The mead’s gone warm, three Vikings are screaming about their order, the kitchen’s on fire, and a raiding party has just kicked the door in. They don’t want food. They want to fight you. Your only weapon is a frying pan.
Your best friend is across the room, flailing because they got stunned and are now wobbling helplessly until someone runs over and slaps them out of it. This is Meadgard, and I cannot wait to lose my evenings to it.
It’s the co-op game I’ve been waiting for someone to make: the cozy, chaotic, scream-at-your-friends kind — the kind that ruins sleep schedules and friendships. And the team building it has a pitch they clearly love: “If Dave the Diver, Stardew Valley, and Overcooked had a baby. It would be Meadgard,” CEO Linda Davidsson told me, rattling off three of the most notorious time-sinks in gaming as though that were a reasonable thing to fuse into one game.
Are those her favorites? I asked. “Yes, I am. I would say in particular Stardew Valley and Dave the Diver.”
Beer, And Plunder, And One Very Good Award
But Meadgard didn’t start as Meadgard. It started as a student project called Beer and Plunder, dreamed up six years ago when Davidsson moved to Gothenburg for a game art program. The assignment was to build something in 3D with classmates, and her process for landing on an idea was gloriously simple. She went through games she adored and asked, what if this, but Viking?
“I was playing Valheim at the time. So I couldn’t think of anything else but Vikings. And eventually, I came to Overcooked. And I was like, okay, but what if we make Overcooked, but it’s Vikings? And maybe it’s violent. And then beer, like, yes, of course.”
And then it won. Best Design at the Sweden Game Awards, 2021, which is the kind of thing that happens to roughly no student projects, and which Davidsson absolutely did not see coming. “I think at the time it was just a fun experience,” she said, “but it was definitely what kick-started the journey for me to create Oddiko.”
Then came the moment every origin story seems to require: a publisher came knocking. A Chinese one, by her account, and the meeting was less a fork in the road than a delightfully baffling afternoon. They were students, not a company, and nobody was quite sure what was happening. It went nowhere, but it planted something. “I think I saw an opportunity here for creative freedom, a little bit of independence.” So she rounded up a few former teammates, founded Oddiko, and went for it.
The name had to change eventually, and the reason is more boring than you’d hope, which is exactly why I love it. “Basically, simply because we felt like it could be problematic to have beer in the title,” she said. Age ratings, you see. Different countries, different rules, and a brand-new developer fastidiously trying to dodge every bit of paperwork she can.
“Anywhere we can make it simple, we’re trying to do it simple.” The fix was a pun she fell head over heels for, mead poured neatly into Midgard. “I personally just loved that twist on the name. So we went with that instead.”
Hunt By Day, Panic By Night
The loop is a beauty. Meadgard runs on a day-night rhythm that quietly turns two different games into one shift. By day, you pile into a longship and sail off to an island to hunt, forage, and brawl for ingredients. By night, you drag your haul home, fling open the tavern doors, and try to feed a room of increasingly fraught Vikings before they start tearing the place apart.
Davidsson splits it into three parts. The tavern came first and is still the heart of it, now with a layer of cosmetic customization on top so you can make your alehouse yours. Wrapped around it is a village of shopkeepers, each with their own personality and their own quests, which is where the Stardew Valley fairy dust settles.
And past the village sits the exploration layer, the bit that gave them the biggest headache. They tried a room-to-room setup at first, the sort you get descending into the mines in Stardew, and it just refused to click. “It just felt like it didn’t vibe,” she said.
What clicked instead was an open island, deliberately not enormous, hand-built so every nook feels deliberate. “It’s not like Breath of the Wild,” she’s quick to clarify. It’s a world with edges, and the edges are sort of the whole point.
Out there, combat is the main event. You fight creatures for ingredients, pick berries and mushrooms, dig up the odd treasure. The bestiary skews charmingly unhinged, including a swarm of little biters that come straight for you. As for the weaponry, well, I’ll just say the star of the trailer is a frying pan, and Davidsson is fully committed to the bit. Do you ever get actual weapons, I asked. “There is always going to be cooking ware,” she said. Cooking ware, all the way down.
Everything is Going to Go Sh*t (This is a Feature)
The thing she keeps circling back to is that Meadgard is engineered to fall apart. “The experience of the game is that things are going to go sh*t,” she said. “No matter what you do, it’s kind of going to go sh*t at some point.” There are raid events where a pack of Vikings storms in wanting nothing but a scrap, and no amount of fussing over their order will settle them. “I can’t give them food or mead. No, nothing. Like they want to fight.”
Which is the whole joy of it in co-op. Stations run faster when two people tag-team them, so a grill you work alone is slow and tedious, and a grill you work with a mate is a tiny, frantic triumph.
There’s an emote wheel for the quiet moments. And there’s the bit I’m obsessed with: get stunned, and you wobble there uselessly until a teammate sprints over and, in Linda’s own words, “basically bitch slaps you” back to life.
Gods Behaving Badly
The other thing giving Meadgard its flavour is the mythology, and it’s not just set dressing. Figures from the Norse pantheon turn up at your tavern, set you trials, and dish out blessings or punishments depending on how the night goes.
Davidsson lights up, imagining a bombastic Thor who barges in “all over the top and wanting you to drink with him.”
She’s done the homework, too. She’s spent a long time reading actual Norse myth, and her verdict is affectionate and blunt: “They’re super weird, like extremely weird.” Which turns out to be the perfect raw material for quests and characters.
The plan isn’t to turn the game into a lecture, though. She wants the lore to reward the curious without lecturing everyone else, so the mythology nerd in your friend group gets the deep cuts while everyone else just enjoys the chaos. The world is built on Norse myth, she’s careful to note, with a generous layer of fantasy painted on top.
The Vikings Funding The Vikings
For ages, the game wasn’t the hard part, but the money was. “I would say the first two years were really rough,” Davidsson said of the long, grinding stretch of chasing funding that every indie has to survive. “You feel a lot of responsibility and obligation to your team to make it work. And when you are struggling to make it work, it becomes really stressful.”
That chapter’s closed now, as Oddiko runs on eight people in-house plus a gaggle of interns, and the studio recently landed backing from the founders of Arrowhead Game Studios, the lot behind Helldivers 2, via their holding company Shpel AB. Which, ker-ching, but also: how perfect. The people behind one of the most joyfully chaotic co-op games in years are now bankrolling a tiny Swedish team’s joyfully chaotic co-op game.
Meadgard is aiming for a 2026 release, with a shiny new demo dropping in August. The old Beer and Plunder demo has been pulled on purpose, since it’s a game that doesn’t really exist anymore. Davidsson’s also throwing open summer playtests through the studio’s Discord, which is the most Oddiko thing I can imagine: come help us break the tavern, and tell us exactly what broke.
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