LogFAQs > #932353671

#74





Years of release: Oh dear god. Ummm... 2011-2019 (everything)
Beaten?: More or less

I'll level with you, I've never played Minecraft. I think that, had I been younger, or in a different place in my life, I would have absolutely loved the hell out of Minecraft. Maybe I still would if I tried to play it now, and my reasons for avoiding it are probably petty as fuck. It's just become such a huge cultural institution that I'm not a part of that's populated largely by people younger than me that I think it's gotten kind of hard to get into and feel like I can take ownership of it. But hey there's always Terraria.

Terraria seems like it's blown up into a really big deal thing too, but unlike Minecraft I HAVE played this, quite a bit of it actually, and it is sort of like the experience I might imagine myself enjoying with Minecraft, if I played Minecraft. I think it's like Minecraft anyway? It sure seems like it's like Minecraft. The whole world is made up of building blocks that you can take apart and put back together wherever you want, and there ARE objectives you can pursue in order to complete the game but you can also kind of do whatever and fuck around at your leisure. It's just all in 2D instead of 3D.

I played Terraria co-op with a friend for a good 70 hours or so. What I love about Terraria is the feeling of completely open-ended adventure. Not only are there no boundaries, but the very concept of having an adventure feels like something you create yourself, in a good way. As I was playing, I allowed myself to sort of invent a game-within-a-game that I imagined I was playing, as if I were playing a procedurally-generated Zelda game; I imagined that each new cave, really just a random hole in the ground that had a lot of the blocks carved out of it already, was really a new, big, scary dungeon that I had to go into; I imagined that as I was carving blocks out of the tunnels and fighting off enemies, that I was sort of carving my own path of adventure through the game's world, and it opened up this true sense of awe-inspiring discovery that I haven't gotten out of a lot of games in quite the same way, even though I was making up a lot of the context of my 'adventure' myself.

At the same time, there is quite a lot of content here - lots of stuff to craft and make, lots of areas to explore, lots of quite real bosses to fight that you actually need to be prepared and well-equipped for. Really nice co-op game, too, since a lot of the time I would feel like just fucking off while my friend did some actual work building stuff or gathering materials or whatever, it's very open-ended and doesn't particularly demand that you be at any one place at any one time or be doing anything in particular. It's just super relaxing. My friend reached out and suggested we play it again now that there's been a bunch of content updates and I might take him up on it.