In the beginning, there is nothing before you but cracked, brown earth. This landscape of toxic soil and dried-out riverbeds is yours to restore in Terra Nil. But the ostensibly weighty task is made satisfyingly easy for players – all you need to do is to place a windmill on a stone surface, where it will provide machines with electricity. The toxin scrubber and irrigator are crucial, whether you’re restoring a continental zone, a polar zone or a piece of tropical rainforest. The scrubber detoxifies the space around it, getting it ready for new life to spring forth; the irrigator provides the crucial moisture necessary to kickstart that process, at least until you’ve got the tools to make it rain.
A polyp collector, once unloaded into the sea, will grow you a nice coral reef clattering with crustaceans, molluscs and everything else that has a shell, and easily recyclable atomic reactors bring heat and electricity to regions where a windmill can’t do the job. Recycling is another vital part of the process, as is reintroducing local fauna. As soon as you have restored nature in a region, it’s time for you to leave, which means picking up after yourself. Every bit of machinery you set down needs to be collected, before it is recycled into the airship you will eventually depart on. You’re leaving with the knowledge that the interplay between the local fauna and flora will keep the region alive, no further human intervention necessary.
This is the juxtaposition at Terra Nil’s core – the game will make your feel almost godlike every time you see trees re-emerge and your first bears stomp their way out of the woods, but at the end of each mission, you have done your job and are no longer needed.
The game is mostly about the tactical placement of buildings, but it plays more like a puzzle than your average city-builder. As you place each machine, you need to make sure that it can restore as much ground as possible and that they don’t overlap too much, to avoid wasting resources. Similarly, you need to place everything so that it becomes easy to recycle at the end of the day – your recycling drones, as advanced as they are, have their limits.
Even on the hardest of the three difficulty settings, Terra Nil is more forgiving than expected. Everything from its simple interface to an easily understood tutorial and a fantastically beautiful in-game guidebook makes environmental restoration go smoothly. The music and sound effects are very relaxing, and after every successfully restored map, there is a moment where you can just appreciate your handiwork. While a bit more friction wouldn’t have hurt, and the variation from map to map is modest, by keeping it simple, developer Free Lives spreads a clear message: saving the planet could be so easy if we wanted it to be. All that’s missing is a toxin scrubber.
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