The media we consume is often a reflection of the times we find ourselves in; bringing to the surface ideas, concerns and fears that we collectively share. For many years this has reflected the feeling of impending doom that seemingly surrounds us, culminating in the coining of the term doomscrolling whereby one specifically seeks out such content even if they’re not actively aware of it. Born out of those feelings those are its mirrors, ones of hope and the idea that the future can be better. Terra Nil is such a game, showing us that while disaster can strike there’s always the potential for us to make it right. It’s an innately solarpunk game that turns the city-builder genre on its head, having you build up the infrastructure to restore the world before you begin the process of removing it all, leaving nothing behind.
The climate disaster happened, and it was our fault. The world we could once call home is now left in ruins: rainforests are now barren wastelands, the pristine arctic wildernesses now covered in radioactive decay and the waters tainted with forever chemicals that made them uninhabitable. We however have survived, and our technology has now progressed to the point where we can look undo the damage we once did. We do not do this for ourselves however, no the work we do is to restore the world to somewhere before we began to ruin it. The traces we’ll leave behind as part of this restoration will be minimal and our future lies elsewhere.
Terra Nil’s art direction takes inspiration from multiple places with it’s voxel like layout for the main map and pixel art inspired elements all delivered to you via an isometric perspective. It definitely harkens back to the city builders of yesteryear like SimCity but in its very own unique style. The isometric perspective does make some things challenging at times, as they always do, but it’s nothing game breaking. There were a few occasions where visual elements would glitch out on me, mostly overlays when placing units, although this could usually be overcome by deselecting them and resecting. Terra Nil might be a simple game but the amount of polish to the visual experience is definitely a cut above what I’d expect.
There hasn’t been a great deal of innovation with the city builder genre with most games either working on different settings or the inclusion of one or two new core mechanics on top of the usual resource management. Terra Nil, whilst starting out in a similar fashion to your run of the mill city builder, evolves as the game progresses. Instead of levelling up tech trees you’ll be moving through stages of restoring a particular biome, each with their particular set of needs to ensure a full restoration. You’ll then go about discovering all the species that will thrive there, hopefully through creating the right environments for them. Then you’ll begin the process of undoing all your work, removing all traces of your involvement before moving on once again.
If you wanted to get reductive Terra Nil could be classed as a resource management simulator but it does feel like a lot more than that. Early on decisions are critical to ensure your own enterprise of restoring the biome is sustainable, as just placing structures down anywhere is a quick way to blow through your very limited initial budget. Once you know the process for your particular biome though it’s pretty easy to figure out how to maximise your return on particular structures and when you can start making less than ideal choices to achieve a particular objective.
If you’re like me the lack of 100% perfect solutions will definitely irk you as the procedurally generated maps, whilst I’m sure are all solvable, will have you doing sub-optimal things from the get go. This is part of the challenge of course, but the desire to try and fill in gaps that arise from trying to fill in square areas with round circles of influence does poke the wrong part of my brain too often. Thankfully the later tasks for the levels help out with that, ensuring that every section of land gets converted, putting your OCD brain back to sleep where it belongs.
Probably one of the best game design choices the devs made was that it’s the very early stages of a level that will determine whether you’ll be able to solve it or not. I only had to restart twice throughout my playthrough and both times it was because I was expanding certain things far too quickly without realising the impacts that was having. These both occurred within the first 20 minutes or so, meaning that restarting wasn’t as big of a penalty as you’d think it is. Even later on in the game, when it was clear I’d made some potentially fatal mistakes an hour prior, there were ways to recover from it. This is largely due to you being able to do far more with less as the game progresses and, past a certain point, it doesn’t really matter at all.
That part is when you have to undo everything you just did which, honestly, is actually really cathartic. Whilst it’s not exactly super challenging to tear everything down there is a bit of strategy required, lest you destroy your only way of getting to a particular item to recycle it. By this point though you’ve likely got so many resources under your belt that rebuilding a small section in order to tear a single thing down isn’t likely to pose too much of a problem.
There are a few small quirks which will likely be patched out as time goes on. A few of the objectives appear to be using higher precision numbers on the backend which doesn’t bubble up properly to the UI, meaning somethings will show as 100% completed when they’re more like 99.5% or something, seemingly leaving you stranded without a way to progress. Similarly some of the scanning objectives for animals are impossible to meet without knowing ahead of time what you’re looking for, something which only the wiki was able to help me solve. These are all solvable in-game today in one way or another, but it would be good to see them fixed or tweaked slightly to make it more visible.
Terra Nil is a fantastic twist on the city build genre and representing that core hope that I believe a lot of us have: things can be better. The graphics are wonderful, the mechanics relatively straightforward and the overall experience being very approachable. There’s a few small issues to work out and the short play time might be a turn off for some but it’s overall a very well put together experience. It seems that Terra Nil was at the forefront of the current city builder glut we find ourselves in and, hopefully, the other titles coming out in this genre are as strong.
Rating: 8.25/10
Terra Nil is available on iOS, Android and PC right now for $36.99. Game was played on the PC with a total of 4.90 hours of playtime and 23% of the achievements unlocked.
