In pure survival mode, the game for me, wasn't that difficult. Some bits were tedious, like dying far away and trying to retrieve my body in a dangerous place, but other than that, it's alright. In the beginning, falling trees and rolling trees might be your number one enemy. ^_^ Well, it was for me and many others in the beginning.

You can take as long as you want to progress, but of course, progressing with boss kills allow you to open up to new tech. However, the devs made it so players can access the a little of the next tier-stuff by doing something alternative. Eg: before I could get bronze to chop down birch trees for fine wood, I could still damage birch trees with other trees falling/rolling over them until they break apart and collect the fine wood, to make fine wood bow, etc. Another example is getting a sledgehammer to smash mountain tops to find silver ore before killing Bonemass which gives you a wishbone to find buried treasure and hidden silver veins.

However, if you like to free-form build, I would suggest using Creative Mode and spawn a bunch of high stamina foods. That way, you can use Creative to build your dream base, then turn it off, to explore the other parts of the game and the world.

If you don't look problems up on the web until you're stumped, Valheim can be an Icelandic saga. People who have fast internet connections can race through it and kill all the bosses in less than a hundred hours, but if you play the game naively, the way any game is meant to be played, you will die a few times and it will take a couple hundred hours depending on your general gaming experience.

Unless you get distracted by building elaborate bases. Then it will take longer. Building fancy bases is a good way to recover skill points after dying, since the practice mobs are unrelenting.

I have 800 hours in my current game, started afresh when H&H was released. I have just reached the Iron age. The third boss is a long sail east, but I'm not worried about him yet.

I found the Maypole. So my headquarters must be moved for the sake of one extra resting buff, just as I happen to be able to build with stone and iron. That's going to take a hundred hours or so that won't move me one inch closer to Bonemass.

If you can resist that sort of temptation, you will finish your first game quicker than me, but you won't have as much fun.

The combat is not hard unless you wander into a biome you're not ready for, though Valheim is an RNG game, and sometimes you get mobbed by everything but Pacman. From the start, the game forces you to make forays into the next level biome, until you can steal enough stuff to make the weapons and armor and food you need to be going there in the first place.

Valheim is a great game, and it's getting better all the time. Some people think it is too grindy, or too this or too that, but the cure is in the devcommands and mods. You can shape Valheim to suit your style. Come for the scenery. Stay for the many colorful ways to die.

PvE pretty much is the game. PvP is in there but it is a tucked away feature that you probably won't see a lot of use from as all players have it deactivated by default. And due to the way the game is structured you will probably not spend a lot of time playing in the company of total strangers.

But all around the difficulty is quite low unless you go to a biome before you are meant to, in which case you may just get one-shotted. But fortunately most enemies are pretty bad at navigating the procedurally generated terrain and you will probably be cheesing a lot of enemies almost on accident.

The pace is really slow though, especially if you are playing alone. You will spend a lot of time facing tasks that don't pose a challenge but nonetheless require a big investment in time to actually do. Survival games in a nutshell.

Making a little house for yourself doesn't take much time though and it's nice to see it grow as you get better with the building mechanics. It just needs some more parts.

Pretty easy game if you are smart about things and don’t venture too far ahead of your current progression level. Early game is a bit of a slog but I’d say the grind becomes tolerable once you hit the swamps. Building bases can take a variable amount of hours depending on the scale, shacks to store materials and get a forge/workbench down takes no more than an hour, but a more sophisticated castle can take multiple hours.

In terms of total playtime, it’s toward the upper end, but I disagree with the other posters that it takes 100+ hours to beat the game. If you focus on progression and beating bosses you can beat the game in 60-80 hours. I beat it in 88 hours and I built a large castle in the mountains and a large farmhouse in the plains before finishing the game, which wasn’t necessary to kill the bosses. I would not consider leisure base building in the length of the game, so 100+ hr is a pretty extreme overestimate.