Terraria - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

With Re-Logic having finished their last major update for Terraria, my brother and I figured it was time to jump back in. We had previously gotten about halfway through it several years ago, but this time we were in it for the long haul, determined to start fresh with mediumcore characters and really sink our teeth into this cute, 2D Minecraftian adventure. It took a while—a lengthy 44 hours to be exact—but our journey was fun and thrilling, containing some really wild ups and downs. The critical thing I did not expect (and really should've in retrospect) was that the Terraria wiki would be an essential contributor in our victory over the game.

I suppose you could finish Terraria with nothing more than experimental mindset and some elbow grease, but hardmode will undoubtedly test that theory. For those that don't know, after descending into a literal hell to slay a fleshy monstrosity, new monsters, items, and features are added to the world to bring this once-explored land back to life—lovingly called "hardmode". I'm fairly certain I stopped here the last time I played because I definitely would've remembered the ass-whooping Terraria handed me had I tried to continue. Resilient enemies prowled the landscape, safe houses were frequently invaded, and the number of corpse runs I undertook had more than quadrupled.

Terraria does a decent job at directing you where to go by suggesting what your next achievement should be, but its mostly a breadcrumb of bosses to kill rather than gear to acquire. And once in hardmode you'll find your gear woefully underleveled, especially if you try to tackle one of the nasty mechanical bosses that can assault your base at night. Looking up how to spawn better ore, what enemies drop what components, and how to acquire wings and/or mounts are the first steps toward surviving—and the game does an abysmal job at telling you this. Hell, I'm not even sure if it tells you how to properly build a house that villagers can live in, let alone what triggers NPCs to finally sell pylons (which are the best way to travel across the overworld for like 90% of the game).

I sympathize a bit with Re-Logic on this issue; nearly every crafting-oriented game becomes so bloated with information and options that it's irresponsible to add a text box simply suggesting, "Player should make X armor and Y weapon". But this diminishes your sense of discovery since you're forced to stumble across most of the secrets on a wiki, instead of experiencing them yourself within the game's world. If you stubbornly refuse to do outside research, you'll find yourself staring slack-jawed at your inventory, oblivious that "soul of light" can be crafted into a boss-summoning totem at an anvil made from mythril, the second ore generated from every triplicate of altars destroyed. For the record, the first NPC that arrives does share a crafting list when you show him an item, but good luck learning where how to locate the other reagents (ah yes, to get an avenger emblem I have to farm an earlier boss I previously had zero reason to fight! Of course!)

There are definitely worse aspects in Terraria than having to do some wiki sifting, like its occasionally abysmal drop rate and the unwieldy UI that gets exponentially more cumbersome with mediumcore deaths. But at no point are any these bad enough to dissuade you from further playing. One of the coolest things that Terraria possesses that other games like Minecraft don't is an urge to evolve. You'll start the game deceptively humble, happy to craft an iron sword to replace your old copper one. But by the end your final state will be practically unrecognizable from how you started, a whirlwind of rockets and magic and spears and yo-yos flinging from your fingertips. Terraria explodes outwards in options as you progress through it, showering you in items that are as cool as they are delightfully stupid. The lack of self-seriousness gives the game a lot of charm, reminiscent of media melting pots that middle-schoolers often brew together. So what if you have orcs, martians, pirates, pixies, and disembodied lovecraftian eyes existing alongside one another? They're all cool! Bring on the pirate jacket and eyeball helmet!

I never really minded hardmode's dramatic ramp in difficulty, mainly because the sense of getting stronger is so well done in Terraria. Every play session starts and ends with you ruminating on your next objective. Slowly you'll work from point A to B to C, crafting a new armor set, grabbing extra health crystals, and discovering new equipment that makes you audibly "ooooh!" Blood moon events that once left you shaking in your boots become minor nuisances, and when the final boss falls you'll feel practically immortal, able to fend off literal armies while bathing in lava. If anything, the game will probably get a little too crazy by the end, transforming into a nonsensical shmup that's tremendously hard to parse. But you don't come to Terraria for its finely-tuned combat—you play it to learn its secrets and then slowly conquer it, biome by biome, boss by boss.

Similar to Destiny 2, another obfuscated game I adore, your experience will be significantly smoother playing with someone that knows what they're doing. When you're first stepping out into the unknown forests of Terraria's wilds, it can be a truly captivating journey—until you run into a wall and have no idea how to proceed. But check out the wiki and stick with it, because Terraria is about the ascension from a simple lumberjack to a gaudy deity capable of summoning unicorns, dragons, and UFOs to their aid, armed with Excalibur in one hand and a gun that shoots bees in the other. It's ludicrous, but reaching that level of absurdity is absurdly fun.

(Also there's a ton of mods and they look pretty cool.)