit his full time job as a shoe-polisher at Kvik-E-Mart if he doesn't get any money?
So, unless he sold 9 million copies and is secretly enjoying his retirement in the bahamas, I'm pretty sure you'll get SOME fun out of this game, dreaming of what it could be while playing Valheim dreaming of this kind of graphics level, and in Wilderness, dreaming of Valheim gaming value with this kind of graphics...ah you get the point!
