tERRORbane

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!

tERRORbane is one of those genre-defying games that’s hard to categorize, though I think if I had to I’d probably put it in the realm of Graphic Adventure games, although from the outside looking in, it looks like an RPG. Or a Simulation? A Puzzle game? However, if you’re looking for a point of comparison, your best bet is to look at games like The Stanley Parable, There Is No Game, and Dude, Stop. In other words, this is a videogame… about videogames.

Released in 2022 on PC and Nintendo Switch, tERRORbane has players encountering a game designer and playing his latest “perfect” game, which he is absolutely sure that you will have nothing but praise for. You, as the player, immediately take notice of what a horrible buggy mess the game is, and resolve to take note of all the game’s glitches. Or at least, that seems to be the idea.

The game-within-a-game here is a stereotypical Turn-Based RPG with a cookie-cutter plot about a goddess conflicting with a jealous demon, and a hero searching for a stolen sword that can defeat him. Or something like that. It’s not very interesting, and I’m fairly certain that it’s not really supposed to be. Rather, much like those other games I mentioned above, this game is about the overbearing presence of a supervisory figure, and your efforts to buck that control. Or at least… that’s what it seems to start out as.

This gets to one of my biggest complaints about tERRORbane, and that’s the issue that this game can’t really decide what direction you want to go in. At some points, it’s the player wanting to basically prove this is a poorly-made game. At some points, it’s the player struggling against the creator to play the game the way they choose to. At some points, it’s the creator actively changing up the game as you play to deliver what they see as a better experience, sometimes playing out like those classic Daffy Duck cartoons where a pencil comes in and messes with the duck. And at some points, it’s the player using the glitchiness of the game to progress, sometimes at the behest of the game’s creator. So… is the developer the antagonist here? A companion character? A rival? A reluctant helper character? The game can’t seem to make up its mind.

This shows in the gameplay too. This game has the trappings of a Turn-Based RPG, but doesn’t really care about them and usually dismisses them as unimportant. You have menus with attacks and special attacks, and you have stats and items and levels, and for the most part none of that really matters because the game is so broken and you’ll be breaking it further to the point where any battles that you have to play through play out more like puzzles than typical RPG battles. And all of this works quite well for this sort of subversive game.

What doesn’t work so well is that while tERRORbane seems pretty clear on how it’s not meant to be played, it’s not so clear on how it does want to be played. It seems to frequently adopt and then abandon game mechanics in a way that makes it hard to feel like there’s any consistency here. Some of these game mechanics can be really clever, but when the game refuses to build on them or even continue using them at all it not only seems like a massive missed opportunity, it makes it difficult to proactively engage with the game rather than just going with what it seems to expect of you.

To give you an idea what I mean, in one part I got an ability to interact with the glitches that are frequently present throughout the game. This had me genuinely excited, because it held the potential to recontextualize the entire experience of the game up to that point, opening up previous areas in new ways… only a short time after this, I lost this ability and had it replaced with a hook that could be used to drag sections of scenery around to be used in different areas. Again, this was a cool idea, that could really be put to use for some clever puzzle designs and open up the game in interesting ways… except this mechanic was also abandoned within minutes of getting it.

The presentation here is decent, mixing 2D pixel art visuals in the style of classic 16-bit JRPGs with other elements that simulate things like programming backend and web browsers. This is joined by a decent but forgettable chiptune soundtrack, and voice over from the heavily-accented game designer when his text box pops up. I was a bit perplexed at this choice – having voice over would work as the creator forcing his commentary in as you play, and having the text would work as the creator opening up a “chat window” or something like that… but having both seems excessive and breaks the immersion the game is trying to build.

Despite its tonal issues, tERRORbane does manage to be fairly consistently funny, either through its frustrated creator being blindsided by your actions and the actions of his own game’s characters, the clever ways the game keeps finding to have fourth wall-breaking moments, and the plentiful references this game makes to things like the Final Fantasy and Pokemon franchises. I struggled to find myself very invested in this game, but I was still pretty thoroughly entertained.

Overall, I liked tERRORbane. It has a lot of creativity and explores some really clever ideas through interesting game mechanics and a humorous look at conventions of the videogame medium. However, I found it to be too inconsistent and muddled to reach the same high level of quality as other games that attempted this sort of thing, like The Stanley Parable. This is still a unique and enjoyable game, but I can’t help but feel like it could have been a great deal better.

tl;dr – tERRORbane is a genre-defying game I’d probably say is closest to a Graphic Adventure, but mostly it resembles fourth wall-breaking games like The Stanley Parable, with players taking the role of someone playing a buggy game as they’re harassed by the game’s naggy developer. There are some wonderfully creative ideas here, and overall the game is amusing and interesting enough to be worth playing, but a lack of overall cohesion and consistency keeps this from being as good as it could have been.

Grade: B-

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