Drunken Viking

Overview

Every step you take is being recorded, because at the end of the night the whole rampage has to play itself back in reverse. Drunken Viking is a tile-based puzzle written in JavaScript with the Phaser engine by developer cxong for Mini LD 53, a 2014 Ludum Dare mini-jam, and it is built on one time-manipulation hook: you steer a hungover Norseman through his own wrecked home, and the moment he stumbles out the front gate, an Instant Replay rewinds the entire recorded path, un-smashing every broken chair and un-fetching every retrieved shirt as he retraces his stagger back to bed. The drunkenness is cosmetic, not mechanical — random hiccup and groan speech bubbles drift off him, and the odd pool of vomit waits to be mopped up — while the actual movement is deterministic grid-stepping that you fully control. What you choose to smash and what you choose to recover is tallied on an end-of-day scorecard, and the campaign runs across seven Old-Norse-named day-levels that frame a solid week of mead-fuelled mornings. It is a short, story-shaped curio for anyone who enjoys watching a mess un-make itself.

How to Play

Move with the four Arrow keys, one tile at a time; hold a direction and the Viking keeps stepping at a steady auto-repeat clip. There is no jump and no attack button — walking onto a breakable object smashes it, and walking over your scattered gear picks it up and puts it back on him. The goal of each day is simply to reach the front gate and step off the map, which fires the end-of-day scorecard showing Clothes and Destruction percentages, and then the Instant Replay. Press R at any moment to reset the current day, wiping the recorded path and dropping the Viking back in bed. During the replay itself, pressing any direction key cancels it and skips ahead to the next morning.

Tips & Strategy

Because the replay must walk your exact path in reverse, plan the route before you start stepping — a clean out-and-back line retraces neatly, while a route that doubles through narrow doorways leaves you watching a long, awkward rewind. Sweep the rooms systematically instead of darting around, since the Clothes percentage only credits gear you actually walked over, not the pieces you left behind on the floor. Wall-mounted objects break only when you approach from directly below, so if a row of shelves refuses to smash you are almost certainly pushing at it from the wrong side. Treat repeated thuds into walls as a warning: after several shoves the game itself flashes a Press R to reset hint, and resetting is genuinely faster than clawing out of a corner you walked yourself into. Let the replay run to the end on the early days so the house layout sinks in, then skip it with a key-press once a level feels familiar.