By Aimee Rogers 
Plenty of games borrow from Norse mythology, but few build their core mechanics around it.
The indie team behind the Norse bullet heaven, Valkyrie Rising: Hordes of Ragnarök, have spent 2.5 years building a game where you don’t just fight in Viking aesthetics, you fight like Viking mythology demands.
Your protagonist is Thrud, Thor’s daughter and a Valkyrie-adjacent warrior caught in the chaos of Ragnarök.
Instead of relegating the gods to a cosmetic progression system, the developers made each deity the structural foundation of distinct playstyles. Thor handles thunder and force, Skadi brings ice and precision, and Odin trades knowledge for hidden power. You get the idea. For the full release, they’re expanding to seven gods total, each with nine dedicated skills arranged in their own branching trees.
The team’s merging Thrud with Valkyrie mythology wasn’t lazy syncretism either. They actively chose to collapse those identities into something new because they weren’t certain which was canonical anyway.
Valkyrie Rising launches during Steam’s Bullet Fest this week.
Steven Andrew