For this week’s blog, I’m going to mix it up a little bit and talk about a game that is much less popular than Super Smash Brothers or Pokemon. This week’s game is called Terraria.
For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Terraria is a two-dimensional, open-world survival-based adventure game. To put it in far simpler terms than it deserves, it can be loosely thought of as a 2D Minecraft; you control a single blocky character and run around a blocky world collecting resources and exploring. As an open-world game, there are no defined objectives, goals, or levels. You start the game in the middle of nowhere with a sword, an axe, and a pickaxe, and from there, you’re expected to figure the rest out. One of my favorite things about the game is how you can so exponentially improve your character to become more powerful. At the start, where you have a weak sword and venture down beneath the ground to find a few pieces of iron, and any approaching enemy is cause for fear and tension. But then, all of a sudden, you are building wings and magical battleaxes enchanted with fire for yourself, laughing as you one-shot the enemies that used to prompt a 1-minute battle. What impresses me most about the game is that though it appears to be so simple at the start, the entire game can only be accessed after putting in 20 or more hours into it. There is far more to the game than what initially meets the eye, and it creates a constant need to continue playing and exploring.
What I love about this style of game is how free the player is to create his or her own experience. There are no obvious hallways with glowing beacons for you to follow and no maps in the corner of your screen telling you where you have to go to advance the story. Instead, you are the master of your environment and your fate, and it’s up to you to survive. However, this “sandbox” style of game creates an interesting paradox. While the player is encouraged to explore by themselves, there is only so much that you can figure out by yourself. For example, in Terraria, every world spawns with a certain number of islands floating in the sky. These islands contain some of the best items in the game, and a certain enemy inhabits the islands that is the only source for a specific building resource needed for higher-level items. While finding things like this in the game is incredibly fun and rewarding, it is also very unlikely. It would take a huge number of coincidences to actually stumble across one and then know what to do once you got there. Because of this, many players take to the internet in order to find these secrets for themselves while they’re playing the game. This research opens up that portion of the game, but it also takes away the experience of self-exploration that the game is designed around. With every open-world game, it’s up to the player to decide how much exploration they want to do for themselves and how much they simply want to look at the Wiki to find out anything that they want.
Either way, though, Terraria is just good, relaxing fun, and it’s even better when you play it with a friend. It turns the game from a lonely foray into a hostile environment into a dynamic, cooperative adventure, requiring teammates to share resources, help each other kill enemies, and explore various environments together. One of my good friends and I got very hooked on the game, and I spent far more time on it than I ever intended, but I don’t feel like it was time wasted. To me, Terraria is everything that a game should be. It has fun game mechanics, opportunities for the player to improve their character and their skill at the game, an open-world style, and it’s something that I can play for either 10 minutes or 4 hours at a time. While it may not have had a very significant impact on me personally in the long run, it still ranks as one of the best games that I’ve ever played and I’m very glad that I gave it a try.