Viking Rituals

Vikings were a pretty important culture a few centuries ago, because they had the power to conquer territories across the entire Europe and beyond, thanks to their prowess in battle and ability to navigate the seas. However, they also had a few other traditions and rituals beside pillaging, as do all cultures from around the world.

Viking Rituals is a jam game designed to provide you with a bit of insight into the Viking world when it comes to their traditions. It’s not a very polished game and it certainly lacks content, but then again it was designed in just 48 hours by a very small team of developers. Hence, it contains a lot of bugs and inconveniences, but it illustrates the main idea pretty good.

As such, there are four mini-games to try and enjoy, each one of which features different rules and different gameplay mechanics. Thus, one of them challenges you to avoid obstacles like in some kind of endless runner, another allows you to make music, one is a simple naval battle game, and the last is a fishing mini-game based on reflex and coordination.

Although the games in question may sound relatively fun, they are extremely short and unpolished, which makes them feel more of a chore than something fun. Hence, they all feel unfinished, and they all have bugs that prevent you from enjoying yourself too much. They are also very short, so even if they work as intended, they end before you can blink.

As an example, it usually happens that the mini-games stop functioning after you play one of them, no matter how much you click on everything. This requires a full game restart, which is annoying and might cause a lot of frustration. Thus, even if the graphics are fairly colorful and enjoyable, the game needs much more work before it can provide the players with a good time.

In the end, Viking Rituals is a long way from being a finished game, but it can turn into something good with enough work and dedication from the developers. Granted, it’s just a jam game, but even jam games can be designed a little bit more responsibly.