A city-building game that's the opposite of SimCity - Terra Nil quick review

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Play it! City-building games have taken it for granted that growth is good for decades, and why wouldn’t they? That’s how we run cities and companies and everything else, after all—but there’s a price to pay for all that expansion. That’s what Terra Nil is interested in, and it’s the first game I’ve played that let me build something, watch it develop and bloom, and then pack up and leave, without a trace of my presence remaining afterward.

Terra Nil looks a bit like a city builder, but it’s really more a puzzle game. Each map started me out with a blasted piece of wasteland on one of four continents, and my job was to restore water, plants, and animal life by using a limited range of equipment. Once the ecosystem had been healed and was back on its feet, I then had to figure out how to tear my equipment down, recycle it, and airlift it out, leaving the lush wilderness pristine and peaceful once again.

TIME PLAYED

I played about five hours, which has been enough time for me to unlock each of four increasingly challenging biomes in Terra Nil. Each full “run” has taken around an hour from start to finish, but it’s a game that unfolds at my pace—time doesn’t pass on its own, and the only changes that happen on each map are in response to my moves. There’s still plenty more to play, because I still have additional challenge maps to complete on each continent, more species to discover, and more biomes to unlock in each area.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Extremely good vibes. Terra Nil is a thoroughly pleasant sensory experience, from the lush pixel art visuals to the relaxing and gentle ambient soundtrack that swelled just a little whenever I planted something down in an ideal spot. It’s a meditative game to play, and the presentation and feedback all contribute to a feeling of sleepy satisfaction with a job well done.

• Interesting new challenges on each map. Reclaiming the wasteland works differently in each new biome. For example, temperate regions require running streams in order for fields and forests to grow, while arctic deserts can only be reclaimed using geothermal energy to melt snow for tundra to emerge.

• Building puzzles for myself. The final task in each map is to figure out how to deconstruct and recycle every structure I had placed, which produced some tricky challenges for me to solve—I needed to plan ahead to make sure I could get my recycling robots everywhere that I’d built anything. The satisfaction that comes from successfully leaving a place is really top-notch.

• Real-world impact. Developer Free Lives has pledged to donate a portion of the profits made from Terra Nil's Steam sales to the Endangered Wildlife Trust, which works to preserve the habitats of threatened animal species in southern Africa and beyond.

WHAT SUCKS

• Nothing actually sucks about Terra Nil, but there are a couple places where the directions could be slightly clearer. The secondary objectives aren’t immediately obvious, and a couple structures took some trial and error for me to understand how they work. None of this created any major obstacles for me, though.

• Length. Terra Nil is a pretty brief game, even with the additional challenge runs and discoverable content I mentioned above. Another map type or two wouldn’t go amiss.

💬 Are you excited to start reclaiming the toxic wasteland for nature, or is Terra Nil a little too chill for your city building needs? Let me know if you’ll be trying it out in a comment.