Terraria is a build your own world, choose your own adventure, make your own game kind of game. You’re provided the building blocks to make your own fun, or at least your own housing, armor, and weapons. Play as you see fit: build the best castle ever, search for the best treasure ever, or fight the worst bosses ever. It’s up to you. And now you can do it on the PlayStation Vita.

You start out by creating a rudimentary character, choosing a difficulty level, and the size of your world. Once the game randomly generates your little slice of pixel heaven, you’re dropped in the middle of a heartless world in which you must fight to survive. But you must first survive to fight. Grab your axe and get to chopping wood, because you need to build a house before night falls and the zombies come out to snack on you. Be quick. It will be dark before you know it, and you need to stay alive to build another day.

Did I say the world is heartless? It’s not entirely. There are bunnies! And actual hearts, but you’ll discover those on your own eventually.

Once you have your first shelter built, you can start crafting in safety. Make and light some torches. Build a work bench. Pull up a chair and put some doors on your little house. There you go. Now you’re ready to go find more materials to build with, so that you can create more things, so that you can then go explore and find even more materials to build even bigger and better things. This is the core of Terraria: exploration and creating. You run around in a world with very loose rules, and do what you want to do, whether it’s digging in search of secrets, or monsters to destroy, or a rare mineral to make that thing you wish you had. You can even just spend your time building the coolest cow-shaped golden tower you’ve ever seen! I mean, you could, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The world is made up of various types of terrain: snow, desert, forest, and the underground areas are full of rocks, dirt, and minerals. Each area has different resources to collect, giving you the ability to fabricate more things.

There are specific things you can do. There are boss monsters in the world waiting to be discovered and dismantled, there are NPCs to meet and interact with. But you can also go on forever and completely ignore those. That’s the charm of Terraria. It’s your game. Do what you want.

The graphics are retro styled, like many indie titles. They’re functional, if a bit crude. The lighting in the game is interesting, and a very important part of the game. Next to a weapon to fight off slimes and zombies, a torch is probably your most important possession. In fact, without one, you won’t be able to see to fight the slimes and zombies. Light up dark areas before you’re mauled by the undead horde. But even for being retro graphics, the game looks a little unattractive. Your avatar is a bit of a mess, and everything in the world is detailed just enough to recognize what it is. Well, in most cases they are. If you play a long while, you’ll start to see little squares in your sleep. Everything you mine and dig up is made of little squares, each of a different color, and you spend a lot of time mining.

The sound is functional. There are different tunes for day and night, and each area. The music is often your best warning of impending zombie attack when night has fallen, and is a great way to let you know you’ve entered a new type of place. It’s very helpful when you’re half a world deep in a little tunnel mining materials and can’t see much of the world around you. Unfortunately, the sound effects can be very repetitive, considering you’ll be mining many thousands of blocks of materials with very little variation in sound. The zombies can get really annoying, too, because they grunt and groan constantly. It’s especially irritating if you’re working in a cave or shelter the whole night while they continually bump against the door trying to get at you, or repeatedly splash in a puddle in a cavern adjacent to you. But at least you’ll be sure to know they’re lurking in the dark.

Having briefly played the PC version of Terraria, I can say that the Vita version is quite a bit more difficult to control using thumb stick rather than a mouse. Precision is lacking. The cursor feels too loose and it can be tough to zero in on the tiny square you need to be clicking, and since 95% of the game is clicking squares, it can cause frustration. I personally focused on exploration, mostly, and only created basic shelters as little bases to keep me safe at night when traveling, but I can imagine the imprecise controls would be horrific if you wanted to make a really big and detailed artistic structure. Theoretically, you can control the cursor with the back touch panel, too, but whenever I tried it myself, it was jittering all over the place. Your main inventory items are selectable with the front touch screen, and full inventory, equipment, and crafting menus can be managed the same way, which is useful.

Battle is pretty simplistic. While there are a few different kinds of weapons to make – boomerangs, bows and arrows, swords – success often just comes from crafting a better version of one of them out of new materials, and doing the same with armor, so that you can fight better and survive longer.

Terraria’s sandbox structure – or lack of structure – is what makes it entertaining. It could also be what makes a player lose interest. There is very little direction, or indication of what to do. The game pretty much drops you in the world and lets you figure it out on your own. There is a tutorial that shows you how to do a few things, and in it you will learn that you need to build a structure before nightfall, but that’s about it. There are also text panels accessible from the main menu that give you some hints and instructions, but many players will overlook those. A better tutorial would have helped greatly, especially for new players.

Overall, Terraria is a surprisingly entertaining game, and a welcome addition to the Vita library. Lots of freedom to create what you like, various activities to participate in, and the ability to do so online with other players make Terraria quite fun, and potentially a long-lasting game that is very much worth the price of the download.

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