Well, it only took about five and a half years, but Valheim has finally hit 1.0. The Viking survival game that swept up half the internet back in early 2021 has graduated from early access, and the full release brings quite a lot with it. There's a new Deep North biome, fresh weapons and armor sets, new tools, creatures, buildable items, crafting materials, locations and events. If you drifted away somewhere around the Mistlands update, there is a great deal waiting for you up north.

I remember when early access games were a gamble you paid five dollars for and hoped for the best. My granddaughter Jess plays a lot of these, and she'll tell you the difference between a good early access game and an abandoned one is basically the difference between Valheim and... well, a whole graveyard of promises. Iron Gate AB kept updating. That matters.

Valheim isn't the only indie worth your weekend either. As Engadget's roundup notes, Wardogs is also turning heads. It's a scrappy mech battler where you pilot machines that feel appropriately heavy, and people who like their combat to have some weight to it seem to be having a lovely time. There are other smaller titles in the mix too, if mechs or Vikings aren't your thing.

My usual advice, and it applies to games as much as it does to gadgets: don't buy all of them. Pick one. Valheim 1.0 is the easy recommendation here, especially if you already own it, because the update is free and the game has only gotten deeper with age. Survival games live or die on whether the grinding feels rewarding, and enough people have sunk hundreds of hours into this one to suggest it does.

The Deep North biome rounds out the map's edges with what sounds like a properly frozen endgame region, new creatures included. I'm told the new armor sets and weapons give the late game more to work toward, which was the one thing the game could feel thin on back when I first watched friends play it on Discord during the pandemic. A lot of evenings were lost to building longhouses. Nobody regretted it.

If you're new to Valheim entirely, now is genuinely the right time to start. The 1.0 label means the rough edges have been sanded down, and it runs on just about anything, including older laptops. Technology should work for you, and a game that runs beautifully on a six-year-old machine is very much my kind of technology.

I'll be curious to hear what Jess thinks of Wardogs, since mech games are more her lane than mine. Meanwhile, I may finally start my own Valheim run this fall. Winter is coming, as they say, and apparently so is the Deep North.