Finally, A Survival Crafting Game For Someone Who Hates Minecraft

Why Valheim won over my gaming partner

Screenshot of Valheim on PC, image captured by author

I’ve been trying to get my husband into survival crafting games for years without success — until now. Minecraft Java Edition was my introduction to survival crafting, and a longtime personal favorite. I’ve stuck with it since before it had nearly as many features and dimensions.

Why Minecraft Wasn’t The One

Minecraft has always been a bit hard to learn. Even now that it has built-in crafting books that show you recipes (whereas in early years, you had to memorize everything). It’s relatively unstructured, with little linear progression. These days, the game has so many features it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Or fail to identify what tasks and items are important to in-game progress.

Achievements help, but don’t provide any mandatory structure. Apart from obvious improvements to your armor or tools, how do you decide what to do next? Wikis and tutorials are great, but you need to know what you want to learn about to benefit from them, and it takes a certain level of investment in the game to bother. For a brand new player, constantly checking a wiki can feel like homework.

Every time we played Minecraft together, I spent the entire game telling him…