Romestead, an upcoming survival crafter, borrows from the best bits of Valheim

The Roman Empire has fallen, and I’ve barely escaped with my life. I’m now in a thick wood, surrounded by angry bears and ornery goats, and I’ve been forced to participate in the time-honored tradition of collecting sticks and stones so I can build basic accommodations. The day can be dangerous, but the night is where things really get hairy. The zombies who led to the fall of Rome are now coming for me, and by the time the sun is back up, my basic village is coated in a layer of blood.

On March 18, I sat down for an alpha preview of Romestead with Swedish developer Beartwigs and publisher Three Friends hosted over Discord. Romestead is Beartwigs’ first game, but my play session showed a lot of promise.

Romestead is a clever portmanteau of “Rome” and “homestead,” a natural fit since this game takes place in a fantasy version of the fall of Rome. Players take the role of refugees fleeing the Roman Empire, which collapsed in part due to a sudden zombie plague. It’s now time to build our own town, which is easier said than done. Players need to pay fealty to the Roman pantheon, find survivors and put them to work, fend off waves of undead, and hunt mythical beasts. 

The core gameplay loop is very familiar for those who have played Valheim; at first, you can only build a humble settlement with limited industry. Slaying a beast of myth opens up new technologies and structures, allowing players to expand their territory and become more powerful, with resources like blacksmiths and siege artillery. As you explore through the six biomes — plains, forests, swamp, desert, volcanic, and a massive, abandoned city — it’ll become important to build forward bases and expand a fledgling empire of your own.

Aesthetically, Romestead borrows heavily from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Terraria. The game has a top-down perspective, and much like other survival crafters, the early game is focused on building basic structures and rudimentary defenses. Romestead cuts down on some of the smaller frustrations of the genre, like having to switch between tools, or manually equipping a torch. Once a tool is in your inventory, the game will simply auto-equip it when you’re in the right context. 

Once the basics of preparing a settlement are done, it’s time to build more productive structures, like a leatherworker. Someone needs to staff the place, so it becomes necessary to strike out, find a survivor, and invite them back to your base. Once they’re settled in, they become your responsibility — you need to feed them, give them a job they’re well suited for, and monitor their happiness.

I can see Romestead being a treat for groups of friends, since the wide scope means there’s something for everyone to do. Someone might stay back at the base, making sure the vendors are whipping up top-tier gear and cooking up some goat meat, while an adventuring party strikes out to find offerings for the gods or map their mysterious surroundings.

There’s no release date for Romestead yet; Three Friends and Beartwigs will eventually open the game up for alpha testing. During the course of my hourlong preview, I built a catapult, explored a dank dungeon, slew a massive owl-beast, and scratched at the upgrade trees for my character and my settlement. There’s a lot of depth beyond that experience, and if Beartwigs can deliver on that promise, this game might just become my metaphorical Roman Empire — something I return to again and again.