Necesse, the game developed by Fair Games that blends Terraria with top-down gameplay reminiscent of Final Fantasy on the NES, drops into full release and changes the way the game loads its biomes.

Necesse is a procedurally generated world for gamers to craft, build, and survive their way through. Instead of digging down like in Terraria, players can explore across forests, tundras, deserts, swamps, and oceans to find resources and fight a wide variety of enemies and bosses.

All the staples of a survival game are here: harvest resources, build elaborate settlements, recruit settlers who can help work the fields, tend to livestock, or gather more resources. You can even hire guards and set up defenses to keep monsters out of your home. Gear up with melee, magic, or a bow and take on quests or not. Everything is open for you to do as you wish. Explore at your leisure.

Previously, with the game’s early access releases, biomes were traversed one at a time, with the player selecting the new area via a gridded map, either explored or not. Now, however, game designers have made the transition from each location seamless. The world is still generated randomly, much like Terraria, but the borders have become invisible. The seed for the map and how the biomes are generated is interesting. Essentially, the world is randomly generated, then the game processes different layers, adding new rules for each biome. For example, there is a rule that no snow biome can be next to a desert biome, so the game moves them. This is not to say the game will never have those combinations; it just makes a logical attempt to rearrange the biomes.

Each new layer of rules defines the biomes and organizes them into larger areas. Layers for oceans and rivers are then added over the main land tilesets. Next, the game adds caves and discoverable areas for players to explore. The entire layer system the developer created even layers different palettes of grass and trees, adding details efficiently. There are preset locations that the game requires; these are loaded upon creation and appear as needed, but the rest of the map is created using the random layer method previously explained. I think it is an interesting way to solve the world border problem.

The fact that this game exists gets my old-school RPG vibe tingling. I love Terraria, but I grew up playing top-down RPGs. I always wanted to see the two design elements combined, and Necesse delivers.