Jotun is a hand—drawn action—exploration game set in Norse mythology.
In Jotun, you play Thora, a Norse warrior who died an inglorious death and must prove herself to the Gods to enter Valhalla.
Valhalla Edition contains Valhalla Mode, a boss rush mode with even fiercer versions of the already challenging jotun!
After quitting his job in January 2014, Will Dubé and friends brought Jotun to Kickstarter in July of the same year. Raising over $64,000 from 2,299 backers, Jotun was also Greenlit in under a week. The success of the Kickstarter campaign consolidated the team and the vision and allowed us to get additionnal funding from the Canadian Media Fund and the Montreal Inc Foundation. Jotun released on Steam (Windows, Mac and Linux) on September 29th, 2015. Jotun: Valhalla Edition is coming to PS4, XBOX ONE and Wii U this summer. Valhalla Edition contains Valhalla Mode, a boss rush mode with even fiercer versions of the already challenging jotun. Impress the Gods!
| Minimum System Requirements | Recommended System Requirements | |
| CPU | Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz / AMD Athlon XP 1700+ | Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 2.0GHz / AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ |
| VRAM | 256 MB | 256 MB |
| RAM | 4 GB | 6 GB |
| OS | Win 7 32 | Win 7 64 |
| Graphics Card | nVidia GeForce 210 / AMD Radeon HD 3400 Series | nVidia GeForce GT 340 / AMD Radeon X1900 GT |
| Direct X | DX 10 | DX 10 |
| HDD Space | 10 GB | 10 GB |
| Game Analysis | Jotun: Valhalla Edition is a hand—drawn action—exploration game set in Norse mythology. In Jotun, you play Thora, a Norse warrior who died an inglorious death and must prove herself to the Gods to enter Valhalla. The Valhalla Edition introduces the new Valhalla Mode in which you must battle against even more powerful gods. | |
| High FPS | 200+ FPS ( GTX 1060 ) | |
| Optimization Score | 10 | |
| Minimum System Requirements | ||
| CPU | 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 | |
| RAM | 4 GB RAM | |
| OS | OS X Yosemite | |
| Graphics Card | Intel Iris 1536 | |
| HDD Space | 8 GB available space |
| Minimum System Requirements | ||
| CPU | 1.8 GHz Dual-Core | |
| RAM | 4 GB RAM | |
| OS | Ubuntu 14.04 | |
| Graphics Card | DirectX 10-compatible graphics card with at least 256MB of video memory | |
| HDD Space | 8 GB available space |
Atmospheric
cool art
sound design
controls
fights
lackluster powers
Not long before starting Jotun i had just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, which is pretty ironic seeing how close the tales in the book and in this game intertwine. Long story short, i was pretty immersed from the get go when i started playing.
And immersion was there definitely, while the story is barebone the themes are deep and rich. All of which is supported by pretty and unique art and animation (i might debate that the animation has something to do with the gameplay issues). But.. a pretty and worthy canvas doesn’t make it comfortable to play.
For a game that essentially is a “boss rush”, the gameplay mechanics are so…. sluggish. Thora is heavy, slow and incredibly limited in movements and abilities. Compare this to Hollow Knight, Bloodborne and the likes and this lags far behind, unfortunately. The fights just aren’t terribly enjoyable 🙁
The game is divided in 5 bosses (+a final one), and to unlock each boss you need to go through 2 sub levels to collect runes. Level designs varied quite a lot and didn’t always feel balanced unfortunately, some were definitely more enjoyable than others.
Conclusion: If Norse mythology is your thing, Jotun is absolutely worth the curiosity (it’s also quite short). It does tip toe on the epic and offers a wonderful canvas to look into. But as a game, it didn’t feel particularly ‘fun’ to play in my opinion.