OK I’m officially asking for help - I cannot keep Halldor alive to the end of the game. Is this by design, or is there a possible playthrough where he can live? I’ve tried about six different things and he always ends up a sacrifice or, if saved, killed in the fight following.
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Yes, I’ve done at least one playthrough where he survived to the end.
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I liked this one a lot (I had potraits all turned off though so I don’t have any comment on that)
The only thing I found odd was I don’t really see any reason anyone would ever side with the demon? “I’ll help you pass some checks you’ll obviously pass anyway if you’re playing optimally, and in exchange you’re guaranteed the worst possible ending no matter what” seems like a bad deal
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Because we didn’t dive the code and look ahead to the endings before picking one? 
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She tells you pretty explicitly though, like her offer to me was “hey want my help in exchange for being burned alive forever like all my other chumps?”
Edit: I guess what I’m getting at is that it feels a little odd that despite the setting including BOTH christian morality and more pagan stuff, there’s still a very explicit and strictly defined line between “all elements of heaven and christianity are perfectly pure and good and heavenly” and “all aspects of demons are purely and entirely bad with absolutely no upsides whatsoever and you’ll be tormented forever bible-style” which is weird considering that mythical viking hel isn’t really the “forever burned and tortured by judgmental demons” thing that christianity is.
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Ah. Checking back over my choices, it wasn’t explicitly said to my character at the feast - largely because I never formally made a deal or a sacrifice, I just asked her not to help Snorri. But that’s what happens when you deal with demons…
Anyway, the thing is that Flies is, in general, a Christian-derived demon. That’s fine - there’s two cosmologies here existing side by side. “Hel” in this case is used as the Norse term for something similar to Christian Hell. (Granted, what we know about Niflheim, especially in sagas related to Ragnarok, was largely first written down by Christians, so it often gets Christian-esque imagery attached - as with the ships built from the fingernails of the dead who didn’t go to Valhalla.)
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Is there a walkthrough available with you becoming King and loyal to the old gods?
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@PtmChopper Cheers for the feedback! At least some of the Old Norse myths that survive are a jumble of Christian and non-Christian beliefs. There is one that seems to equate dwarves/dark elves with demons and light elves with angels. I wanted to try to include some of that jumbling, whilst allowing all the gods to co-exist without making either religion the “true” and “good” one. That meant I felt I could include a Norse-ified demon like Flies as well (she’s based on a demon that pops up in an early story called The Tale of Thorstein Shiver).
I was trying to distinguish between Hel (an Old Norse place of the dead that doesn’t focus on punishment) and a Christian version using the name Niflhel, but probably the more neutral Hel didn’t come up enough for that to be very clear. I think there might actually have been places of the punishment for the dead in Old Norse religion too, but it’s very hard to tell because we have so little evidence for almost anything.
Re. the more negative ending… well, if you’re going to bargain with a devil…
@eldensalkeld and everyone else who has left their thoughts on the game - thanks to you as well! Obviously the positive comments are my favourites, but I’ll take the rest on board too. It’s all very useful.
I think the comments on the romance options will be especially great for anything else I write. I was hoping that people would find the romances fun (personally, I loved writing all three ROs, maybe Leikny above all), hopefully you did, and it’ll definitely be an area I look to expand next time. I’ll also look harder at giving players a choice over the genders of ROs. And I’ll have to check out Odin’s Game by Tim Hodkinson!
P.S. Sorry for not posting on here sooner! After the initial flurry, the idea of feedback started making me nervous, so I was only going to reply to posts that mentioned me directly. Hopefully you’ve all figured out by now how to get the endings and achievements you want.
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Hey, all. I’ve completed my review of Choice of the Viking. Thanks for reading!
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Hi! I DM’d you with a bit of advice! Hope it helps 
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Not actually expecting anyone to read this since I’m super late to the party, but here goes. Overall I really liked the game, but I have a couple things to note.
the main one is I really really didn’t like the Door Court scene, having several issues with it from both a narrative and mythological perspective, as well as issues with how the game refers to Niflheim and alfar/myrkalfar more generally.
I’ll start with the mythological ones, since one of my narrative issues stems a bit from the mythological ones.
Prefacing that I know there aren’t a lot of sources on norse mythology, and that a lot of what we do have is somewhat jumbled so obviously there going to be differences in interpritation, but I do feel like there’s definitely a line where you can say that something is mythologically wrong, that I think the game crosses a few times. I also know that it’s possible there are sources out there that I haven’t encounter that do set a precident for these things, so apologies in advance if anything I bring up has a source. And more generally apologies in advance if it seems like I’m talking down about anything, especially anything I’ve gotten wrong, that’s not my intention, I just like to make sure to include all information, even the obvious stuff, just in case. Anyway, that aside, here are my issues:
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Firstly the entire premise of the court happening is on pretty shakey ground. As far as I’m aware, there is only one instance of draugar being defeated by taking them to court, and it bears little similarity on the events of the game.
i. The draugar in the original saga were sea-draugar, which are a distinct thing. Sea-draugar are sailors who died at sea, are generally less malevolant and often don’t realize they’re dead. A malevolant non-sea draugr, who knows it’s dead but can’t or won’t pass on, probably wouldn’t respect the authority or verdict of such a court.
ii. The court was a proper trial held at a þing, not an impromptu affair.
iii. The þing didn’t decide of the fate of the draugar’s souls, it was to decide that the draugr were in fact dead and as such, needed to leave and stop bothering the living.
iv. No magic or anything was used to actually banish the draugar, like previously mentioned, the sea-draugr didn’t realize they were dead, and just needed to be convinced to move on. -
alfar and svart/myrkalfar aren’t angels/demons, like at all. I know there’s like one or two sources that kinda imply it, but like they conflict with other sources enough that I think it’s safe to say they’re definitely a later christian addition.
Also, and I admit this is delving into the realm of speculation and opinion, but I feel like a bunch of pagan spirits probably wouldn’t heed the call of a Christian priest or be all that willing participants in a trial in Jesus’s name. -
Niflhel/Niflheim/Hel really isn’t comprable to the Christian Hell. Even setting aside the fact that Niflheim and Hel may have been entirely seperate, with Niflheim not even being an afterlife in that case, the two aren’t really comparable.
Not just the wicked went to Hel, and the wicked that went there weren’t really punished. They were just kinda gathered there to hang around in the cold waiting for Ragnarok. And that’s the last thing, Niflheim is very explictly a realm of ice and cold, in contrast to the fires of Muspelheim, so “the fires of Niflheim” makes no sense.
Anyway that concludes the mythology issues. The story issues, are that the whole segment feels like it takes away player agency and ignores player choice, by making assumptions about the MCs belief in order to make the scene happen. Basically it really feels like the game really throws the agency of a pagan MC under the bus in order to serve the plot. Like since as mentioned, Niflheim is not at all Hell, I assume in that scene, the priest (whose name I forget and am to lazy to go back and get) is wanting to send the MCs father to either the Christian Heavan or Hell. The whole premise of the MC going along with the trial relies on the MC both believing in the Christian Heaven and Hell and also respecting the Christian God enough to consider the authority of a court in his name legitimate, since even if you try to not go along with the court, you have to go about getting the court dismissed, and not just stopping the whole thing before it started.
And obviously, if the MC is Christian, or is more open to Christianity, this works, but think about it from the perspective of a more stuanchly pagan MC whose opposed to Christianity. This guy barges into your house and says he’s gonna do what is basically a blasphemous ritual from your perspective, in order to send the soul of your father to one of two afterlives, neither of which you believe in, and likely wouldn’t want your father to end up in even if you did believe in them.
And yet the closest you can get to objecting on religious grounds at anypoint, is that you can choose to take matters into your own hands because “either one would have been too good for my father”, not “I don’t believe in or respect Jesus, now get out of here, I’ll deal with my father on my own” or anything like that, like my Pagan MC wouldn’t have thought Heaven and Hel were to good for her father, because she doesn’t believe in them, or this preists nonsense and wouldn’t have let him inside to start the trial in the first place.
Anyway that’s my thoughts on the Door Court. My other smaller issue is that the romance options aren’t that great. I don’t really feel like you spend enough time with Leikny and Halldor before you seemingly have to pick them to get an idea of their personality, (I also didn’t find either particularly appealing, but that’s just my personal preference, not really an issue on your end) which only leaves Geirríðr whose signifigantly older than the MC, and while I don’t have an issue with someone dating someone else whose a decent bit older, it’s certainly not for everyone, myself included. But the romance options not being great isn’t really a huge issue for me, since that’s not really the main focus.
There are a couple minor gripes I have here and there but they definitely fall a lot more into the realm of like personal preference or whatnot, nothing really worth commenting on especially since the game is already out.
Okay I lied one more thing, it midly annoys me that viking or vikingr is never actually once used when talking about going raiding, or as the Norse would say, going viking.
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