Terra Nil review: The apocalypse leads to a conflicting management sim

My worst nightmare is management simulations. If playing a simulator game is like playing god, then I’m certainly a wrathful one. I Factorio, I remind myself “the factory must grow” as I fight bug hordes that, understandably, attack my base as pollution saturates their settlements. I FrostpunkI make workers endure long shifts of 18 hours and eat sawdust-gruel food, while they live in an unplanned shantytown.

Terra NilIt is the perfect balm to combat aggressive gameplay. In this “reverse city builder,” as developer Free Lives has described it on the game’s Steam page, you rewild desiccated and barren land across four major biomes in a series of four scenarios. It’s a game for this era of climate anxiety, where we’ve gone past the climate “point of no return.” Healing landscapes across Earth’s biomes is the ultimate comfort fantasy — especially amid a sea of games premised on destruction and dominion — where reversing the toll of habitat destruction comes at the click of the mouse. The game has an identity problem, as the meditative tile placement mechanics struggle against the complex late-game systems.

Terra Nil’s themes of rebirth and reconstruction are translated beautifully through its delightful visuals and an ASMR-like soundscape full of clicks, rain sounds, and wind riffling gently through the grass. It’s viscerally satisfying, almost dreamlike work, slowly reviving dead, crisp-looking land with lush pine, bamboo, or mangrove forests. The coral reefs you create in the oceans allow sea turtles to thrive. You rebuild ice caps, making a home for virtual penguins, even as they’re threatened in real life.

In the spirit of tiles placement games, early gameplay can be described as purely atmospheric. Dorfromantik. You start by placing windmills — and later, more advanced forms of electricity generators — followed by a building that turns desiccated land into soil, and then a building that lays a grassy field over that arable land. The restoration phase is similar to a game. TetrisYou will need to try and restore as much of the gridded area as possible. These scenario maps, which are procedurally generated and quite small in size, have an isometric style. You can earn points by rewilding the map, represented as leaves in the user interface. These points can be used to purchase additional structures. The only real strategy is making sure you don’t spend these points before you’re able to lay down a building that earns you more points.

Image from Free Lives/DevolverDigital

In the next phase of restoration, you start to diversify these ecosystems, placing structures that can spawn forests or meadows in the surrounding land — granted it meets ecosystem requirements on that particular tile. Have you laid grassland on tiles, are they near rivers or oceans, or did you do a controlled burning to seed a forest. This might also include requirements such as humidity or elevation.

This is where it gets convoluted: After the first scenario, the game doesn’t clearly explain the order of operations, or how these particular tools can layer atop one another, and only lets you undo the most recent building that you’ve placed. It is possible that you are waiting for a meadow to be placed in the tundra, after having done a controlled fire, when in reality, it should have been in the reverse order. The scenario has ended and must be re-created. This is, in part, just how simulators are — you mess things up and you start over. Other sims, however, tend to warn you earlier if things go haywire and offer options for getting out. These are the In Terra Nil, you discover that you’ve messed up, and that’s basically it. Furthermore, there’s also a pretty steep complexity jump between scenarios two and three, so these confusing mechanics add yet another layer of shock to the sudden failures.

The final phase of restoration — the cleanup phase — is also convoluted, though I do respect the political implications this step represents. The work of humans in an environment needs to end by eliminating evidence of industrial presence. Also, the animation and sound design are outstanding. A building explodes when it is disassembled, emitting a pleasant crunchy sound. But the actual mechanic behind it is a huge pain, requiring you to make buildings either accessible by river or through air tram stops — which can only be built on rocks.

Suddenly, the increasingly deindustrialized landscape becomes replete with rails and artificial rivers, as you do scummy reverse engineering to attempt to remove the buildings you’ve placed, once again clogging up the landscape. You can’t beat a scenario until all the buildings are gone. I would be happy to buy into the idea that rewilding — and removing your footprint — ostensibly requires complex machinery, but the jump from atmospheric to complicated once again is grating.

Image from Free Lives/DevolverDigital

It’s hard to tease out that line between satisfying complexity and convoluted complexity. Typically, weighty simulators tend to feel a little more open-ended — even if they have scenario objectives — because the buildings you place interact with one another in real time or chain to form automation. You can also download In Terra NilThis makes it feel more rigid, solidified, and ready for you to move forward with your plans. There is less emphasis on the interlocking structure and more about building order and placement. There are many ways you could rewild the landscape you’re given, but you’re always building on top of what you’ve already created. Where you might expect a city builder to open up and widen the amount of creative expression you’re given as the game advances, Terra NilThere is a limitless number of possibilities. What you can place, in the late-game, depends entirely on what you’ve already done to the map. It is possible to run out space for certain biomes, or the tramways that you require. It is easy to get stuck in corners, even without realizing.

This isn’t the end of the world. After beating a scenario, you’re given the option to replay the biome as many times as you’d like — and thanks to procedural generation, these maps will always have some variance. Within these replays, you can be incredibly intentional, or you can put the game on “gardener” setting for a truly atmospheric experience. I’ve personally enjoyed playing it on this chiller mode, and just stuffing my biomes full of as many animals as possible.

I’m also open to the idea that the preconceived notions I have around the genre — and the way that restorative, or visually lush, games get labeled “cozy” — negatively influences my perception. To be clear, I love “cozy” games. But I also think that some people view these games pejoratively, with the assumption that joy and comfort can’t be taken as seriously as heavier topics — or that the gameplay in these games is more straightforward. To avoid making assumptions about this, I seek out games that offer something to heal and also take chances with the game mechanics. Just because I think so, doesn’t that make me happy? Terra NilIt is somewhere in between complex and atmospheric, but without any strong ramp for its difficulty.

While I was playing, I thought. I love you.It was because I had to build so many tramway poles, pylons, and other structures just in order to make a complete scenario. When the demo was released, I replayed it over and over to get excited about what came next. Although some aspects of the game’s gameplay feel a bit rigid, it is still a great example of how to promote environmental stewardship in a genre where the opposite tends. Despite the roadblocks, that sense of wonder is enough to bring me back into the game’s world.

Terra Nil On March 28, the game will go live on Android, iOS, Windows PC. Devolver Digital gave the pre-release code to review the game on PC. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions from products sold via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.