The eight-year-old loves Minecraft and wants me to play it with them… but I just don’t get it.
But now we’ve found Terraria — it’s basically 2D Minecraft, and that means it looks like the side scrollers I loved when I was a kid.
Where Minecraft’s art looks ugly, blocky, and arbitrary to me, Terraria’s 2D version of basically the same thing looks breathtakingly beautiful because I loved that style of pixelated art when I was young in games like Commander Keen and Crystal Caves.
I would have LIVED in Terraria when I was ten. I tried to draw original Commander Keen levels on notebook paper back then. I’d have given anything for a game that let me generate constant new 2D side-scroller levels and build my own structures inside it.
For me these days, Terraria feels a little open-ended. I like feeling like I’m winning, which doesn’t always fit well with such an open world.
But I feel like I should respect how much 10-year-old me would’ve wanted to play this game, and my kid loves having me play with them.