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But not every Viking is well-suited for every task. Your villagers have traits that might make them better suited for farming during the day rather than manning a watch tower at night. It’s your job to manage them and make sure each is happy with their occupation, or at least as happy as someone can be when they spend all their time cracking boulders and hauling logs.

Once you’ve recruited enough loyal Vikings you can even set up production chains, as I did when I played a preview build of Aska last month. I hated crafting rope because collecting the resources needed for it was time consuming, so I set up a crafting station, assigned one of my Vikes to it, and picked the rope recipe from the menu. From then on, my rope problem was handled.

What do you do while your villagers are doing all the gathering, harvesting, and crafting? Explore the world, fight weird monsters, discover ruins, and try not to die. If you do perish in combat, your villagers can serve one additional purpose:you can consume their soulsto bring you back to life at full strength. It felt a little grim to banish one of my Vikings to eternal darkness just because I picked a fight with an angry skeleton warrior and lost, but hey, my villagers knew the risks of signing up with me. (Note: I have no evidence that my villagers knew the risks of signing up with me.)

If you want to build and manage your own Viking village, and occasionally suck the soul from an innocent follower, there’s not much longer to wait. Aska releases on June 20.

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