While you could call TerraScape a city builder, that would not be entirely true; without harvestable resources or production, TerraScape barely qualifies as a city builder despite constructing a city and its support infrastructure is a core gameplay mechanic.
You could also call TerraScape a deck builder (and the developers themselves refer to it as such); however, while TerraScape is card-based, and players can collect cards from multiple sub-decks, TerraScape is hardly a deck builder.
While collecting cards is a core gameplay mechanic, nothing uniquely beneficial about any single card or deck makes developing a deck-building strategy a requirement.
You could even go as far as to call TerraScape a puzzle game, and that is mostly true, except there is only one real puzzle mechanic: correctly deploying cards in the correct order to take advantage of terrain and structure bonuses.
Even then, it has more in common with traditional board or card games than anything resembling a traditional puzzle game, and calling it a puzzle game feels like a bit of a stretch.
So what is TerraScape if not a city builder, deck builder or puzzle game? The answer is all of these, and yet none of these.
Perhaps unintentionally, the developer has stumbled upon a new hybrid genre, and I am very interested to see how the gaming and non-gaming community will react to it.
While TerraScape is unlikely to become the next Fortnite or Call of Duty, it has a real chance of becoming popular with casual, mobile (Steamdeck) and non-gamers due to its eye-pleasing aesthetic, low-end hardware requirements, calming soundtrack, challenging puzzles, and easy-to-understand-gameplay mechanics.
Image credit TerraScape - Published by Toplitz Productions and developed by Bitfall Studios.
If TerraScape were any more chill, It would be asleep, which is a good thing; with eye-pleasing low poly visuals and a whimsical lo-fi soundtrack, players who want a distraction from the stresses of the real world will enjoy watching their city grow with every card played.
Despite having fairly impressive low poly visuals and a pleasing soundtrack, at launch, TerraScape comes in at shy of 800 MB and runs well on almost any PC released within the last ten years, making it perfect for those with older or less powerful PCs.
Due to its low hardware requirements and slow-paced gameplay, TerraScape runs wonderfully on Steamdeck, making it a great choice for those who enjoy “gaming on the go”.
Image credit TerraScape - Published by Toplitz Productions and developed by Bitfall Studios.
To compensate for the lack of gameplay mechanics and curated content, TerraScape relies heavily on procedural generation, meaning that no two games of TerraScape will be the same, allowing for essentially endless replayability.
TerraScape is very well balanced, with bronze trophies being almost impossible to miss out on and higher difficulties requiring varying degrees of planning and strategy; this division of difficulty allows less skilled and newer players to feel encouraged by their progress rather than frustrated by repeated failure, something which will go a long way towards making TerraScape palatable to non-gamers and those who are just looking to unwind.
Image credit TerraScape - Published by Toplitz Productions and developed by Bitfall Studios.
Terrascapes’ launch into early access is just the beginning of its journey, and the developers have laid out a comprehensive roadmap that includes major editions such as cooperative multiplayer modes, new mechanics and, most importantly for a deck builder, entirely new decks.
Image credit TerraScape - Published by Toplitz Productions and developed by Bitfall Studios.
TerraScape is a management video game developed by Bitfall Studios and published by Toplitz Productions, it was released on 5 April 2023 and retails for $14.99.
TerraScape is available exclusively on PC.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
TerraScape is unrated and contains no mature content.
While TerraScape’s laid-back and admittedly gimmicky approach to city building is unlikely to appeal to fans of the genre, and it has little to offer hardcore gamers in general, its widespread accessibility due to low-end hardware requirements, emphasis on procedural generation and challenging puzzles makes it very appealing to fans of casual games and logic puzzles alike.
As a result, TerraScape will appeal to many people who would not traditionally self-identify as gamers, giving it a demographic to target in the highly competitive PC gaming market.
