Among the Trolls is a first-person survival adventure set deep in a Finnish wilderness shaped by folklore. You play as Anna, an American forest ranger who travels to a remote island to find her missing grandfather, Jaakko, and her brother, Jonas. Early play shows a game that mixes resource gathering, hand-built crafting, hunting, and combat against supernatural creatures drawn from the Kalevala myths.
Quick answer: It is a narrative survival game where Anna explores a folklore island, crafts tools by hand, hunts and forages to stay alive, and fights wooden, root-woven monsters while uncovering her family’s past.
The premise and the talking crow
Anna arrives after a stormy boat journey and washes ashore near her grandfather’s cabin. Inside, family portraits of Anna, Jonas, and Jaakko set the tone, along with a locked chest left by her grandmother. The opening cutscene also hints at danger on the water, with a large lake creature attacking the boat.
A talking crow perched outside the cabin becomes your guide. It explains Jaakko’s disappearance, points you to the tools and wisdom he left behind in a journal and backpack, and doubts you will last against the forest until you prove otherwise. Throughout play, the crow feeds you lore and nudges you toward the next objective, such as reaching the Great Tree to pick up Jaakko’s trail.
Crafting on a physical mat
Crafting happens on a leather mat where you place materials and tools by hand and combine them, following recipes recorded in the journal rather than picking from a menu. A knife is needed for most early recipes. The system makes building feel deliberate, since you have to carry the right parts to the mat before anything can be made.
Several of the core recipes seen in early play are built from forest materials:
| Item | Materials needed |
|---|---|
| Stick Rope | Woodsticks and a Knife |
| Grandpa’s Bow | Bow Handle, Woodstick, Stick Rope, Knife |
| Grandpa’s Axe | Axe Head, Hardwood, Knife |
| Wooden Arrows | Woodstick, Long Feathers, Knife (makes 3) |
| Campfire | 6 Large Stones, 4 Small Stones, Wood Chunks |
| Torch | Woodstick, Stick Rope, Pine Cone, Resin |
| Shelter | 9 Woodsticks, 1 Stick Rope |
Tools and weapons wear down. Wooden sticks snap when chopping with the axe, and bow strings break during combat, so you will re-craft gear regularly from gathered parts.
Survival: hunting, foraging, and cooking
Staying alive means tracking food and water alongside health and stamina, all shown on the bottom-right of the screen. Deer are a primary food source, and the journal warns that they are skittish and quick to flee, favoring a quiet, stealthy approach with ranged attacks. Once a deer is down, you harvest bone and raw steak from the carcass.
Foraging fills the gaps between hunts. Honeycomb from broken hives, mushrooms, raspberries, and cloudberries all turn up along the trails, and a water canteen keeps thirst in check on longer trips. Raw food is cooked at the campfire, where raw steak and mushrooms are placed on the mat to be prepared into meals.
Combat against wooden monsters and rifts
The main threats are wooden, root-woven humanoid creatures, draugr-like warriors tied to the forest’s corruption. You fight them with Grandpa’s Bow and Grandpa’s Axe, trading arrow shots from cover against skeleton archers and switching to melee when enemies close in. Headshots deal noticeably more damage, which matters when arrows run low and you are scavenging the ground for more.
The corruption itself appears as a Rift Nest, a pulsing fleshy red mound surrounded by twisted roots. You close it by interacting with it directly. Death is part of the loop as well, whether from an ambush outside the cabin or a fall off a cliff edge, and a grim ending screen tallies your run with survival time, distance traveled, enemies defeated, journal pages unlocked, chests opened, and items crafted before loading you back in.
The island map with no GPS
To find your way, consult a paper map of the island and the compass band at the screen’s top, which marks the cardinal directions. With neither a player marker nor an automatic waypoint, you’ll need to navigate using landmarks: a stone fox shrine, a huge tree at the island’s center, and carved stone faces along the beaches. Named regions on the island include Vahdinsaari and Vaipusaari.
Landmarks also hold rewards. Bronze chests tucked around shrines, ruins, and gardens hold Copper Leaves, the currency sought by Little Penny Man, a gnome merchant found at the roots of the Great Tree who asks whether you have any copper leaves to trade.
Stone portals, dungeons, and the Sampo
Carved circular stone portals open into underground dungeons once you hold a matching illuminated portal page and Anna’s rune bracelet. The first of these, The First Passage, leads through corridors lined with giant guardian statues into a space called The Hall of the Threshold, where a lore document describes a three-fingered hand test and the Void realm.
Dungeons mix combat with light puzzle-solving. You smash wooden barricades and crates with the axe, light wall braziers with a torch to see in dark tunnels, cross wooden scaffolding, and open rare chests that hold progression recipes. Those chests are where the Torch, Shelter, and Bridge instructions come from, along with a Sampo Fragment tied to the game’s deeper mythology. One trapped, talking skeleton even asks about Anna’s brother, Jonas.
Progress carries back to the surface. After clearing The First Passage, Anna steps out to find the cabin smashed apart by the forest’s monsters, then builds a shelter and heads to the coast to construct a bridge toward a neighboring island, felling timber, including a glowing rune-inscribed tree, to lay the bridge head and body across the water.
Väki, Lykky, and Kalevala roots
The game leans on two Finnish folklore ideas. Väki is a spiritual force tied to natural places and objects, while Lykky is luck. The pitch is to balance the two to survive, with your actions and your relationship to the forest influencing how things go. The creatures, portals, and the Sampo all draw from the Kalevala, framing the wilderness as something to understand rather than simply strip for resources.
Where to follow Among the Trolls
Among the Trolls is developed by Avantgarden and published by 505 Games. You can add it to your library wishlist through its Steam page. The trailer below gives a sense of the island’s look and its blend of nature and the supernatural.
What the early play makes clear is the shape of the loop: gather and craft by hand, read the journal and the crow’s hints, survive the weather and the wooden creatures, and push through stone portals toward the truth about Jaakko and Jonas. The mystery of the family is the thread pulling you deeper into a forest that keeps proving it is not empty.
