Management simulation made me the bad guy. If playing simulator games is like playing God, then I’m definitely an angry person.of factor, Naturally, as pollution saturates their settlements, I am reminded that ‘factories must grow’ as I battle hordes of bugs attacking my base.of frost punkI force workers to endure 18-hour shifts and meals of sawdust porridge while living in an impromptu slum.
Terra Nil It’s the balm for this kind of aggressive gameplay. In this “Reverse City Builder,” as the developer Free Lives explains on his Steam page for the game, in a series of his four scenarios he finds himself in a dry, barren landscape spread across four major biomes. lands are rewilded. This is the game for this era of climate anxiety. We have passed the climate “point of no return”. Healing landscapes across the Earth’s biomes is the ultimate comfort fantasy. Especially in a sea of games premised on destruction and domination, you can reverse the toll of habitat destruction with the click of a mouse. The traditional tile placement mechanics run into the complexity of the late-game system.
Terra Nil‘s theme of rebirth and rebuilding is beautifully rendered with delightful visuals and an ASMR-like soundscape filled with clicks, the sound of rain, and the wind gently rustling through the grass. It’s an viscerally satisfying, almost dreamlike piece that slowly brings to life a dead, fresh-looking land overgrown with lush pine forests, bamboo groves, or mangrove forests. Rejuvenate the sea with coral reefs and kelp thickets where sea turtles can live. Rebuild ice caps and create virtual penguin dens. threatened in real life.
The early gameplay is purely atmospheric, in the vein of a tile placement game like dol romanticStart by placing windmills, then more advanced forms of generators, followed by buildings that turn dry land into dirt, and then plants that lay grass on top of that cultivated land.This stage of restoration is like a game Tetris, tries to restore as much of the gridded surface area as possible. Isometric style scenario maps are procedurally generated and fairly modest in size. Rewilding the map earns points, shown as leaves in the UI, which can be spent on additional structures. The only real strategy is to avoid expending those points before building buildings that can earn you more points.
![Screenshot of Terra Nil, an ecological remediation sim, from an isometric perspective. A large net covers the rainforest. There are windmills and other buildings around.](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/767aoLJEp89T6lLYrX2b0scPgEw=/0x0:3840x2160/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3840x2160):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24529537/terranil3.jpeg)
Image: Free Lives/Devolver Digital
The next stage of restoration will begin to diversify these ecosystems, placing structures that can generate forests and meadows on the surrounding land, assuming you meet the ecosystem requirements for that particular tile. To do. For example, have you ever put grass on tiles, is it adjacent to an ocean or river, or have you had controlled burns to seed a forest? May include global requirements such as level and altitude.
This is where things get complicated. After the first scenario, the game doesn’t clearly explain the order of operations or how these particular tools stack up, and only the most recent building you’ve placed can be undone. After doing controlled burning, you may be waiting to lay out pastures in the tundra without realizing that you should have done it in the opposite order. At this point the scenario is lost and must be restarted. This is, in part, how the simulator should be. If you screw things up, you’ll have to start all over again.Other Sims, however, tend to give early red flags when things aren’t going their way, suggesting options for digging themselves up. Terra Nilyou discover you’ve screwed up and that’s basically it. Shock.
The final stage of restoration, the cleanup stage, is also complex, but we respect the political implications this stage represents. It suggests that the work of human intervention in the environment should be concluded by removing evidence of the existence of industry. When the building is dismantled, it explodes into ether and makes a crunching sound. But the actual mechanics behind it are quite cumbersome and require the building to be accessible via a river or air tram stop. It can only be built on rocks.
All of a sudden, an increasingly unindustrial landscape filled with rails and man-made rivers, as you’ve done some sneaky reverse engineering trying to get rid of the buildings you placed, clogging the landscape again. You cannot clear the scenario until all buildings are gone. I’d be happy to accept the idea that rewilding and footprint removal require complex machinery, but jumping from atmospheric to complex is again difficult.
![Screenshot of Terra Nil, an ecological remediation sim, from an isometric perspective. Since it is the beginning of the scenario, the ground is almost dark brown. Some patches of soil and part of the river have been restored.](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JImVH3_D-8S5Up-kk1gBfAfagSM=/0x0:3840x2160/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3840x2160):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24529541/terranil2.jpeg)
Image: Free Lives/Devolver Digital
It’s hard to draw the line between satisfying complexity and intricate complexity. Heavy simulators usually tend to feel a little more free-spirited, even if they have a scenario purpose. This is because the buildings you place interact with each other in real time or chain together to form automation.of Terra Nil, it feels stiffer and more fixed in stone waiting for you to move forward with your plans. There are many ways to rewild a given landscape, but you are always building on top of what you have already created. You might expect it to spread out and spread out, Terra Nil Offers a palette of possibilities to shrink. What you can place later in the game depends entirely on what you’ve already done to the map. You may run out of space to create certain biomes or lay the trams you need. You may be cornered without realizing it.
This is not the end of the world. After beating the scenario, you’re given the option to replay the biome as often as you like — thanks to procedural generation, these maps will always have some variance. Or you can set the game to a “gardener” setting for a truly atmospheric experience. I’m in.
I’m also open to the idea that preconceived notions about the genre and the way resilient or visually rich games are labeled as “cozy” are having a negative effect on my perception. To be clear, I love “cozy” games.However, I think some people view these games disdainfully.Pleasure and comfort aren’t taken as seriously as heavy topics, or the gameplay in these games is simpler. , attempts to resist assumptions around this label by looking for games that say something interesting about healing while taking risks with the game mechanics used to carry out that vision. Terra Nil It’s trapped somewhere between atmosphere and complexity, without a strong on-ramp of the difficulty curve.
I kept thinking about it while playing, let me love you, built so many pylons and tram poles just to complete the scenario. When it was first released last year, I played the demo over and over again. Even if some of the gameplay feels unnecessarily rigid, I have a lot of respect for the way this game emphasizes environmental management, especially in a genre that tends to focus on the opposite. There is stuff, but the sense of surprise is enough to pull me back into the game world.
Terra Nil It will be released on March 28th on Android, iOS, and Windows PC. This game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Devolver Digital. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, but Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased via affiliate links.discoverable Additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy can be found here.