I found myself in the mood for a more traditional roguelike with the release of
Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate on Switch and ended up purchasing...
void tRrLM(); //Void Terrarium instead? I saw some videos of it pop up in the history of a streamer I'd been vaguely following, and I guess I found the base building aspect of the game appealing enough to give it a go. I guess the fact that my most recent experience with the Shiren franchise through the Wii entry left me with a slightly sour aftertaste also contributed to my decision. (If I recall correctly, I died in a dungeon after a particular cutoff point, after which I was unable to recover and continue on with the storyline due to an inability to build up enough resources to continue to progress.)
Overall, Void Terrarium lands as a simpler, more lenient game than the Shiren games. There's nothing in terms of item fusion or shopping, no random item identification. The dungeons themselves didn't have a lot of variety either, with all of them drawing from the same tilesets (which, admittedly, makes sense given the game scenario) and, within each dungeon, a very limited set of rooms to draw from. (Additionally, I got a couple of game crashes while playing, but the fact that the game autosaves at the start of each floor made those occurrences not too bad. I also experienced some extreme slowdown in the final dungeon, which kind of helped me know whether or not there was a monster house present.)
Despite that, the game still does some interesting things with its systems.
- Dungeon Progression: The game does a good job of introducing item types well through its first few dungeons. Each one introduces a new type of item, and only gives the ones with the simplest effects to the player in the dungeons where they are introduced.
- Rewarding Failure: At the end of a run, whether successful or not, all of the items you were carrying get converted into resources that get used for base building. Base building then gives you permanent upgrades to your character to let you make deeper runs more easily. The fact that you benefit from every run makes losing sting a bit less; you'll also find yourself wanting to voluntarily leave the dungeon once your pockets are lined with valuable materials. It also makes for an interesting decision on what items you want to use to stay alive versus what would be valuable to turn into resources. On the flip side, while the game is mostly on the easy side, it still feels like there's still a certain amount of failure required to build your stats high enough to progress through the mid-game dungeons. There's also a little bit of required grinding in order to manufacture items for story progression.
- Skill Building: Every time you level up, you get to choose a skill to learn among a random selection. Like opening a pack of trading cards or pulling from a gacha, there's a certain amount of anticipation you get from seeing if you get something that will punt your run to another level. A fair amount of things that you can construct are geared around helping tip the odds of what skills show up into something that fits your style of play. One downside of this level of customization is that once you've manufactured enough tools, it can be surprisingly easy to come up with broken builds. In my endgame runs, it seemed inevitable that I would have at least 40 inventory slots, a 100% critical hit rate, and at least 30% (and not infrequently a maximum 95%) damage reduction rate, which made dungeon crawling effortless.
Through all of these pros and cons, the gameplay loop supported with these systems was enough to see the game through to its ending. (Took me about 28 hours, for reference.) It's not the most polished or balanced game out there, and it won't require all of your attention to complete, but maybe someone out there will appreciate the game being shouted out. It was charming enough for me to want to post about, anyways.