Games worth discovering

A relaxing environmental friendly strategy game | Full Review - Terra Nil

3K View2023-04-01

Terra Nil is a nature building / reverse city building strategy game developed by Free Lives and released for both Mobile platforms and PC.

🟩Pros

+Beautiful visuals

+Soothing ambient music

+Innovative gameplay mechanics

+Pro-environmental advocacy

🟥Cons

-Too short for its price

What if the idea of a city building game is turned on its head? Whereas the main objective of the game is not to build a huge bustling city, but instead to build a natural living world without any trace of technology or artificiality? Terra Nil is exactly that game for a change. A strategy game where players construct and deconstruct terraforming structures with the ultimate goal of restoring the land.

Players start off with a simple plot of procedurally generated desolate wasteland. It’s completely dead. It’s up to them to completely restore it to life, in small little steps up to a resulting beautiful landscape complete with thriving flora and fauna.

One of the things that got me hooked immediately was the therapeutic aspect. The handpainted Sim City 4-looking visuals look beautiful, there’s something in the art style that is highly mesmerizing. It’s a very soothing experience, coupled with a highly relaxing ambient music, it’s a tranquillizing game that just fits perfectly with what it advocates.

The main gameplay is divided into three main phases that overlap each other. biome restoration, flora growth, and animal reintroduction. All of these phases are subdivided into multiple small steps and milestones that players have to check and complete. In parallel to this, players will also do some climate modification to change the humidity and temperature which affects the potency of other terraforming structures and how they affect their surroundings.

The players start off building structures that restore the soil into plain grassy fields and reintroduces water to dry channels. It is a challenging task because there’s a limited amount of area where players can build power sources and structures. Then, once the whole map is filled with green fields, the second phase starts.

Players will now need to grow enough plants and fruits filling the map. Different plants and fruits will grow depending on the terrain and structures made, and it is quite lovely seeing these plain green fields and once dead rivers slowly growing more life into it.

Concurrently, players will also be able to manipulate the weather by introducing some cloud seeding to increase humidity or starting wildfires to increase the ambient temperatures. This game highly emphasizes destruction and de-creation in order to make progress. Not everything is supposed to be permanent or constantly growing, this will be more prevalent in the last phase.

The last phase focuses on Animal reintroduction, where players will need to find a suitable habitat for the animals. It’s almost the simplest phase to manage, except players will also need to recycle every artificial structure they’ve built so far, by building recycling centers and an airship to leave the map. Leaving no trace once done.

There are three difficulties in Terra Nil and I dare say it is a very hardcore game of sorts despite the simplicity in the goal. There are no saves, with the only convenience in the form of a limited rewind option (only rewinds to the last made move). Terra Nil is hard, your resources are limited and how you efficiently utilize it to restore the land will determine your success. It somehow becomes a puzzle game in disguise, especially in normal and hard difficulties.

For example, you need to continually spend resources to keep building structures, but there is no passive income. Luckily, the structures when built, will give resource rebates if the placing is restorative enough. However, this may not be a good thing as frequent consecutive bad placings will inevitably exhaust your resources, placing you at a complete dead end. As a result, restarts and do-overs are an intended part of the gameplay experience.

In addition to the land restoration aspect. There is also an over world element with the overarching goal of restoring the ENTIRE planet. The planet is divided into different regions and that regions into different zones of lands represented by percentages that players need to complete. Entering a new zone will start a new “run” where players are placed in a brand new wasteland map that they will need to restore. Everything is procedurally generated, providing some nice replayability factor every time.

That’s basically the gameplay cycle of the game. Restore some tiles of land, continually improve them until the whole zone is restored with complete fauna and flora. In turn increasing the overall habitability of the planet. Restore some more, encounter different kinds of terrains; rivers, mountains, oceans, etc., Until the whole planet is 100% restored. It is quite short, and is completely beatable in one sitting (if you count restoring the whole planet as beating the game). I kind of wish there was more content for its price ($25) aside from being procedurally generated.

In all honesty, games like this that help teach and raise awareness about the environment should be given more attention. Maybe these types of games are what we need – especially for youngsters — to instill that mindset that we need to be environmentally aware and take care of our planet more.

Conclusion:

Terra Nil is a relaxing environmental friendly strategy game with innovative reverse-city building gameplay mechanics that I’ve never seen before. It’s quite short, you can experience everything this game has to offer in one sitting, but I can’t deny that the short-lived experience is a beautiful one.

Mentioned games