Terraria is one of those games that defines its genre. It just keeps surprising you.
No matter how many thousands of hours you fork over or how good you get, every nightmare and poltergeist that’s been waiting at the edge of the light is still let loose when night falls, and the blood moon will never tire of watching them drive you to your knees.
Terraria has something for everyone; it’s the penultimate sandbox, survival, RPG, and hack-n-slash, all rolled up in a delicious, two-dimensional video game burrito.
If you like Terraria, you’ll be pleased to know you aren’t alone. There are lots of games that take inspiration from the freedom of an open world and the teeth-gritting thrill of giant boss battles and overwhelming swarms of monsters.
These games are Terraria-esque at their cores, but take some creative liberties that make them stand-out experiences all on their own.
17. Starbound
Ohm Plays... Starbound - Gameplay Overview / Impressions - PC / Steam
Stranded in space with a busted ship, you must collect materials to get your ship up and running again. Once you do, the whole universe opens up to you, and no two planets are alike.
Starbound’s universe is incomprehensibly big - I have over 800 hours clocked, and I find something new every single time I play. Surprisingly nuanced combat coupled with randomly generated weapons make for a personalized loadout without the need for a class system. Planets are populated with NPC villages, trap-riddled dungeons, and hundreds of other structures whose decorations would look very nice on my ship I’ll take that thank you very much.
Destination unknown: an algorithm generates trillions of weird, wonderful planets, with unique treasure, dungeons, and wildlife
Shut up, Wesley: as the captain of your own space vessel, you can expand your ship, hire crewmembers, and travel in style
16. This War of Mine
This War of Mine Gameplay Part 1 – "Day 1 Dawns Upon Us"
Three civilians are suddenly thrust into a dire survival situation as war breaks out right outside their front door.
Anything can happen, and your traumatized survivors can’t afford to make a single mistake. The atmosphere is tense, as you attempt to piece together a functional shelter, never quite feeling in control.
The game forces you to make harrowing moral decisions, whittling away at your crew’s morale and turning them on each other or even themselves. It’s difficult, realistic, and eye-opening, sending the most hard-hearted players desperately Googling puppies to try and ease the ache in their chest.
God of a shrinking universe: you may have control over what your survivors do, but in the heat of a violent conflict, there are some situations you just can’t salvage
Harsh reality: random events and sudden deaths can send a stable community whirling towards disaster in minutes
15. Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation
Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation - (Colony Building Survival Game)
All Hell has broken loose, and your party was camping when it happened. You and your friends are safe for now, but your city was destroyed by demons, and you have to build a defensible settlement in the wilderness before they find you. Scavenging for supplies is a risk, but vital to your progression, and a delicate balance must be formed when rationing resources to your crew and their efforts.
Your survivors are smart - they know what they’re good at and will place themselves where they’ll be most helpful. And when it comes time to fight back against the demon invasion, you’ll have to keep each other alive with careful strategy, as you’re no match for the forces of Hell alone.
Not what they had in mind: your band of survivors must learn how to not only stay afloat, but thrive and grow stronger
Hell’s angels: break up the grind with real-time strategy shootouts against the armies of Hell
14. Fallout Shelter
Fallout Shelter PC - Ep. 1 - Fallout Shelter Vault #314 - Let's Play Fallout Shelter PC Gameplay
The Fallout series has historically focused on what happens outside the shelters. In this app game, we’re given a glimpse into the life of a vault-dweller.
Each dweller has a proficiency, and you’ll have to play to their skills to accrue resources for your vault. As your population grows, you build new rooms to produce more resources, and send your dwellers out into the wasteland to find caps and gain experience.
For Bethesda’s first foray into app games, Fallout Shelter is a friendly and addictive debut, with virtually no pay-to-win mechanics and that classic Fallout whip-smart charm inside every dweller… or maybe that’s just the radiation.
Hotel Wasteland: if you’re going to be trapped underground in the wake of nuclear war, you might as well be comfortable
Text adventure: exploring the wasteland is dangerous, but yields outfits, weapons, and supplies
13. Dig or Die
Let's Play Dig Or Die - Early Access - Co-Op - Ep. 1 - Night Time Is Scary Time!
A botched exploration mission has led to your exile on a hostile alien planet.
You need to use the world’s resources to build a ship and get back home, but first, you need to defend yourself against the deadly night - it’d be pretty hard to pilot a ship with all your giblets scattered across the dirt.
Dig or Die marries the tactile grind for materials in an open world with the intense, fast-paced strategy of tower defense. The game takes a more linear approach to building games, emphasizing fending off the relentless hordes and clever resource management.
Don’t even try it: create a base that makes invading monsters regret their whole existence
Hello world: automated firepower and transportation make you a force to be reckoned with
12. Kingdom: Classic
Kingdom: Classic - Gameplay
I highly recommend that you play this game for yourself before you watch any footage. You are an ambiguous monarch, building up your kingdom coin by coin, day by meager day.
Your only method of affecting the world around you is by trotting across your land on horseback and giving orders to your villagers, and you aren’t given any quantifiable way to keep track of anything, including your money.
All that’s clear is your defenses need to be up before nightfall, or else something as nameless and mysterious as the monarch themselves will rip your budding kingdom from history.
Roughing it: your kingdom starts with little in the way of… well, anything
Ancient mysteries: the story is told through environmental clues, but raises more questions than it answers
11. Craft The World
Craft the World Ep 1
Dwarves get to doing what dwarves do best in this quirky take on crafting games. Dig for ores, learn new skills, and defend your base against invaders. Your settlement gains experience from going about tasks, but the dwarves’ individual skills are honed with use, and you can pick their specialties from a sprawling skill tree. As you progress, you find tech and rare materials that allow for better weapons, more efficient machines, and deeper layers for your merry little dwarves to pierce.
It’s in the name: crafting in Craft the World is complex, but easy to understand
It’s off to work we go: relax in between mining trips by decking out your base in colorful adornments, making it a cozy place for your dwarves to come home to
10. Oxygen Not Included
Oxygen Not Included: Oil Update MEGA EPISODE
Being shipwrecked on an uncharted planet might not be so bad, if only it had a breathable atmosphere. Your determined crew of clones must retreat underground and build a habitable shelter.
In addition to making oxygen, you need to produce food, find water, and make sure everybody keeps their head on straight while they work. Resources will run out, and the smallest of oversights can send the whole operation into a spiral as clones scramble to section off rooms leaking toxic gas and take out their frustrations on your expensive machinery.
A priority system keeps the important irons in the fire, but when half a dozen different equally catastrophic emergencies arise at the same time, try to refrain from asking what else could possibly go wrong. I swear, it can hear you.
Three’s a crowd: as you warp in new community members, your workforce is increased, but so is your workload
Breathing gets harder: we take air for granted here on Earth; your clones don’t have that luxury
9. Crea
Familiar, But Different- And That's Good! - Crea 1.0 Gameplay & First Impressions
With little explanation and few guidelines, Crea presents you with a fantastical, vibrant world waiting to be explored. A tall crystal serves as your spawn point, and the further you wander, the less friendly things get.
Crea’s beautiful, mysterious landscapes beg to be investigated, and your curiosity is encouraged by gentle learning curves and little punishment for failure. Your base can span biomes with the help of the strange crystals’ teleportation powers. Despite the easygoing atmosphere, combat is in-depth, with spells, weapons, and skills that can be mixed-and-matched to your preferred fighting style.
Make a house a home: making your abode fashionable is one of Crea’s specialties
Turns out money does grow on trees: Crea’s currency is golden leaves, which can be farmed late in the game
8. Raft
MAN GOES CRAZY ALONE AT SEA | Raft #1
The game’s titular raft is but a pitiful two-by-two palette of bare wood when you start out. Resources drift by on the current, and you can use them to build tools, cook food, and expand your raft.
Fishing for plastic and potatoes might sound doldrum, but it’s surprisingly therapeutic, and it can quickly turn into a fierce struggle as you race the heaving ocean for precious crafting materials before you die of starvation. If the vast, unyielding, merciless ocean wasn’t enough to scare you, there’s also a shark circling your raft at all times, and it’ll chew off bits of your float if you don’t deter it in time.
Your raft can be just enough for the barebones necessities, or it can be a luxurious castaway mansion - either way, the ocean won’t hesitate to remind you of your place.
Alone together: multiplayer allows for cooperative survival, but you might have to fight over rations
The lap of luxury: come as close as you can to comfort while you’re drifting on the endless expanse of the ocean
7. Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley Gameplay
Your day job has you feeling like a cog in the machine, so you quit and move into your late grandpa’s farm in Pelican Town.
Farm to make money, build relationships with your neighbors, and uncover several strange, magical goings-on brimming just under the town’s unassuming surface. Stardew Valley is often described as an improvement on the Harvest Moon series, with twelve romanceable villagers that aren’t restricted by your chosen gender, intuitive new mechanics, and a compelling narrative that places the farmer’s moral compass under scrutiny.
It’s relaxing and engaging at the same time, and you’ll find yourself daydreaming about tending to your strawberries while your honey waters the roses when you’re supposed to be working.
Country livin’: growing crops and tending to cute farm animals becomes a peaceful, comfortable routine
Community building: the inhabitants of Pelican Town are bursting with personality, and they’ll open up to you if you pursue a friendship
6. Planet Centauri
Planet Centauri - Introduction - Let's Play Planet Centauri Gameplay Part 1
I’m a sucker for any game with a nice art style, but Planet Centauri’s breathtaking, masterful pixel art is unparalleled. Set in a wild, untamed world, you’ll build your base, recruit NPCs and tame monsters to aid in your exploration.
Weapons, armor, and custom spells can be crafted to smite the unlucky beasts that don’t earn your favor. Any creature on the planet can be captured, and some, like the dinosaurs, can be ridden.
You can program robots and villagers with the user-friendly coding language LUA to execute custom AI - you could just program them to hunt or dig, but there’s the potential for entirely automated factories here.
A whole new world: Planet Centauri is strikingly beautiful, so anything you build is gonna be pretty by default
Put that thing back where it came from or so help me: don’t worry, he doesn’t bite. Or, at least, his jaws can’t reach me from back here.
5. Junk Jack
Junk Jack How to Survive Your First Night | PC Gameplay!
Junk Jack is an honest sandbox, giving you the key to a lovable new world. You’ll build structures, tame animals, and find rare collectibles to display. Items are ranked by their rarity - the rarer an item is, the less utilitarian its purposes, but that won’t keep me from displaying my lava lamps with undeflatable pride.
The game features 12 different dimensions, all with unique environments and inhabitants, and animals you catch can be displayed or set to follow you around. At the end of the day, it’s about collecting shiny things, and making your friends feel inadequate because you have more shiny things than them.
Recycled materials: Junk Jack has a consistent, appealing art style that uses the limits of generated worlds to its advantage
Stargate, eat your heart out: explore lovingly rendered dimensions stocked with new monsters and treasures
4. Don’t Starve
Where are they hiding the gold?? - Don't Starve Gameplay - Part 1
I think Maxwell said it better than I can: “Say, pal, you don’t look so good. You better find something to eat before night comes!” In Don’t Starve, you juggle your hunger, sanity, and health, and try to prepare for winter, when everything will be even more scarce.
This game is stressful as all hell - if the volatile weather, vicious spiders or bloodthirsty hounds don’t kill you first, your fire could die out and you could be swallowed by the things that live in the dark, or your hallucinations could come to life and shred you with their claws.
But don’t get me wrong; you’re going to love every second. It’s witty and plays like a dream, and you’ll be addicted to the excited dread it makes you feel faster than you can say beefalo.
Don’t get in over your head: even if you do manage to get this far, an errant lightning strike or untimely hound attack is all it takes to ruin everything, and then you have to start all over
Untraditional interests: each of Don’t Starve’s delightfully gloomy cast has their own special abilities and inclinations. Wendy, for example, likes fire. A lot.
3. Minecraft
NEW AQUATIC UPDATE GAMEPLAY! - Minecraft 1.13 Ocean Update Snapshot 18W07A (gameplay)
This comparison is obvious, but only because it’s still very relevant.
Minecraft is a survival game, with an emphasis on… everything. I’ll never, ever forget my first night in Minecraft - I holed myself up in a mountainside and felt my heartbeat in my ears as I tried to will the creeper outside my door to go away, still aching from the awe I’d felt cresting the mountain thirty seconds earlier.
Combat, farming, survival, crafting, exploration, and building are Minecraft’s core mechanics, and all of them are well-rounded, a one-size-fits-all of playstyles. Minecraft was a big moment in video game history, and if you haven’t played it yet, I urge you to go see what all the fuss was about.
Sea to shining sea: Minecraft’s nigh-infinite worlds are the perfect sandbox
Passion project: one of Minecraft’s greatest assets is its community - there are thousands of user-created mods, maps and servers that can change the face of the game entirely
2. Planet Nomads
Planet Nomads Ep 1 First Look ! Base Building, Space Survival and MORE ! Z1 Gaming
You crash-land on a remote planet, and as these things go, you start to work the land around you for resources.
Harsh conditions and aggressive fauna are a constant threat as you explore your crash site. The environments and animals are gorgeous, if unfriendly.
You can build ground or sky vehicles to your specifications that make traversing the planet safer and faster, and eventually you’ll duke it out with other spaceships.
Familiar, but not too familiar: alien life is different enough to be interesting, but earthy enough to feel like home
Ridin’ dirty: vehicles are built totally from scratch; your rod can look like a Mars Rover or a souped-up four-wheel drive
1. Feel the Snow
Feel the Snow - (Open World Survival Adventure Game)
Set in a glimmering wintery wonderland, Feel the Snow’s protagonist is an adorable little snowperson. The game’s story, however, is not so adorable, occuring in the wake of an apocalypse that brought nightmarish invaders with it.
The isometric point of view already makes this game stand out against others like it, but its integration of RPG elements like mana and skill trees are its biggest experiment, and it more than succeeds in adding nuance to the combat.
You build your own house after the first couple of nights are spent safely within the city gates, and you’ll have to defend it against the nightmares, all the while trying to understand their appearance in the first place.
Trouble in paradise: a narrative unfolds around you that’s far darker than it seems on the surface
Keep it frosty: you’re made of snow, so you have to keep an eye on your temperature as well as your other stats
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