Terra Nil
Restoring the Environment
Terra Nil is an environmental strategy game about restoring the environment. I’ve seen it described as a reverse city-builder, where you start with a polluted wasteland and work to restore it to a lush, green paradise. I have some quibbles with that description, but it’s a cozy and charming game that I enjoyed playing.
I started Terra Nil on the Steam Deck, which has a good controller layout available. Played about half the game that way, then played a few maps on PC. I got the credits to roll, but I didn’t finish all the different maps (yet).
While I love the idea and the vibes, overall it wasn’t as strong as I was hoping. I find the “reverse city-builder” label a bit misleading, as I typically think of city-builders as open-ended games where you can build whatever you want. Terra Nil is more of a puzzle game where you have to solve each map in three phases. Each phase consists of placing a variety of building on the map, which typically build on each other and alter the terrain, ecosystem, or weather in a variety of ways. It’s all about fixing the environment and there’s not really much room (or purpose) for you to put your own creativity into the map.
It’s definitely cozy and charming, with a good soundtrack and a nice aesthetic. It’s not particularly hard, which I appreciated, but that leads to some tedium when you know what to do but you still need to place a bunch of buildings across the map.
There is a fair bit of variation between the maps, with different buildings and challenges to address. This added variety, but it also made me feel like I was always learning new systems instead of mastering them. Although to be fair, I don’t think I would have enjoyed if each map was harder than the previous one.
I don’t think there was a prescribed route through the different maps, so perhaps if I had taken a different route e.g. finished each continent before moving on to the next, I would have had a more cohesive experience.
Reading what I’ve written so far, it sounds like I didn’t enjoy Terra Nil, but I did! I just wanted more from it. I wanted more freedom to build the environment I wanted. There could have been more cosmetic options, or more possible ways to solve each map. I wanted more of a sandbox experience, and Terra Nil is more of a puzzle game.
Perhaps my mild disappointment stems less from Terra Nil’s shortcomings and more from my own expectations of what an “reverse city-builder” should be—the game succeeds at being the focused puzzle experience it aims to be, even if that wasn’t quite the ecological restoration sandbox I had imagined.