Jotun: Valhalla Edition

There is a moment in Jotun — the arrival of the frost giant Ísa — when the boss rises out of the ice and fills the entire screen: a hand-inked mountain with a face, moving at the deliberate pace of weather. Your Viking, Thora, is roughly the size of one of its knuckles. That moment is the whole pitch. It is also, more or less, the whole game.

Jotun: Valhalla Edition is the definitive cut of the September 29, 2015 debut from Thunder Lotus Games, the small Montreal studio that would go on to make Sundered and the extraordinary Spiritfarer. You can see the studio’s future in this game’s DNA: an obsession with frame-by-frame traditional animation, a willingness to build an entire product around a mood rather than a mechanic, and a mythological seriousness that most indies chicken out of. Thora died an inglorious death at sea — no sword in hand, no glory — and must now hack her way through Norse Purgatory to convince the Gods she belongs in Valhalla. It is a redemption arc with an axe.

The market positioning is unusual and, frankly, a little awkward. Jotun was Kickstarter-funded and arrived in the great mid-2010s indie boom, when “hand-drawn” was still a differentiator rather than a genre. It sits in the uncomfortable gap between the art game and the action game, and it never fully commits to either. That tension shows in the reception. Metacritic lands at 79 — a score of respect, not enthusiasm. The critical consensus is a shrug of admiration, and the reasons why are laid out below.

• Five Colossal Boss Battles: Arena fights against elemental jotun — ice, fire, earth, forest, and worse — each rendered at a scale that makes the camera pull back until Thora is a speck. These are the reason the game exists.
• Hand-Drawn Animation Throughout: Not a filter, not a shader trick. Fully traditional 2D animation across nine levels and every boss, with no reused sprite work where a new drawing would do.
• Nine Exploration Levels: Frozen wastes, burning forests, mist-choked caves. You hunt runes to unlock the gates to each jotun while an Icelandic narrator unspools fragments of Thora’s life and death.
• God Blessings: Powers granted by the Norse pantheon — healing, speed, defensive shields — that function as consumable panic buttons rather than a build system.
• Valhalla Mode: A boss-rush gauntlet against significantly nastier versions of all five jotun. This is the edition’s headline addition, and it is the closest the game gets to a real skill test.
• Original Score by Max LL: Composed scene by scene, not looped by zone. You notice.

The Gameplay Loop

Jotun alternates between two modes, and they are not equal partners. One is a triumph. The other is filler with a gorgeous coat of paint.

Combat is built around a single weapon: a two-handed axe that Thora swings like it weighs what it looks like it weighs. There is a light swing and a heavy swing, plus a dodge. That’s the kit. The heavy attack has a wind-up long enough to read a paragraph in, and committing to it is a genuine decision — if the jotun’s arm comes down mid-animation, the hit lands. This is a game about spacing and patience, not execution. At its best it plays like a very slow Shadow of the Colossus boss fight rendered in two dimensions, where the entire challenge is learning a giant’s tells and finding the two-second window where its wrist is on the ground and vulnerable.

The problem is that a two-button moveset with no combo depth, no parry, no positional damage, and no meaningful progression can only stay interesting for so long. There is no growth curve here — the Thora who kills the final jotun is mechanically identical to the Thora who killed the first one, just with a slightly bigger health bar and a couple more god powers stocked. Compare that to a Hollow Knight or a Dead Cells, where mastery compounds. In Jotun, mastery plateaus almost immediately and then you simply apply it, over and over, more carefully.

Exploration, and the Backtracking Problem

Between bosses, you walk. A lot.

The nine exploration levels are large, largely empty, and structured around rune collection — find two runes per region, the gate opens, fight the giant. On paper this is fine pacing: tension, release, tension, release. In practice, these levels are where the game’s design ambitions run out ahead of its budget. There are no enemies worth the name in most of them. There are environmental hazards, some light puzzling, and an enormous amount of holding the stick in a direction. When a rune is missed, the game asks for a retracing of already-cleared ground, with no fast travel worth the name and a movement speed calibrated for atmosphere rather than convenience.

The exploration is a delivery mechanism for the art, not a system in its own right. To be fair: some of those walks are genuinely affecting by design. Crossing the roots of Yggdrasil in near-silence, or wandering a burning forest as the narrator describes Thora’s father’s death, is built to produce something close to awe. But awe is not renewable at the rate this game demands it. By level six, the frame being admired is one that has already been admired, and the forward press is because the boss is the reward, not because the road is.

The Narrative Layer

The story is delivered entirely through narration in authentic Icelandic, subtitled. This was a bold call for a game with no marketing budget, and it pays off enormously. There is no localized-English safety net, no attempt to make the mythology palatable. The result is that Jotun sounds ancient in a way almost no game about Vikings manages. Thora’s backstory arrives in fragments — her family, her voyage, her stupid, undignified drowning — and the emotional arc lands because it is understated. Nobody explains the themes to you.

Valhalla Mode

The boss-rush addition is the best value in this package and the clearest signal of what the game should have been. Stripped of the walking, Jotun becomes a tight, brutal gauntlet where the combat’s deliberateness reads as design rather than limitation. Harder jotun, no filler, no rune hunting. If the campaign feels like it never quite gets going, this is where it does.

The art is the product. Every frame is hand-drawn, and the animation quality is closer to a Cartoon Saloon film than to a 2015 indie. The jotun in particular are staggering — not because they’re detailed, but because of scale discipline. Thunder Lotus understood that a giant is only giant if you can see the whole thing and yourself at once, so the camera pulls back until Thora is nearly illegible. That’s a real trade: readability sacrificed for spectacle, and it is easy to lose track of your own character during a chaotic phase. It is a trade most developers wouldn’t have had the nerve to make, but the cost is real.

Max LL’s score deserves specific credit for being composed scene by scene rather than zone-looped. Music swells for a boss entrance and then genuinely stops, leaving wind and footsteps. That silence does more atmospheric work than another orchestral cue would have.

The UI is minimal to the point of austerity — a health bar, a god-power wheel, little else. It fits, though the rune-tracking is vaguer than it needs to be, which is a direct contributor to the backtracking frustration. A slightly more informative map would have cost the game nothing aesthetically and saved players a real amount of aimless wandering.

Technically, a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the modest requirements are a genuine plus.

Steam is the definitive version and the scores reflect it — a 79 on Metacritic. A controller is the right call regardless of platform; the axe’s weight is designed around analog movement, and keyboard input flattens it. The advantage here is display: the jotun are drawn for a big panel, and a large monitor or a living-room TV via Big Picture is where that scale actually registers. Mouse-and-keyboard is supported but is the wrong tool for this particular job.

Nintendo Switch is the more interesting case and the weaker one. The handheld screen is the culprit. A game whose central visual argument is this thing is enormous and you are not loses real power at handheld size, where the boss and your character compress into the same visual weight class. Docked, the gap closes almost entirely. Portability cuts both ways too: a short, atmosphere-first game suits a commute, but the long silent walks that read as meditative on a couch are built to read as dead time on a train. If you have both options, Steam is the one.

Jotun is a short argument that a game can be worth playing for its craft alone, and it does not quite win that argument. The jotun fights are among the most memorable boss encounters of the indie era, the Icelandic narration gives the whole thing a gravity that no English VO could have bought, and the animation still looks better a decade on than most games released this year.

But craft isn’t a substitute for design, and Thunder Lotus asks you to walk through a lot of beautiful nothing to reach the good parts. The combat that feels weighty and considered at the first boss is thin and repetitive by the fifth. The exploration levels are scenery, not systems. Those aren’t nitpicks — they’re the reason this game sits at a respectful 79 instead of the mid-80s where its art belongs.

We rate it Mixed: a gorgeous, flawed curio that only art-first players should pay full price for. Play it on a large screen, finish it in a couple of nights, and then run Valhalla Mode to see the game Thunder Lotus almost made. What you’ll remember is the giants. That’s not nothing — and given how few games leave you with any image at all, it might be more than most.