Have you ever wanted to lob cute little creatures at a force field and have them disintegrate into dust? Well, Terrorarium, a game developed independently by Stitch Media, will be able to satisfy that oddly specific desire.
The game itself is a puzzle-based game. Although I haven’t played it myself, it’s very reminiscent of the Nintendo Pikmin games, with having small creatures follow you and being able to throw them and have them do certain things to solve puzzles.
Terrorarium also has a really cool creative “maker mode” with which you can make your own levels – a pretty unique feature. It’s even integrated with Steam Workshop so you can share it with the public and download other people’s levels once you finish the base game levels, so there is theoretically infinite amounts of content. I’m unfortunately not very creative or versed in making levels, so I wasn’t able to make much with it, but if you like having a creative outlet in making puzzles, this is definitely a good game in which to do so. It’s relatively robust, too, and I’m sure the developers are expanding more on it since on their store page they seem to emphasize it being the main aspect of the game for the time being.
There are different types of creatures in Terrorarium, which are called moogu. They have varying abilities ranging from being super heavy to being able to make your character float around. Hopefully, more types come out, because based off the loading screens and the levels I played, there are currently only four types. I thought it was funny how the moogu can reproduce with dead moogu because during levels with lava, you could just have them sit there and die and keep replicating over and over until you hit the unit cap and lose. The main character is known as Crafty with the distinguished title “The Gardener.” She is a cute old alien lady who has the ability to control all these moogu. I also hope that her story gets more fleshed out or more perhaps unlockable characters are released.
I also really like the aesthetics of Terrorarium. The music really captures the alien-esque theme of the game. The characters are also well designed, and you can tell the differences between all the elements of levels very distinctly. Every moogu has a unique shape and color so it is easy to tell what’s doing what. The only thing that confuses me is that though elements reference creepiness and macabre themes with things like “murder gardens” and even the name itself “Terrorarium,” it doesn’t actually seem to reflect that at all. I’d probably rework that to make it more consistent if I were the developers. I am also not that big a fan of the controls, but I’m sure being able to change the controls in-game will be supported sooner or later. As it stands, you can work around this by using the Unity launcher, but it’s by no means a very good replacement. Optimizations would also be a great addition because the game runs relatively poorly even on my nice computer when you bump the resolution up.
There’s definitely a lot of potential to this game’s concept, and though it’s largely a direct copy of the concept of Pikmin, it still has a lot to offer in terms of uniqueness with regards to things like the theme and the maker mode and being able to share your created levels. Definitely check out Terrorarium for PC and Mac via Steam Early Access!
Take a Look at the Terrorarium Steam Early Access Trailer:
Video games are my passion. I've played countless games for 15+ years on various different consoles ranging many genres. Favorites are action/adventure and RPG's just because they're so immersive and I love being able to lay out a strategy for going down tech trees and looking for loot, but I'll pretty much play anything that isn't a sports game.
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