The Viking the Gods Forgot

Oddmar isn’t good enough for Valhalla. His village doesn’t respect him. He’s clumsy, perpetually overlooked, and the Norse gods have registered his existence approximately never. Then a mushroom spirit offers him a deal, and suddenly the assessment is open for revision.

That’s the premise of Oddmar, a mobile platformer that opens quietly and then turns into exactly the kind of game you forget you’re playing on a phone. It’s clearly made by people who grew up on the SNES—Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, Earthworm Jim, that entire generation of 16-bit platformers that had a specific generosity to them: handmade abundance in the level design, color palettes that committed fully, a willingness to spend ten seconds on a joke that maybe a hundred kids would catch. Most games that invoke that era get the difficulty right and the soul wrong. Oddmar doesn’t do that.

The world moves from glowing Nordic forests into mushroom fever-dream landscapes and beyond. There’s a flying squirrel you can ride. You fight trolls, collect sheep, find hidden treasures, and the level design has the patience to teach you its own rules before complicating them—a basic thing that a surprising number of games still get wrong. The animation has weight. The environments feel inhabited. It sits comfortably alongside the modern indie platformers it clearly learned from: Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, Fez—games that understood atmosphere isn’t decoration, it’s structure.

Oddmar is out now for iPhone and iPad. I usually play something for a week and forget it exists. I have a feeling this one might last longer.