tERRORbane is a labor of love that lacks an identity — Hands-On Impressions

gamepur.com:

Perhaps more than any other type of creative endeavor, indie game developers need a way to stand out. Some of the most obscure indie titles still retain a voice of their own — RPG Maker horror games, for example, tend to run along the same lines as each other. Yet, Ib is different from Angels of Death, which is different from Mad Doctor, and so on. While indie games may contain references to other games and series, typically it is done sparingly — and when it’s not, usually there is a theme or identity that serves a purpose to cover. Not so in tERRORbane, a game that clearly has a lot of heart put into it, but fails to retain any sort of identity on its own.

tERRORbane (TB from here on out) evokes another indie title that came out a few years ago: Evoland. Both games clearly show a love for the history of video games, with the games jumping from genre to genre. Evoland, for example, starts off as Zelda-like before eventually evolving into a modern Final Fantasy or Y’s-style game, while TB tends to stick to the SNES/Game Boy style of RPGs, shuffling through different examples of the era. The pull of TB, however, is pushed more towards the back end of gaming — the code that runs in the background.

Used as a plot device, the “developer” of the game is not particularly good at coding, and as such, his game is full of errors. Things such as NPCs being stacked on each other, or being able to walk on water tiles, or having a box of pears join your party mistakenly are just a few of the “bugs”. The goal of the game is simply to progress through it, but the secondary objective is to fill out a list of these bugs by discovering all of them — doing so unlocks the True Ending. As you progress through the game, the game itself