Squarelands

I'll be straight with you: Squarelands is the kind of game that sits quietly in the corner of Steam, accumulating a modest pile of mixed reviews and almost no press attention, and yet something about its unpretentious ambition keeps pulling me back to think about it. Released in July 2015 by the small outfit Oryon Entertainment, it wears its Terraria inspiration openly - procedurally generated worlds, mining, crafting, building, combat progression - but squeezes it all into a top-down perspective that draws comparisons to Realm of the Mad God more than to its stated influence. That tension between inspirations is both the game's personality and its main liability. The feature list is genuinely ambitious for a solo-scale project: a day/night cycle that actually changes enemy behavior, mining and crafting loops, fishing and farming systems, hundreds of collectible items, and an optional permadeath mode layered on top of standard death penalties. On paper, that breadth is impressive. In practice, the seams show. Loot tables feel unbalanced - community feedback from early on flagged situations where a low-level encounter could hand you near-endgame gear, which collapses the progression curve faster than the game intends. Enemy design pulls heavily from its inspirations rather than charting its own territory, and the mouse-only control scheme (no keyboard movement) is an unusual constraint that takes real adjustment, especially in combat. Where Squarelands earns its keep is in pure sandbox latitude. The procedural map generation means no two runs open the same way, and if you approach it as a low-stakes exploration toy rather than a structured RPG, the friction softens considerably. Farming plots, fishing lines cast into procedurally placed water, and a crafting bench stocked with hundreds of objects give patient players a lot of quiet texture to pick through. The permadeath toggle is a thoughtful addition - it lets cautious players stay in the world they built, while anyone who wants genuine stakes can flip the switch and feel every night cycle properly. The honest context here is that Steam's community sits at a "Mixed" rating across 48 reviews, with the score hovering just above half positive. That number is small enough that a handful of enthusiastic players or frustrated ones can swing it either direction, so treat it as a signal of uneven quality rather than a verdict. The game saw a version update in 2016 but has since gone quiet, with effectively zero concurrent players on any given day. There is no multiplayer, no modding support, and no ongoing development visible to the outside world. You are buying a finished - if rough - artifact from 2015, not a live service. For the right player, that is fine. If you have a specific soft spot for small sandbox experiments built before the genre calcified, if you enjoy poking at a crafting system without a tutorial voice barking at you, or if you want an afternoon project that costs almost nothing, Squarelands holds a certain quiet charm. It does not reach the depth of Terraria or the frantic pace of its top-down inspirations, but it is more handcrafted-feeling than its humble reception suggests. Approach it with low expectations and a curiosity for unpolished indie work, and it will occasionally surprise you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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