Valheim.

Mistlands - Not because “whaaa, Mistalnds hard”, but because the whole area is built around verticality and the game engine most certainly is not. Combat is Valheim is generally pretty good, but after a reasonable amount of playtime, you will experience the frustration of swinging under/over enemies, because of minor variations in terrain height. Mistlands dials this problem up to 11, with the added bonus of enemies which specifically take advantage of this problem.

The Mistlands also turns exploration into a boring, grindy chore. The shorelines are a nightmare to sail around and even with the wisp, the mist is always too close to deal with said shorelines. So, you’re hoofing it through terrain which is designed to be difficult to navigate and move across. The feather cape helps, a bit. But, you’re still going to spend way too long faffing about, jumping up one side of a ridge and floating down the other, only to find that you’re in a gully with nothing useful and need to jump up the other side. Seeing dungeon entrances at any range is impossible. Enemies regularly pop out of nowhere and you’re forced into dealing with the combat verticality problems.

I’ll also throw a bit of shade at “Refined Eitr” as a resource, though I think the problem is less the resource and more the grind to get the parts for it. To start with, you need to make a Black Forge, to make that you need Black Cores, to get Black Cores, you need to spend hours in the mists hoping to stumble across one or more dungeons to get the cores. And inside the dungeons, expect lots of combat where the verticality problem is on prominent display. Now that you have the Black Table, you get to make the Eitr Refinery, which requires more Black Cores. Hope you enjoyed getting them the first time! Ok great, more cores obtained, time to go stumbling about again looking for Soft Tissue. With any luck, you’ve been mining (or at least marking) nodes along the way. Though, expect to spend more time lost in the Mists, you need a shit ton of Soft Tissue. Thankfully, this is a resource you can take through a portal, so that’s nice.

And finally, you get to raid Dverger towns for a required material to extract sap, a Sap Extractor. “What about trade? Vikings were well know traders”, you ask. Nope, fuck trade, all that gold you’ve been collecting, go spend it on some clothes which you will never actually use. You want a Sap Extractor, put on your killing pants and get raiding. Ok fine, we have our Sap Extractor covered in Dverger gore. And that gets us to the least horrible part of our Refined Eitr. Sap extraction is not terrible, find a spot with several roots in close proximity and just rotate a few extractors through them.

Right let’s get our Eitr Refinery built…and why the fuck is one of the input ports on the top? Ok whatever, I’ll build some stairs and…why the fuck is this thing tossing off damaging sparks? Yes, I know you can wrap it in iron bars, but seriously what the fuck? Why is this even a game mechanic? It’s really the perfect metaphor for all of the Mistlands. It’s needlessly annoying and doesn’t really provide anything positive for gameplay or fun. Just another pointless grind tossed in because, “players like hard things, right?”