

The dungeons you'll skulk through continue to present new challenges and new enemies the lower you go, and while the pure act of digging can get a little grindy at times, there's a wonderful splendor to dipping your toes into an uncharted grotto, thousands of miles below sea level, that will never get old.


Unlike Minecraft, Terraria is very much focused on combat, moreso than building. You'll construct layered workstations to forge your harvest into better weapons and gear, you'll build more houses that will attract new NPCs, who will sell you exotic items or offer fresh haircuts, you'll eventually no longer fear the night, and will cut through zombies like cotton candy. You'll mine, and chop, and kill enterprising bad guys, and return home with iron, and tin, and buckets of loot sourced from benevolent wooden chests. You trot across the earth's crust to find some entry points into the vast network of underground caverns below your feet. Once you have a place to keep you safe at night, the world is pretty much your oyster. There's a day/night cycle, which means you'll immediately be under siege by zombies and floating eyeballs as soon as the sun goes down, so your first order of business is to put your starting set of copper harvesting tools to work and construct a house (complete with a table, chair, and light source). You create a character, and enter a randomly-generated world (albeit one that's guaranteed to have a few core recurring elements). Terraria's core structure remains pretty much the same as it was during its initial unveiling. if you're an idiot like me, you might not notice the underground reservoir of water above the roof until you inadvertently jam your pickaxe through the last brick keeping it at bay. However, I managed to find something even scarier. There wasn't a scripted boss encounter or an interrupting dirge of story exposition lying in wait for any adventurer who breached the walls. What could possibly go wrong?Īs it turns out, nothing was going to go wrong.

Sure it was covered in musty spiderwebs, and broken furniture, but there was a golden chest on the top floor and a loom I was excited to take back to my modest township on the bottom. To my left I found a twisted bit of minecart rail, populated exclusively by a nest of extremely territorial face-eating bugs that seemed eager to prove that my loose assemblage of iron-hewed armaments weren't cutting the mustard anymore. I was deep underground, far from home, looting one of the many abandoned homesteads left to be discovered in Terraria's ever-generous bounty of nooks, crannies, alcoves, and recesses.
