Terraria

I’m going to start blogging about indie games and lesser known games that I’ve found hopefully to inspire some people to check them out and maybe breaking that gaming funk a few of us seem to be in. I’m not sure how often I’ll put up a suggestions (about once a week seems to make sense to me – give you a chance to check out the suggested game.

Terraria (PC – coming to XBOX and PS3 in the next few months apparently).

Let's start off with something kind of lite and charming.  Despite being lite and charming Terraria still has a great deal of depth and you'll have to be resourcful to figure it all out and you will be challenged along the way :) 

When I first saw Terraria I didn’t pay much attention to it….I was kind of like “meh….it looks somewhat charming but it kind of comes off as a 2D Minecraft and I’m not really that big on 3D Minecraft so why the fuck would I want to play a 2D version?”  Then a few months later I got it as part of a Steam Sale (I think I got it for $2.49 down from the regular price of $9.99….it seems to go on sale quite frequently usually at about $4.99).  Small download, minimal system requirements so I figured why not.

After about 2 hours I was fully hooked on the game.  Here’s what the game offers you the player:

Charming graphic style – it’s like a stylized, colorful 8 bit style graphics look.   It is very colorful and the colors kind of dance around.  It’s really a beautiful game.

Music – again the music is kind of the old school computer game music but to 10^th degree.  It’s very well done and it does a good job shifting the mood as things become more intense and dark.

Minecraft Elements – Well it is kind of Minecrafty J the world is randomly generated, you can explore left/right/up/down for hours, you can dig and dig and dig discovering new ores and other hidden treasures (and monsters!), you can build structures and you can craft items. 

Moving away from Minecraft - All of that is very Minecraftian (did I just make up a word).  Where Terraria deviates from Minecraft is that it is more of a “game” than Minecraft in the traditional sense.  You can do all that stuff for hours on end and play it like a sandbox / lego game and be quite content.  But it has these other elements…..like if you start building structures meeting certain criteria then NPCs will appear….a Nurse….a Merchant….a Demolitionist….and more.  You start build this little town of RPG style NPCs that can help you out.   In addition to the NPCs there is world corruption – dark parts of the map where evil lurks….eventually the evil comes for you.  At the beginning of the game when it becomes night the evil will come for you (similar to MC in that way again) but it starts to ramp up after a while you’ll be fighting boss characters (who will come under certain conditions – one of the conditions being that you can summon them!).  Through the acquisition of NPC’s and the summoning of Boss characters you get a game with an RPG like progression.   There isn’t really a story / lore – you are kind of making it as you go.

Terraria takes the building, crafting, exploring to next level by adding RPG sytle NPCs, more armor / weapons / upgrades, Boss fights, platforming gameplay, dungeons etc.  Terraria is a fantastic game and well worth the money.  It probably doesn’t have the longevity of Minecraft.  You can play Minecraft forever because the building mechanics in the game are so deep – it really is infinite in possibility.  But you can expect to get 20 or 30+ hours of fun out of Terraria and it is just a fun world to exist in.  You’ll find your asking friends or checking out the wiki on how to unlock the next great thing or make the next great weapon or piece of equipment.  Also it has multiplayer so you can hop in with some buddies and make a night of it.  I was running a server for a while and it was great to hop on and see what people where doing in the hours when I wasn’t there – then we’d get together and summon a big bad boss and co-op it – great fun.  Also Terraria allows you to build up your character and all his/her equipment etc. and then you can take the character into new maps you create or other online servers other people have created.

Terraria - $9.99 on steam – goes on sale quite often and just a stellar game.   The creators of Terraria are working on a game called Starbound right now and it should be out in the next few months as well.  So this might be a nice transition for you.

Markus Persson@notch

If Terraria is our competition, I'm damned proud to compete against it. It's one seriously awesome game. *takes notes of things to copy*