If you’ve followed Phenixx Gaming for any length of time since we started, you’d know that I am a fan of NIS America titles. I’ve played and reviewed a fair few of them. I also am a fan of Dungeon-Crawlers and Roguelikes too, despite varying quality standards in the genres themselves. Sometimes something that sounds good on paper isn’t executed well and NIS America’s Void Terrarium (stylized as void tRrLM(); //Void Terrarium) is one such example.

Void Terrarium was created by the same creative team behind A Rose in Twilight, which I played a while ago. The visual similarities are striking, mostly in how the characters are drawn and animated. You play a robot named Robbie, in a world that has been corrupted and overrun by toxic fungi. Humanity has been all but extinguished, with robots being the last surviving remnants of the former civilization.

Robbie finds a young girl asleep on the brink of death in a bed of fungi and enlists the help of an AI, known as factoryAI, to save her. They begin to work together to create a terrarium in which to keep Toriko, the young girl, safe. FactoryAI cannot move from the scrapyard where your terrarium is located, so you must go out and get resources, food, and materials in order to be able to nurse Toriko back to health and build her new home.

In this regard, Void Terrarium plays like a mixture of a virtual pet/Tamagotchi and a roguelike game. While you are out in various dungeons, you can watch Toriko’s vitals (health, hunger, wellness, sanitation, etc.) via the Pet Nanny. You go out and you kill enemies, collect items and resources, and then when you die (or choose to leave) your items and equipment are converted into resources, while materials for building are brought back with you.

Like a classic Roguelike, you start with absolutely nothing when you go into each dungeon run. You start from Level 1 and level up as you kill enemies. When you level up you are able to choose between two passives (randomly generated) that will upgrade Robbie’s stats or give him some sort of benefit. Robbie has two main resources, Health and Energy.

You can use batteries to restore energy, while you must use other items to restore Robbie’s health, such as bio-gel. Your battery resource is important, as it is not only used for offensive skills but also is akin to your hunger stat in games like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. When your battery bar depletes, Robbie begins to take damage over time. If you don’t restore your battery or keep your health up, you’ll die quickly.

This is a rare occurrence though or at least it was when I played. Why? Because you will most likely die way before your battery becomes a problem. The difficulty in Void Terrarium spikes in many areas, from having “monster houses” pop up out of nowhere, to simply having difficult enemies attack you one after the other when you are under-geared.

Because you can’t bring anything with you in or out of the dungeon, there’s no real way to prepare for difficulty spikes or random bouts of bad luck. One such random event is the Weather Blight where contaminated enemies, which have three times the health, can appear more often. Items can also be contaminated as well, providing a negative effect at high contamination.

For example, you may get a battery that is so contaminated that it causes a status effect on you when you use it. If you use it at the wrong time, you’re absolutely doomed. It also doesn’t help that enemies don’t show up on the map until you enter a room they’re in or they get close enough to you to become a problem.

In truth, the game has a tendency to take a turn for the unfair. Most Roguelikes are skill-based, where you improve over time because you learn enemy patterns or they have a progression system that is conducive to your personal growth by giving you more options. Void Terrarium’s difficulty is just arbitrary in a lot of ways, throwing ridiculous numbers of enemies at you or making supplies very scarce just because the game can.

The only progression system involved in the game comes with the crafting mechanic. By breaking items down into resources at the end of a run, you are able to craft items for Toriko’s terrarium. Some items may require you to find materials in the dungeon, but others can just be made with resources. The first time you craft an object for the terrarium, it will give you an upgrade for either Robbie or Toriko’s stats.

You find blueprints for new objects by progressing in the “story” or rather, doing more runs to get things that factoryAI tells you to get. I use the term “story” loosely here, as there isn’t much of one. After a while, the game just becomes a bit of a grind. Get materials, make things, get new blueprints, and make more things. Only the stat upgrades are minimal enough that you can’t really see an improvement over time, so the difficulty never really eases.

That is the issue with Void Terrarium in a nutshell. It is just a slog, with very little incentive for you to continue on your journey. This gets even more obnoxious when you realize that you have to not only make sure Toriko is fed, but you have to also monitor her sanitation. If she becomes too dirty she will get sick, which can also happen if her food is too contaminated.

You may be having a fantastic run but have to leave the run because Toriko needs to be fed or her terrarium needs cleaning. Add that to the fact that the game crashes on Switch fairly often and the game starts to be very annoying. In fact, if the autosave function was better it wouldn’t be an issue but it doesn’t save often enough, so a crash can set you back thirty minutes or more.

There are also some framerate issues and some lag issues that you may experience on the Switch. I don’t know if the PS4 version has these issues (or the crashing) but I can tell you that the Switch version is poorly optimized. Regardless of all that, if you like difficult Roguelikes or you think the premise is something you might be interested in, consider picking it up.

Void Terrarium isn’t a bad game per se. However, I also wouldn’t suggest that it is a good one either. It seems like they needed to refine some of the mechanics and spend a bit more time on it. It is enjoyable in short bursts and I can’t say that the premise isn’t appealing, but there are too many issues to ignore. Void Terrarium isn’t perfect, but I’ve played worse Roguelikes and worse NIS America games.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Void Terrarium was provided by NIS America for this review.

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Void Terrarium

$24.99 USD

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Interesting Premise
• Cute Characters

Cons

• Unfair Difficulty Spikes
• Framerate Issues and Lag
• Crashes Often
• Too Many Mechanics to Balance
• Very Unforgiving Gameplay