Developed with lots of love by indie studio Sagestone Games, Delverium is a sandbox survival fantasy action-adventure as well as a chill builder/farm sim. It at many times feels as if Minecraft and Terraria (or Stardew Valley) had a child, just one that’s a bit less fancy than its parents. It doesn’t mean that it’s not fun. And addicting. Oh, boy, how addicting it can be. So, after experiencing the demo of this small, simple, yet strangely engrossing title, here’s a look at the current version, as Delverium finally enters Early Access.
After a light character-creation sequence, the main character is dumped into the world of Delverium and is told to get on with it. Get on with what, exactly? Well… whatever they fancy, really. The first NPC encountered will ask for a house so they can set up shop, which translates to four walls, a bed, a light, and if you are feeling generous, a door. Expect little guidance beyond that. There’s no tutorial, no helpful quest marker, no enormous glowing arrow saying “GO HERE, IDIOT”. There’s no kindly wizard standing nearby to explain what is going on and what the bloody heck you’re supposed to be doing. This turns out to be a blessing and a curse.
Not having a concrete goal like “save the princess from the evil king in the North” will definitely make some people quickly lose their taste for adventure. At the same time, this immense freedom is refreshing to say the least. Feeling unsocial? Don’t talk to the NPC, pick a direction, and just start walking – or stay put and start building a town. It’s like getting to play the original The Legend of Zelda for the first time. Free on your own to explore, and discover where, what, and why.
Instead of being handed a little civilised corner of the world to work on, you’re expected to build one yourself. So, you head out for a nice stroll, chop down trees and rocks and then come back and start crafting walls, floors, doors, etc. It soon becomes obvious that there isn’t enough practical reason to spend too much time with all that. The hero/ine can simply build a large “box” to store tools and resources, and NPC houses can be simplistic rooms made from a handful of tiles. And this brings us to one very important thing about Delverium: it’s as enjoyable as you want it to be.
Beautifying your personal fantasy realm is immensely enjoyable. Create columns and put torches on them, then design a diverse farmland for your chickens and sheep. Add ancient ruins to the forest with half-built structures, and connect your world using stone-paved roads. Finally, craft a flower-filled forest meadow and build a beachside wooden home complete with a deck and palm trees. Was there any need for all that? None at all.
One can spend hours making their microcosm look exactly the way they want it to, but they won’t get any big reward for doing so. It’s understandable that for some that will be a deal breaker. The rest will be glad to know that the actual process is fun and addictive. It helps a lot that everything is super easy to do. Expect zero hassle while your little bundle of pixels walks, builds, digs, hacks, slashes, ploughs some land or fishes some fish. No QTE mechanics tied to cooking, no intricate series of steps so that a few pieces of wood can turn into a fence, and no fiddling with a spreadsheet to unlock a recipe. Just point, click, done.
It’s true that currently this feels like a playground. A genuinely enjoyable one, but still just a playground. It would be nice to see the final release to build on what’s available with more mechanics that give the town-building side of things a greater purpose, and definitely more NPCs, more meaningful character interactions, and more pieces of lore. The same criticism applies to the rest of the experience. Farming? Plant seeds, water, gather, cook. Fishing? Click, wait, click again. Crafting? Start with a wooden sword, and then upgrade to bronze, iron and silver. Simple. Simple. Simple.
Exploration will eventually lead to the caverns below the overworld, which inevitably leads to combat. Zombies, skeletons, ghosts and even flying robotic sentries firing purple lasers(?!) all want you dead. The solution to almost every such problem is remarkably straightforward. Hit it. Keep hitting it. Stop when it stops moving. Like everything so far, it’s fun in its own charmingly minimalist way – but enemies don’t feel especially distinct, and fighting one creature isn’t dramatically different from fighting another. A goblin with twice as much health is still basically just a goblin with twice as much health.
There’s a neat survival element here as you’re encouraged to venture deeper and deeper, pushing your luck until eventually the hostile environment starts suggesting that perhaps you should go home before running out of health regenerating sandwiches. As time goes by, enemies tend to increase in number as well, raising tension significantly when the hero is two levels underground, surrounded by monsters and pitch-black darkness. The fun improves by tenfold when you choose the hard setting, turn on permadeath, as well as horde mode, as the scale lean towards the survival aspect much better.
So, you are a heroic adventurer, a warrior, a miner, a lumberjack and an architect. You are also a chef. And a farmer. And who knows what else the developer will ask of you. The problem is that it all lacks depth – and that’s becoming a bit of a theme with Delverium. Pretty much everything is simple… and, somehow, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most will spend a while playing before they find themselves thinking “this really needs more stuff.” More enemies. More lines of dialogue. More crafting recipes. More weapons. More biomes. More things to discover. And yet they’ll continue playing…
You think, “I’ll just explore this cave and move on with my life,” and then you realise you’ve wasted three hours trying to conquer a vast underworld, with many intervals between dungeon crawling so that you can tend to your garden or improve the look of your shed, now an imposing castle. That’s probably the most encouraging thing about Delverium; even at its current, bare-bones state it can be quite the exciting time sink. More importantly, it doesn’t dictate what sort of experience it is supposed to be. Fancy exploring and fighting the undead? Off you go. Want to spend an afternoon farming potatoes because apparently that’s what your life has become? No one is going to judge you.
Feeling lonely? Try out the local, four-player co-op, and if you aren’t feeling particularly Virgo there’s also eight-player online co-op available as well. Like another town builder yours truly recently tried out by the name of Go-Go Town!, this becomes so much better with company, particularly once the novelty of chopping trees by yourself begins to wear off. When in co-op a few people can stay behind and work on the settlement, while everyone else heads off to gather resources. Or you can all pile into a cavern together and beat the absolute stuffing out of anything unfortunate enough to be living down there.
Visually, it keeps things simple, with crisp – very 2000s-like – pixel art that does a perfectly good job of bringing its vibrantly colourful little world to life, while the almost out-of-place, synth-based ambient music provides a suitably atmospheric backdrop to all that adventuring and landscaping. It’s a presentation that just works, and much like the gameplay itself, there’s something rather charming about its simplicity. Of course, the audio visuals are the clearest example of where this currently stands: a good start, but not enough of… everything here yet. In any case, keep an eye on this one. If the team behind it keeps adding stuff and doing the necessary polishing the end result is bound to be great.
