tERRORbane [Switch]
Developed by BitNine Studio, tERRORbane is a highly comedic adventure where bugs and glitches are surprisingly welcome. Opening with the typical blue screen of death, tERRORbane introduces you to the ‘dev’, who is having a bit of a tough time getting the code to work correctly - but he insists nevertheless, that his game is perfect. So you’ll be presented with a ‘Features List’ in order to record all of the cool things you witness, and interesting things you come across; only for it to quickly change to a ‘Bug List’ upon the game beginning - and once this has been filled up, you may return to the dev to present them with the evidence of just how not-perfect their ‘perfect’ game actually is.
You play as the Chosen One, Terrorbane, who was prophesied by the goddess Arielle as coming to save the realm from the Archdemon Xonder. Bork the Undying utilised one of Arielle’s tears to create the Eversteel of Eternity, a legendary blade said to be able to cleave the universe in half, which Leorion is bound to protect… only, he lost it. So you’ll set off on a quest to track it down - and see what weird and wonderful bugs you’ll come across along the way. The story of the game itself is ‘fake’ in the sense that it is just a driving force for you to get through and witness the ‘real’ game that comes with bug-chasing - NO! Not that kind of bug-chasing. Bug… hunting - thank you very much. So the story itself can twist and turn in all manner of ways, with things making drastic and hilarious changes as you go.
The visuals range from depictions of glitched out computer screens, to pixel-art dungeons, and character designs are truly impressive in their strangeness - with lots of downright creepy creatures such as gangly horror-women with long talon-fingers, and cauliflower-monsters. There’s some superb lighting, especially considering the overall visual style of the game, with light casting shadows in temples that look gorgeous, and sunrays shining down from above. Textures glitch out on trees and environment designs will warp and fall apart, with your own sprite often splitting in half or flipping to a negative colour palette. The soundtrack is amazing, too - composed by the team members of BitNine Studios themselves - with tracks that perfectly fit the relevant areas of the world, but often wind up glitching out and having odd, unsettling sounds within, which really adds to the theme.
We really enjoyed wandering around and interacting with the huge amount of NPCs, who’ll provide you with tonnes of weird conversations ranging from typical game dialogue, to meta-humour and fourth wall breaks. There’s some fantastically funny encounters, such as a battle against a Rock, that upon almost dying and visiting the inventory to see if there were any potions, I found paper - before loudly (and proudly) shouting “PAPER! PAPER BEATS ROCK”. Jam packed with references, from mentions of Xonder’s ‘army of darkness’, to him not even being in his final form (like Cell), and shouting ‘exterminate!’, like a Dalek. There’s a Pokémon-intro styled interaction with a Wizard, and you’ll find a Fallout-style vault (404, fittingly). The overworld is filled with random encounters where you’ll take on enemies that exploit the game’s very coding, causing wacky Minigames to occur during battles; which are decently varied (though they can get a bit repetitive when you keep running into these encounters), such as staying within a zone, a slot machine style game or ‘devtris’ which is just like Tetris, to name just a few.
Overall, tERRORbane is a brilliantly fun game, with tonnes of humour. Finding the wide range of bugs is fun, and there’s plenty that’s so bizarre and unexpected that it’ll catch you off guard. Poking fun at games, as well as iconic gaming moments across all genres, it kept us interested throughout - although we did find ourselves getting a little confused at times. Available for £14.39 on the Switch eShop, tERRORbane gives you plenty of stuff to do, with so many bugs that you’d need to run through the game at least a handful of times to find them all, but thankfully the unlockable mode ‘Warp Zone’ will help with that. It can be a bit confusing trying to find some of the options, but uncovering new bugs is always fun - and many of them will give you a giggle when you read the information held within your Bug List. Overall, we’d definitely recommend you to check it out!
In the end, we decided to give tERRORbane the Collecting Asylum rating of 8/10.
Are you interested in tERRORbane? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Vicarious PR for the tERRORbane Switch review code!
