Towering giants of ultimate power have finally met their match in the most beautiful art project turned video game known as Jotun: Valhalla Edition. While life has ended for the main character on Earth, she seeks to prove herself worthy to Odin by defeating five manifestations of ancient runes on a terrestrial plane. Brutality and beauty combine in a powerful package finally available on Xbox One.
I have to start with a glowing complement for the voice-over work in Jotun. The male and female narrators are two of the best voices I have ever heard in a video game, and this is not hyperbole. From the moment the opening story begins, I was instantly captivated by the voice of the narrators. The narrator speaks only in Icelandic which provides culture, realism, and authenticity to the story. Reading the subtitles was not a chore while listening to the powerful delivery provided by the actors.
While talking about what Jotun excels at, the soundtrack also begs mentioning. The mixture of mystical and whimsical continued to make the fantastical believable. Each track was varied and fit the world properly. The sound balance was spot on, ensuring I was never taken out of the game for any reason. Each moment I was encouraged to press on by the adventurous score that propelled me through each level.
I started by calling Jotun an art project, and that isn’t completely fair. It is more of an art gallery than anything. What I mean is that each artistic element of Jotun is a masterpiece. The level design is brilliant, both artistically and mechanically. Artistically, the entire game looks like a painting come to life. There was a moment that I was walking up a hill near the beginning of the game where the camera panned back and I was able to see the full scale of the world. I stood there for a few moments to truly soak in the majesty of the created world. The attention to detail in this way always catches my eye.
The character animations, mixed with the art style, make Jotun look more like a late ’90s Disney movie than a video game. Everything is incredibly smooth and the lighting provides proper depth while highlighting other accents. I found every moment of looking at Jotun to be a joy.
Mechanically, the game is broken into five main levels that are ruled by a boss. Each of these levels can have a few subsections, as well. Each boss controls an element, and the levels are designed to incorporate that element. For example, the first boss controls nature and the level is lush with forest and plants. The enemies within the level are plant appendages that can whip you into oblivion. This differs highly from the wind boss level that had me walking over clouds.
The purpose of traversing these levels was to get to the boss and impress the gods by killing that boss. Each boss has their own set of powers and move sets that must be memorized in order to tactically take them down. Sometimes the boss would spawn minions to do their bidding, or they may have a turbo-charged attack that I had to time correctly to get out of the way. The boss fights were difficult, but not insurmountable. It took a few turns of trial and error to memorize the move sets and capitalize on the bosses’ weaknesses.
The exploration of each level rewarded me with golden apples that increased my health bar, and statues of the gods that gave me super powers. These powers help in beating the levels and bosses. Jotun is not a Metroidvania, so no areas locked me out without these powers. However, like Mega Man, specific powers worked better against specific bosses. There is no particular order to fighting the bosses, so it is entirely possible to beat every boss in any order without using the upgrades for advantage. That was how I did it.
So far I have had overwhelming praise for what Jotun did right, but the game is by no means perfect. Jotun is a boss-rush style game somewhere between Titan Souls and Mega Man. In Titan Souls, the player only fights bosses without having any level to traverse. Mega Man has ending boss battles, but an entire level filled with enemies to try to stop the player. In Jotun, the levels are large and sprawling, but there are hardly any enemies at all.
In the first level, the only enemy was the plant-tendrils that came out of the ground to swat at me. For the most part I could just run past them. If too many blocked my path, a single swipe of my great axe laid them to waste. The level was no challenge at all in comparison to the boss. Later levels had other enemies, but they too could be one-shot and merely served to distract from the main goal.
Do to the levels being quite large with nothing to do in them, the game seemed to plod along very slowly. I would say Jotun’s greatest weakness is pacing. Beating a boss provided me with a great rush that was immediately hampered by starting up a new level where I did nothing for almost an hour until reaching the next boss. While the levels were beautiful, they were just too sparse.
Jotun took me around six hours to complete in total. I believe a speed runner could trample the bosses much quicker than that. But for a first time player, exploration and discovery is needed to find the runes that open the boss doors. I do not feel this is a sub-par length for this game. However, I wish there was more to do while in the levels searching for the runes. The mixture of light and strong attacks, and the awesome power-up system, really begged for a variety of enemies to experiment on. It is a missed opportunity to make the levels so bare.
Summary
My impressions of Jotun: Valhalla Edition are overwhelmingly positive. While I feel the levels are sparsely populated, the boss battles more than make up for the slow-paced path. The game controlled and ran perfectly on the system. The beautiful art style and amazing sound design built an incredible world that should not be overlooked. I highly recommend you check out Jotun: Valhalla Edition.
Joshua was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 42 articles across game reviews, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.