Steam

Game: Wurm online Rating: 13.5, S
Accessibility: 1* Expected: 3
Badge: Sugar Actual: 10
Adjustment: 3.5

It’s no secret that I love this game to death, it is genuinely one of my favorite games ever released, as evidenced by me having over 3500 hours in it at the time of writing.

I expected very little going into it, as I’d watched the Josh Strife Hayes video on it, and it was… unfavorable, combined with my previous experiences with it from about a decade ago where I walked up a mountain, fell into a cave, and got killed by a spider, then quit for 10 years.

But now that I’ve learned a bit more about gaming in general, and realized I do tend to like really slow burn games, I very much enjoy Wurm. I will say it’s not for most people, though.

The game has an unbearable grind. For most skills, you’ll spend weeks if not months getting to a point where you can make any real money off of them, and even then you’ll need to max out a few skills to make enough money to buy premium and pay for a small deed without spending most of your game time making support beams or nails.

If you do have the free time, though, it’s a great game to zone out on while catching up on youtube/podcasts/whatever, because for the most part you can just sit there hitting a few buttons over and over again. Hell, I’ve written a few posts on this blog while doing things in Wurm many times before.

The Gameplay#

The game has an unbearable grind. For most skills, you’ll spend weeks if not months getting to a point where you can make any real money off of them, and even then you’ll need to max out a few skills to make enough money to buy premium and pay for a small deed without spending most of your game time making support beams or nails.

If you do have the free time, though, it’s a great game to zone out on while catching up on youtube/podcasts/whatever, because for the most part you can just sit there hitting a few buttons over and over again. Hell, I’ve written a few posts on this blog while doing things in Wurm many times before.

The gameplay does vary a bit between skills, from tending and harvesting your fields, to foraging and doing archaeology, to improving and building items.

Foraging and archaeology require a lot of exploration. For foraging you now walk around looking for plants and debris to gather, and then you just kinda gather them. Archaeology is a little different, as you just scrape around a bunch of tiles until you find fragments, or see evidence of the remains of a deed. Once you get a full report for archaeology, you can use it to find a cache and get a bunch of fragments, as well as rarer items like masks.

A lot of skills will be done on your deed, though. Things like farming require you to stick around in one place for a while and keep your crops tended and healthy. Cooking feeds into this skill, which usually requires you to put ingredients into a container, and then put those into an oven to cook them after a time. Sometimes you do just combine ingredients by hand, or use a tool though.

Improving items really is what you’ll spend a lot of time doing, though. It’s the most time and resource efficient way to level, and it makes your tools and items better in most ways. It shortens your action times, increases their durability, but does come at the cost of lowering your experience gain while using the tool. Most people have lower quality tools for gaining experience, and higher quality tools for making good stuff.

The community#

The real draw of this game is the community, though. Largely everyone here is older, and a bit calmer, which is good because interacting with the community is probably the safest way to have a good time. The early game grind is difficult, but you can skip a lot of it by joining up with people in an established village, and using the tools they’ve made, like forges, and ovens.

This does lend itself to some of the inaccessibility, though. The community is great, but if you’re not someone who likes to interact with others, it can be daunting to just talk around.

Conclusion#

Overall, like I’d said before, this is probably one of my favorite, if not my favorite, game ever released. It’s definitely not for everyone, though.