Conor Kearney, the video game cartographer who walks through enormous open-world games in real time, took a bit of a break since crossing Far Cry 5’s Hope County, Montana, back in 2018. He came back at the end of March for a special engagement with Cyberpunk 2077, though — walking time: 50 minutes — and this week, he took on the Viking survival epic Valheim.
Total time to traverse Valheim’s map? A jotunn-tastic 4 hours, 15 minutes, good for fifth among the 80 games Kearney has walked. That puts Valheim in the company of Ghost Recon Wildlands (4 hours, 10 minutes) and Just Cause 2 (4 hours, 54 minutes), but still well short of heavyweight champ No Man’s Sky (where half a planet took 12 hours) or the more terrestrial Just Cause 3.
According to fans on Reddit, Valheim’s map (a flat circle with a 10-kilometer radius) measures about 314 square kilometers — almost 16 times larger than The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. For the record, Kearney’s walk across Skyrim — his fifth tour of duty — took 31 minutes, 40 seconds in real time. That’s about one-eighth of the travel time in Valheim, but of course, things like walking pace (typically double-time in a lot of games), terrain, obstacles, and wandering monsters can lengthen or shorten a march.
“This game is a lot of fun,” Kearney said of Valheim in his YouTube comments, “I tried my best to do it without God mode, but Valhalla’s occupants brutally bashed my head in multiple times.” That’ll set you back a bit, too! So would sailing off the edge of the world, a hazard Valheim navigators must be mindful of if you’re looking for Haldor.
