I recently found myself in an unfamiliar predicament. I wanted to review a game I wasn’t convinced I’d be good at. If my past attempts at roguelites have taught me anything, it’s that I’m pretty terrible at them. Remember when everyone was raving about Hades? I tried and failed miserably. Many, many times. Despite this, my curiosity got the better of me, and that’s how I found myself playing Void Terrarium 2 - or, to give it its full name for one time and one time only, void* tRrLM2(); //Void Terrarium 2.
I crapped out in spectacular fashion at the first real hurdle — crafting the terrarium. I had to navigate through two areas, each with multiple floors, to find a specific crafting ingredient. Everytime you head out, Robbie, the little robot you control, is level one again. You don’t retain any skills, weapons, or items from each failed run, as any items you were carrying get automatically juiced down into pure resources each time you return to Toriko, except for a few inventory slots reserved for food.
The first zone was easy enough, and I learned to explore each level thoroughly to stock up on items and kill everything in sight. It’s entirely random which items you come across, and if you’re unlucky, you can end up with no restorative items at all, making it nearly impossible to succeed. Skills are also random; you can choose between two options each time you level up, but some are noticeably better than others, so a string of bad luck could condemn you to failure despite your best intentions.
I could manage to reach the second area where beefier enemies stalked the map, but would promptly get my robotic ass handed to me before finding the item I needed. Imagine my fear when I realised I couldn’t even progress enough to live up to the game’s title — terrarium is right there, baked into the name.
I began to overthink my plan, wondering if I should have been whizzing through levels and ignoring everything to simply get ahead. Of course, that was a stupid idea. The real solution was to ‘git gud’. And by this I mean simply not giving up. I became more strategic about the skills I picked, and used my items better.
It was half one in the morning when I finally crafted my terrarium. I had stayed awake, tucked up in bed with my Nintendo Switch, determined not to sleep until I had made it that far. You’d think by that point, I couldn’t wait to put the game down and get some rest, but I was invested. I’d finally found my groove with the game, and the burst of serotonin from my small accomplishment had me eager for more.
There’s something undeniably appealing about the adorable style, with the hand-drawn visuals offering the same gentle charm of children’s book illustrations. This is what captured my attention in the first place, as the game is overloaded with cuteness. Robbie is a sweet little robot tasked with caring for a human girl named Toriko with the help of his friend factoryAI, which manifests as various uwu faces on a monitor.
You can decorate the terrarium Toriko lives in, crafting weird and wonderful furnishings, machines, and tools to create the perfect little environment, with the scope to plant seeds and harvest crops based on temperature and humidity. You must also keep the terrarium clean, clothe, feed, and ensure Toriko is happy and healthy. When venturing out into the wasteland to collect resources, even the enemies you’ll be facing are fairly adorable, too. While away from Toriko, you can interact with her via a Tamagotchi-like screen to clean up her poop, feed her, and play with her. It’s all very childlike and loveable, on the surface, at least.
Despite the post-apocalyptic setting and taking care of the last remaining human, I thought I was in for some fairly standard, cutesy gameplay that mixed it up between dungeon-crawling roguelite goodness with the joys of decorating a little room for Toriko and dressing her up in clothes. The first time her arm fell off — yes, you read that right — I realised Void Terrarium 2 might look cute, but it’s deceptively dark underneath.
There’s a third element to the game beyond exploring the wastelands and taking care of Toriko: the VR world. You piece together memory shards that allow you to explore an 8-bit recreation of the human world before its untimely end. While learning about the disease that turned people into cats might seem a little daft, the narrative is surprisingly twisted. Experiments on kids, workers pushed to their limits in bizarre ways, and let’s not forget the weird fungal element. I mean, what’s the red crap growing out of Toriko’s face? There was even a point where I think I gave some parents their kid’s body parts in a box.
When you get to the point where you’re one-shotting enemies in the first areas but still have to navigate them to progress to the next, factoryAI will discover shortcuts that let you skip the zones. Robbie still starts at level one from the next tier of areas, and you’re going in without the benefit of items and skills earned from those first areas, but the stat boosts you get from crafting alongside the introduction of Knacks and Custom Parts should keep Robbie in decent shape to tackle new threats.
Some noticeable difficulty spikes will test you, with certain plot requests requiring you to get an item in some high level area that means certain death. This leaves you scrambling for blueprints on every floor to increase your base stats and overall chances of success, and that’s where you’ll be spamming failed runs over and over. The real pain point is when you finally find a new blueprint, only to realise you can’t craft it yet because it requires some rare item.
The adorable art style and quirky concept of Void Terrarium 2 reeled me in, but the moreish gameplay kept me hooked. Repetitive failure can sour an experience, even if that’s part and parcel of roguelites, but Void Terrarium 2 alleviates the frustration a little by offering a blend of genres and regularly evolving gameplay mechanics. After all, there’s nothing like taking a break to redecorate your terrarium and destress after 20 failed runs.
Score: 3.5/5. A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher.
Void Terrarium 2
Void Terrarium 2 continues the story of the Nippon Ichi strategy RPG. Having put an end to the rogue cloudAI, a new threat to Toriko emerges. This time you'll need to go back in time in order to find a remedy to a lethal disease.