a game that radicalized me in many ways. it taught me a very important lesson: gamers are stupid. and cruel. and wrong.
the story of this game is well known enough. a 2 person husband and wife indie team set out to make minecraft but an actiony rpg with a neverending procedurally generated world with multiplayer. then a billion people saw it and decided it was going to be the best and only videogame ever made. they made an alpha that people though was pretty cool and didnt update it for years, getting accusations of being scammers and liars, until finally putting out an update that completely overhauled and changed the game structure that everyone hated.
for one, you can't talk about this game without acknowledging the extreme cruelty of this game's fanbase. its fair to say the development team overpromised what this game would be. but so what? they were two people. be mad at yourself for believing it. i believed it because i was like 13 when this game got announced. what's your excuse? at the time i liked the alpha ok, when i could get it running on my shitty laptop. then i forgot about it until a few years ago, which brings me to point two.
the update made the game better. way better. so much better. this is an opinion, people can think what they'd like. but if you prefer whatever generic rpg structure they were going with in the alpha to the inspired exploration focused direction they took the final version, you are either being tricked by nostalgia or might just hate good things. the combat is messy, the progression is weird, and the system is in desperate need of a tutorial. but when you see how it works it just clicks into place.
the world is a series of regions, and each region is its own self-contained legend of zelda type exploration game. you need to find items and equipment to be able to reach new areas and get strong enough to beat monsters protecting other items and areas. and all these items only work in the region you found them. when you finish out the region, you find an artifact that provides some minor buff that persists between all regions. then you go to another region and start again.
it could be considered a flaw that there's no real endgame past that. you just keep amassing artifacts and becoming more powerful. i think the game would be better for it, but for what it is i love it. i love being able to go on a never ending series of self-contained adventures, slowly amassing power. imagine a lttp randomizer but at the end of each run link gets a new bonus power for the next run. it's not for everyone, i get that but i think this is the best version of cube world we could've gotten. it was never going to be whatever game everyone was imagining it to be.
this is a review i had been working on for a while, but i felt inspired to finish it because i recently saw wollay had started work on a new version of cube world for ue5 based on the game's alpha. that's not the version of the game i prefer, but i'm still excited to try it. i hope it will get people to give this game another chance.