Terraria might be the best $10 I've spent on a game in recent memory. I've logged more hours on that one little platformer than I care to disclose. It's got the open-world addictiveness of Minecraft with, I daresay, even more charm and intrigue than the ever-popular building game. It takes a very simple concept and stretches it out to the playing time of a full scale RPG. And it all runs on my netbook.

The game has sold remarkably well on Steam, with over a million copies downloaded. Thanks to their success, the developers can keep building their pixelated universe. In a few days, Terraria will see its biggest update yet, with lots of new toys and features for us to play with. 

Both aesthetics and mechanics will be tuned up in the 1.1 update. Light sources old and new (some in brand new colors) will glow more prettily. Weapons will have random individual perks. You'll finally get to tell your household NPCs which room to live in. And, of course, plenty of new content will be coming our way. We'll see 39 new enemies and 4 new boss fights ready for the beating. There will be a few new NPCs to interact with. Over two hundred new items will settle into the world you build--new armor, new weapons, new everything. And if you look closely at the trailer, I'm pretty sure you can see a unicorn in-game. 

Pretty snazzy stuff. I'm excited for the opportunity to go back and start from scratch with a new character and a new world. Leveling all the way up and getting all the best stuff is satisfying, but it's really the journey to the top that makes Terraria so much fun. Now that there's way more to discover, I can relive that initial sense of intrigue and discovery that got me hooked on the game. I might even start out on hard mode--where you have to kill a boss in the underworld before you can even really do anything. After all, a good part of the fun in the game comes out of dying in sticky situations, losing all your stuff, then trying to nimbly skip back to your corpse and loot your good gear back before the same enemy or fall kills you again. I think I stacked up something like six tombstones once just trying to get my inventory back. Good times. 

Check out the trailer for the update below. 1.1 will drop on the first of the month, with more special Christmas updates arriving on the 15th or so.