Teardown: Relics of Barkuna Review – Tumble In The Jungle

If you’re not familiar with Teardown, it’s a voxel-based game about a struggling family-owned demolition company getting wrapped up in various criminal conspiracies in order to both survive and clear its name. It has numerous wild missions, like having to destroy buildings to below a certain height level, steal several items in a sprawling level and make it to an exit within (usually) 60 seconds of taking the first one, or even hacking an island’s computer network while avoiding stray gunfire from an attack helicopter. Its DLCs also follow the formula of mission-based levels with exploration being out of curiosity or in service of additional objectives or hidden items. So the Relics of Barkuna DLC is a complete flipping of the script: no specific missions, just a few levels to explore with a whole host of puzzles and hidden items to solve and find.

That’s not to say that Relics of Barkuna is just a big sandbox to play in (there is a sandbox mode though, if you just want to have fun traipsing about exploring and destroying the levels), because there is an overall objective. You are exploring to find a magnificent gem in the ruins of Barkuna’s central temple, and to find it you must find golden eggs, both to unlock the capitols of the three Barkuna factions, and to retrieve the gems of these factions which must be returned to the central Temple. In addition to the golden eggs, there are also coin-shaped relics and spirit bottles to find in each level. The golden eggs are the only ones that grant additional progress; finding enough eggs in a level lets you literally unlock the door to the next level in the central hub, but there’s plenty of fun and purpose in finding the soul jars and especially the relics. Find enough relics and you can upgrade the various pieces of equipment you can find in the levels. Yes, find. You aren’t granted the equipment like in other DLCs, there’s one quasi hidden in each level and you have to find it without any guidance.

Your first equipment is the torch, which differs from the base game’s blow torch in that it doesn’t have anywhere near the cutting power, but it has unlimited fuel. It can still light things on fire, from scones to braziers to trees to thatched roofs. Fortunately the game gives you the extinguisher right after along with spray paint, so you don’t burn down an entire level by mistake. The torch being your first tool sets the tone for Relics of Barkuna, which has many caves and temples with no access to natural lighting, and while destruction isn’t off the table, it’s typically more limited in scope.

The explosive plants you can find at various points in levels are a good example of this, they come in two variants: one fixed entirely in place and can be set off by the torch or other tools, and another that can be plucked, but explodes shortly after plucking. These are the game saying that these are the puzzles where explosives are helpful, because you can’t simply brute force the rest. And the expansion has a lot of puzzles. Some are simply finding clues to the location of a golden egg, relic, or soul jar, but others require interacting with the game physics, like finding specific objects to present to an altar, or finding objects of the right weight to put onto pressure pads to raise another object to the right height. A puzzle found in each of the levels involves a statue with a multi-part plaque scattered about the level. Bring all the pieces of the plaque to the statue and it opens up to reveal its egg. While the plaque pieces glow slightly like all important items in Teardown do, they can’t have an outline indicator turned on like eggs, relics, and soul jars, so finding those pieces and getting the eggs they contain are perhaps the hardest puzzles in Relics of Barkuna. There are other repeated puzzle types, but the puzzle variety in the DLC’s few levels is overall really good, especially given that only one of the expansion’s tools, the zipline gun, offers any additional movement capabilities. Granted, each of Relics of Barkuna’s tools do help considerably in finding collectibles, especially when taken back to previous levels, and each has some destructive potential on its own, just not enough to really reshape it the way the base game’s arsenal does.

Relics of Barkuna’s emphasis on exploring its levels gives the gameplay a particular sense of freedom that even the most freeform of Teardown‘s other levels lack. The missing marked objectives – and a proper level map of any sort, really – encourages the player to hunt every corner of each level for clues. It’s sort of like finding random items for money in the base game, but instead of it being a side hustle, it’s the primary focus with the timed challenges just being different ways to find more of them. This is both a boon and a bane, as you never feel pressured to do anything, but you can also feel at a loss for how to approach a particular puzzle if you encounter it from the wrong direction, which happened to me a couple times.

The DLC also lacks the explicit failure state of the timed levels. Yes, you can fail to complete a challenge in time, but it just resets instead of making you reload a save. Honestly the only failure state is death, and even then the game remembers all the puzzles you’ve fully solved and the items you’ve collected – it just resets anything you haven’t fully solved.

My major complaint with Relics of Barkuna comes in its length. I played it all the way through twice, and I think it needed a proper final area. After completing all the levels and obtaining the DLC’s final tool, there’s really only one additional puzzle waiting before the end, and while it’s a good puzzle, having some more time to play with the final tool would have been much appreciated.

Tim reviewed Teardown: Relics of Barkuna on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.