Graves here! Dipping my toe into something new tonight with my first written game review. Y’all know me, I love my spooky horror games, but I also love super cute games. When Terrorarium came across my feed for new games this year, I knew I had to try it out.
Terrorarium is a 3D puzzle platformer about wanton destruction & adorable gore across a galaxy of community-designed murder gardens. Conquer dangerous alien worlds as a feisty granny with a chip on her shoulder and an army of cute but expendable walking mushrooms.
Terrorarium comes with three modes, the campaign, creator levels designed by other players & creative where you can make your own levels for others. I started out by popping into the settings. The UI is very simplistic, but it can be easy to miss things. I went straight for the sound settings, and there really isn’t any outside off and on which is unfortunate. The controls are quite basic which is nice for a puzzle platformer, I’m going to need all the brain power I can get for figuring my way through the levels.
Next I headed for the campaign, which is approximately 25 levels at the moment. Each chapter starts with a video for the story line. The characters speak in an alien language so subtitles are provided, which is great for hard of hearing – but leaves out anyone from the blind community. We are introduced to our character “The Gardener” who has placed second for what looks like her entire life in gardening contests. She heads out and we are taken to the first level.
Intuitive signs walk the player through a basic tutorial mode and you begin navigating your way through treacherous gardens with your crew of Moogu – tiny mushrooms which you will throw, stick to things, blow up things, and feed to ravenous plants for their fruit. The levels start off quite simple, but it definitely takes some finess to get used to calling your Moogu to you at all times to keep them alive. The first level I played the fruit from the monster plant didn’t drop properly so I had to restart. There’s definitely trial and error even in the early
levels, and I enjoyed the grimness of environmental hazards completely wiping out your Moogu. As The Gardener, you can also die from certain hazards, so you need to balance and place your Moogu in the proper places throughout each level to get through to the end with enough Moogu to feed the plant monster at the end and still have one Moogu left.
Next I tried creative mode and making a level. You have four biomes to choose from and a variety of monsters, obstacles, and environment decoration. It’s very user friendly for placement and resizing and moving items. I definitely want to spend more time with it once I’ve played a few more levels myself and can get a better comprehension of how to make a good puzzler design.
The community designed levels are nothing to shake a stick at. Not as simple as the first chapter of the campaign for sure. There’s some amazing ideas and designs that have been done, definitely recommend checking them out after you’ve got a good knowledge base of the game and controls and hazards in your mind.
I personally don’t play a lot of puzzle platformers, but this one is just the right balance of spooky and cute that would keep me coming back. I really do hope to see it ported to Switch one day as it would get the most play from me on that platform. If that genre of games is your thing, please take a moment to check Terrorarium out.
Terrorarium, published by Stitch Media, is now available on Steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003450/Terrorarium/
Find them on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TerrorariumGame
Website https://terrorarium.games
Key for review provided by https://terminals.io
The Cackling Cauldron 