Aleš Komárek
Some games keep a key to the back door. You uninstall them, you move on, and then one grey evening the longship slides back into the harbour and you are sharpening a flint axe again. This week it was Valheim's turn to pull me back, and this time it was running on the living-room Batocera/Loki Zero box, launched straight from Steam.
The tenth world still holds up
It has been a while since I last set foot in Odin's tenth world, long enough to forget how good Valheim is at the quiet things: wind moving through the meadows, the way a half-built longhouse already feels like home, the small dread of a first trip into the Black Forest after dark. Coming back, the loop is as moreish as ever, chop, mine, build, sail, die to something with antlers, then build something better.
Playing it on Batocera
What made this run different is where it ran. The whole session was on the Batocera/Loki Zero box, with Steam running as a Flatpak and Valheim launched straight from the library. No separate gaming PC, no tinkering: pick it from the menu, the controller just works, and you are at the character screen in under a minute. For a couch session it is hard to beat: Batocera handles boot-to-game, Steam handles the rest, and every screenshot below came straight off the device. The world itself lives on our Vanilla Survival server, so the same map is waiting whenever the box boots.
Screenshots from the base
Next stop: finish the seal and take the one-way trip to the Ashlands instead. If the box keeps a steady framerate through all that fire and ash, I might never reinstall it on the desktop at all.