Sublime sandbox RPG Necesse is finally finished, and it's washing away my Terraria blues

With Terraria 1.4.5 still off on the horizon, I've got some good news. While Re-Logic continues to hone and polish the next big update, another of the best sandbox games on PC has just hit 1.0 after six years in early access, and it's a whopping 50% off to celebrate. Necesse shares all the storytelling, lifestyle, and buildcrafting options that make Terraria one of the best RPGs, but also folds in the base-building and management elements of Rimworld, along with the cozy community vibes of Stardew Valley, and now is the best time to play it.

While the top-down perspective of Necesse puts it more in line with the likes of Core Keeper, it's closer to Terraria in terms of its overall feel, and its 95%-positive Steam review score proves that Fair Games has carefully honed its creation into one of the best indie games on the platform. The worlds you build can grow out as large as you want through procedural generation. You can choose to go it alone and establish a town filled with NPC settlers, or you can set up a server that could hold hundreds of real players.

There's plenty of freedom when it comes to deciding what you want to do, especially if you're teaming up with other people. Take on the dungeon-crawling life in search of treasure and rare minerals, grow out a bustling settlement filled with orchards and workshops manned by your townsfolk, or set out across the lands to challenge dragons and pirate kings. Some of the most powerful gear is specific to unique enemy drops, but much of it can be obtained in various ways, letting you approach Necesse however you enjoy it most.

Build options will feel familiar if you're coming from the likes of Terraria - you can choose to specialize in melee, ranged, magic, or summoning, with plenty of gear and weapons to choose from. While there's a similar helping of major boss battles to discover and defeat as you work your way through the progression, Necesse actually goes one step further by adding a Path of Exile-style endgame that takes place after defeating the final story boss.

This endgame is known as 'incursions,' and allows you to spawn special temporary areas that require you to complete a challenge before taking on a final fight to obtain some of the game's most powerful crafting materials. In 1.0, incursions have even been given a perk tree that lets you modify how they play, and there's a new, ultimate location to discover with a super-secret showdown that you'll be able to challenge once you've filled that tree out.

Perhaps best of all, Fair Games makes it easy to adjust your Necesse playthrough to suit your tastes. There's a wealth of difficulty sliders and other world settings that can be tweaked to suit your liking. Think the day/night cycle should last longer? Choose your preference independently for the length of both light and dark hours. Hate raiders disrupting your town? You can reduce their frequency, or simply switch them off altogether. Want to make death less (or more) punishing? Select from a range of different penalties, all the way up to a single-life hardcore mode.

Necesse 1.0 is out now on Steam, and you can buy it at a 50% discount until Thursday October 30, meaning you'll pay just $7.49 / £6.49. Get it here and find out what you've been missing.

If that's not enough to keep you busy, we've rounded up the best open-world games along with the best survival games on PC today, so you'll have plenty of choice.

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