Terraria is fantastic, but it's designed by and for crazy people.
By Dalai 10 Comments
This past week was one of the least productive weeks I've had in a while and I need a scapegoat. So I blame Steam and you, the general public, for making me buy Terraria. Granted, nobody actually forced me into buying it or personally recommended it to me, but as I saw Terraria take up all the time of my Steam friends (you know who you are) the purchase and eventual playing of said game was inevitable. But don't blame yourselves entirely for this sudden lapse in judgment. Terraria itself did a great job tugging at my 16-bit retro heartstrings with its lovely SNES-era looks... dashing, good looks for sure. Also my hidden curiosity with Minecraft (a game that's not Terraria officially) led me to try it out even though my experience with Minecraft can be summed up as so... walking around for a minute then digging as far down as the browser version would let me. So no real experience. Terraria, however, I gathered dirt, built a nice house in the woods for me and my gay lover, Guide, and made a lovely watch so I always know what time it is. I have a cheap watch so it only tells me when it's clobbering time or time for me to fly.
And now I'm at a point where I'm looking at the Terraria Wiki to decipher different formulas for crafting and other gameplay hints they don't really tell you about in the game directly. Is this how Minecraft works except with more imagination? I have yet to build a giant penis house made of wood or recreate World 1-1, but I do have a complex system of caves underground that seemingly go fucking nowhere. And I fear there's literally no end since I barely touched the outer, more corrupted areas of this hellish world. But like any crazy person, I must continue on in search for more ore so I can get a fancy chandelier and more sand for glass that I can use to make bottles so I can turn my mushrooms into some kind of magical mushroom drink.
To be serious for one second, Terraria is not a game that you can't fiddle around with for a brief period and see everything the game has to offer. The reason I find Terraria appealing is its weird sense of wonder, flexibility, and exploration combined with enough tools to create a 2D mansion of your dreams. It might share it's core gameplay with Minecraft, but they added a Metroidvania (Minetroidvania?) element to it by stripping out a dimension and adding plenty of combat (which can be annoying or satisfying depending on the situation.) Terraria is much like Minecraft in that it's something you can't put down in 15 minutes and call it quits for the day... it's an ongoing construction project, but with skeletons and flying eyes. There appears to be no wrong way of playing Terraria since it's fairly simple to learn and it lets your imagination run wild if you so choose. In conclusion, anybody who is remotely interested in Terraria and loves building shit should pick the game up, but a word of caution. You might be declared unfit for society once you start digging deeper into the game's underworld. You may take a turn for the worse and just write incoherent blogs about retro indie games and posting links to cats that look like Pop Tarts.
