I don’t suspect so, as his 15-year-old game site has, he mentioned, about 5000 pageviews.
The website for download is here: the free download gets you 10 days of life on your characters, $11 or so gets you the current version unlimited, and something like $44 gets you unlimited upgrades. He seems to update his stuff fairly often and I found the game addictive enough to pay the full price.
Essentially, it’s a Viking survival sim. The graphics are simple 256-color tiles and the complexity, as you might imagine, is on the order of your average Roguelike. I was pointed at the game when I mentioned a love of Dwarf Fortress. This game is not dissimilar in its idea or execution, but the player has only one character.
You can do, well, just about anything a Norseman could do two thousand years ago. You can set up agriculture and stock turnips and broad beans and such for the winter. You can trip gaily through the woods in summertime picking blueberries and making soup. You can go hunt for fox and wolves and beavers and elk, tan their hides, and make a lovely fur wardrobe.
You can die very, very easily.
The controls are a bit fuzzy – something as simple as making a fire involves hitting Alt-E, B, and the direction arrow that points toward your stack of firewood – but there are a few shortcuts for crafting and the like. Building a little spruce-twig lean-to is easy. Building a cottage takes weeks of work. You can roast an elk, but most of that meat is going to spoil before you get hungry enough to eat it unless you build a cellar and smoke, salt, or dry the meat. Smoking requires a fireplace, and you can’t have one of those without a cottage. You need rope, too, but it doesn’t grow on trees – if you can’t trade for it, you can make some, but you have to hunt down a non-furry animal (pigs work nicely) and kill it, skin it, cure the hide, tan the hide, and braid that skin into ropes. Salting requires… salt, and you can’t just find bags of it lying around. Drying just requires a wall and some more rope (good Lord, rope is wonderful stuff), but it takes a month.
This game is crazy addictive. I lost last weekend to it. I’ve been unable to put it down to study or do homework. When I’m not playing it, I’m thinking about it. And since I know a few of you are going to enjoy this sort of thing (and while I haven’t exactly mastered the game, I’ve discovered a few little charming bits – did you know your warhammer can work just like an axe?).
New addiction, in other words. You’re welcome.