Dead In Vinland is a follow up to Dead In Bermuda. It's not a sequel since it is set in a completely different time period, but iterates on the mechanics, adding much more complexity. At its core, it is a simple 2D survival game mainly relying on random numbers. You drag and drop your party into slots in your camp, which is split over several screens. The UI is much improved, and now you can quickly navigate using on-screen buttons, or using the arrow keys. You can pick up your characters with the mouse, using a flyout menu from the left, or number keys.
There's different stations in your base; some gather resources, some are for crafting, some are for recovery. The right-most area is the forest which explores.
In Dead In Bermuda, you had a group of 8 survivors and stick with them throughout. Dead In Vinland has a different approach where you start off with a family of 4, and add new members when you find them, and upgrade your camp to gain extra capacity. Each person has a variety of attributes, and a variety of needs. The needs are Hunger, Sickness, Depression, Fatigue, Injury. Characters will die when any attribute is maxed out. These aspects also scale down the effectiveness of your attributes.
Their attributes determine how effective and how fatigued they get performing an action, but can also be affected by traits (which are added temporarily and permanently from many actions and events). The temporary status effects are added for all kinds of reasons, and these can really stack up and make things way more unpredictable. It can be frustrating to have so many though, and you are constantly having to heal early on. Just gathering resources can trigger them such as gaining “back pain” for gathering water, “flea bite” for gathering fruits.
There's more skills than the previous game so scavenge isn't used to gather wood or materials. You now need Forestry to gain wood, and Mining to gather the rocks and metal. Attributes can be improved by performing actions which levels the character up. Instead of skill points like Dead In Bermuda, Dead In Vinland gives you a random list of traits and you pick one. Many of the perks have pros and cons, so you choose the one that seems the best fit.
Everything is geared to be tough. Given that the needs affect performance, and lack of performance will mean you have a lack of food, or get stuck struggling to craft a useful station; it is easy to get caught in a situation that just spirals out of control. You often need to assign people to the recovery stations. The tavern which recovers depression, and the Healing Tent require 2 people to work, and the latter requires someone with high healing attributes to be effective. Recovery is always at the opportunity cost of not gathering resources.
Exploring slowly uncovers the map. The map is a grid of squares and each area has some kind of object you can interact with. It could be a tree to search for berries and cut for wood; an animal to hunt, a treasure chest to open and then scavenge for wood. When there's multiple actions, sometimes you can do some repeatedly, whereas most are single-use. The ones marked in red mean no more actions can be performed when you choose it. So you might be able to fish (several times too), but if you jump in to search, then the resource is expired (presumably because you scare away the fish).
There's no travel time when moving between locations on the map (time doesn’t pass with events that see you resting, or waiting to hunt a creature). Any character can perform an action there too, even though logically you would think it would only be available to those in the exploration slots.
The previous game saw you get a chance of being attacked before every action which simply hurt you based on your success roll and attributes. This time you have an actual battle system and is checked when you explore a new square rather than per action.
When the battle is initiated, your characters assigned to exploration are automatically chosen, then you select the others to make a party of 3. Then you play a turn-based system, using abilities and a simple formation system with 2 lines, melee and ranged. When no one occupies the melee row, the ranged row turns into a melee row. Some attacks only work from a certain row, can attack certain rows, and some can automatically move between rows (like an attack then retreat style move). The characters are basically designated a style, which comes down to melee, ranged, support, defence, and it's probably worthwhile having a balance.
The attacks have a damage range amount, chance to hit, chance to critical, then maybe apply buff/debuffs to self/enemy. Since there's a chance to hit, then a damage range, you can end up missing or doing zero or low damage each turn. When enemies have buffs to reduce damage it can often nullify your attacks, so an attack that does 1-3 will now do 0-2. The boss characters have even stronger buffs. I think it's worth keeping this in mind when you level up - to make sure some characters are combat focussed and have increases to minimum or maximum damage, otherwise you could be stuck here. All the random numbers mean that combat takes a long time.
The stations degrade over time, by use, and depending on the weather condition; storms take a larger hit. Damage can have a dramatic effect on the resources and recovery gain. These require either wood, rope or stone to fix. There are way more stations to craft, and each of these has an upgrade tree to improve them.
In the previous game, I suspected the developers tweaked too much and ruined the game balance during their updates. Even though they added an easy mode, it could be challenging in places. In this game, they have easy mode, ability to fine tune all the percentages, and change between a couple of statistical distribution models. Although I appreciate giving the user control, you would have to repeatedly play the game a few times to understand what to tweak to your preferences. Developers should have a standard game mode that is perfectly balanced, but since this game is way more complicated than the previous, and they didn't get the balance right in the first; I went straight to easy mode and found it was too hard. When I started again, I did choose the same difficulty but made sure I focussed on certain upgrades based on what I learned and it was much more manageable. At the start, you can assign someone to search your wrecked ship for resources, but after that, you need to have your basic stations set up.
You can eat the fish and meat raw. When you have the cooking pot, you can assign someone to turn it into a cooked meal of random quality, but for some reason it is at the expense of your fire intensity. Uncooked meat has more chance of increasing sickness and adding negative traits. You can preserve the meat/fish and berries on a drying rack but these can fail to dry or chance to be stolen by animals. There is a station to gather berries and you can grab a decent amount if you have a character with high harvest skill. The food expires too fast though, with each food item having a percentage like 10-40 to spoil every night. Since the day is split into 2 parts, the ideal scenario is to acquire the meat on the first turn, then cook on the second. If you don't eat it during the night scene, then (non-jerky) has a chance to degrade in quality. All food has a range of hunger it can satisfy rather than a fixed amount.
The campfire chat during the night is more positive than the bickering in the last game. Often you have a choice to respond, and these can tweak relationships and needs positively or negatively, and add statuses. There's quite a few dedicated storylines between the characters, some can end in romance. The dialogue is surprisingly dark, with many sexual references and profanity.
The water mechanic has changed. You no longer convert berries to water (although you can do), but water is collected from the sea, or just automatically when it rains. Collecting it from the sea needs to be purified using your fire before it can be used as drinking water. Your supply now has 2 barrels. You can then change the unpurified water to add to your purified supply in a menu. This decreases your fire to boil the water. From that menu you can also use wood to increase the fire strength.
You need water to Explore, and will allocate it to your party during the night scene to prevent dehydration. Even the drinking mechanic has a chance aspect to it. You can allocate 1 unit to guarantee it will remove "dehydration 1", but can gamble with 0.75, 0.5, 0.25 units which then just has a chance. If you don't remove "dehydration 1" it has a chance to scale up to "dehydration 2". During the sunny weather, you will need to assign someone to collect water, but during rainy weather, you don't often need to. If you upgrade your water supply enough, you tend to have a decent stock during the rainy periods to last through the sunny period.
There are loads of consumable items to find. Many are restoration (and some of these have a random range, sometimes can be negative too) or permanent skill boosts. The items that remove injury or illness traits have a percentage chance to work based on the actual illness - so some are easier to cure than others.
In addition to the difficulty in surviving, you are constantly being requested to pay tribute to a tribe. These can be very challenging to meet especially when they ask for perishable goods like "20 meat". One strategy is to find food sources by exploring but not claiming them until the required day.
I like the concept of games like this but they can be hard to balance. It's tough, and takes an extremely long time to play (took me around 45 hours but some time was invested in a failed run) but it was good fun. I appreciated all the new ideas they had to make the game much more interesting than the previous.