Nine Worlds - A Viking saga

I went looking for a hidden gem buried in Steam's long tail and found something honest about its own ambitions and limits in roughly equal measure. Nine Worlds - A Viking Saga is a 2D action platformer built around Norse cosmology, the kind of small personal project where one studio handles everything from lore to level layout. You play a Viking warrior who drowns in a storm off Midgard and wakes in Elfheim, the land of the Fae, alongside a mysterious fairy companion named Ozma. From there the saga sends you across the nine worlds of Norse myth to find out what corruption is unraveling the cosmos. It is a genuinely interesting setup, and the fact that it reaches into Elfheim, Asgard, and the wider cosmological map rather than staying in generic Viking village territory earns it real credit. The core loop is jump-and-run platforming with melee combat. You start barehanded and gradually earn new weapons and techniques as the chapters progress, which gives a slow but real sense of momentum. Hearths of Life are scattered through levels to extend your health pool, and finding them nudges you toward exploring rather than sprinting. Hidden treasure rooms and bonus level gateways reward curiosity. Boss encounters with evil gods punctuate the chapter structure and provide the clearest spikes in challenge. Controls are simple, a three-button scheme built first for mobile that translates to keyboard or an Xbox-compatible pad on PC. The developer confirmed the gamepad is the preferred way to play, and that tracks, the inputs feel tuned for thumbs rather than fingers. That mobile origin is the game's most persistent shadow. The visual design carries the clean, slightly flat quality of a phone platformer scaled up to a desktop window. It is not ugly, but it does not have the handcrafted pixel density of contemporaries who built exclusively for PC. The pacing in early chapters is gentle to the point of quiet, which I can respect when a game earns the slowdown, though Nine Worlds takes a while before the world variety starts doing meaningful work. Post-launch patches addressed some rough edges: hit boxes on attacks were tightened, the game-over flow was softened so you restart from your last checkpoint rather than the beginning, and the opening chapters were made slightly more forgiving on health. Those are the right fixes, and they signal a developer who listened. What the game does have is sincerity. The Norse lore is clearly loved rather than borrowed as set dressing. Elfheim as a starting point rather than Midgard is a small structural choice that shows someone actually read the mythology. The chapter-based saga format gives the adventure a storytelling shape that most sub-five-dollar platformers never bother with. Steam leaderboards and achievements add light replay motivation for score chasers. If you are the kind of player who keeps a list of games about mythology that almost nobody covered, this belongs on it, qualified but present.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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