Terrorbane – a Review

The other day, I was supposed to have a gaming horror night, but we didn’t really have anything that scary to play. So we decided to play a normal game. Well, normalish. The boyfriend picked up Terrorbane. Or, to make it a bit more obvious, tERRORbane. This is a fun little pixel RPG game, where there are a lot of errors.

The game starts off simple enough, with a conversation with an otherwise nameless video game developer, who calls themselves Dev. This fictional developer has made a cool game called Terrorbane and wants us to play it, but not everything is finished, and there are a lot of bugs and glitches going on. The goal is to defeat Xander, a big bad evil guy, by obtaining a magic sword, then using it to save a pretty goddess and kill Xander in the process. While also running into all sorts of glitches and unfinished features. As you play, the developer pops up and chats with you, sometimes pissed off by your actions, but also occasionally actually congratulating you on your thinking. Most of the time, it’s rather passive-aggressive, but the developer character is interesting, at least.

The game itself, after an introductory blue screen of death, actually plays out a bit like a normal RPG game, with collectible items in this game being bugs rather than actual collectibles or gold or anything. You proceed using a handful of glitches here and there, before being greeted with more bugs and crashes. You even lose connection with the Dev for a while, and get to explore a smal area while having access to a gamebreaking developer console. Not only do we kill enemies, but we break things too, to the point that the Dev, who has been watching from a distance, saves us from being trapped in a void after we break things a little too hard.

The combat in Terrorbane is your standard turn-based system, but there are neat tricks to it. In an early bit of combat, we use broken UI boxes to turn an 8 into an infinity symbol, allowing us to cast spells infinitely. In another, we cause a baddie to faceplant into a wall. Thinking back though, there isn’t much combat at all.

Then again, Terrorbans isn’t a very long game. I think we completed the game and got the normal ending in about three hours or so. That’s only the first ending though and there is a lot left to explore. Terrorbane also gives you a warp zone, so you can go back to previous choices and plot points, so you don’t have to start the game from scratch. I say that, there are two somewhat alternate intros to play through, so the total game time is probably much more than you’d expect.

Still, I do like the warp, it does help with replayability. I also very much like the many video game references, like the Minecraft cake being sold in the starting town, a bunch of familiar swords in the blacksmith, and Rabadon’s Deathcap from League of Legends appearing in one shop. The video game references continue to pile up, especially in the late end of the game, which gets incredibly chaotic.

Terrorbane’s arty side of things is also somewhat decent. The art style is pretty typical of an RPG, pixel-based mostly, not much to say about it. The music was good, but I didn’t find any of it memorable. However, the plot I did find memorable. It actually reminded me of Bipbop, a game played on Ross’s Game Dungeon, with the way the developer talks to you.

Overall, Terrorbane is a fun little game, even if it does get overly chaotic at times…