I am smitten! Terra Nil has rocked my world. And I tell you what: I would never have expected it from the maker of BroForce. I love that game dearly, but it’s a reckless action game where heroes tear pixelated lands apart. This, on the other hand, Terra Nil, is a serene game about restoring them.
Terra Nil preview
- Developer: Free Lives
- Publisher: Devolver
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Coming to Steam. Release date TBA
It’s a sort of city-building game. “Sort of” because you don’t actually want people to come and live in what you create. You want nature to. You want birds and bees and animals to repopulate what begins as a scorched piece of Earth. A barren wasteland, earth cracked, trees dead. Nothing lives here. But with your futuristic array of environmental machines, you can change that.
These machines slowly enable you to transform the land. For instance: your first lesson is to build a wind turbine for power, then a soil cleansing machine to make some land fertile. Then, you greenify the land with another machine, growing grass, bushes and trees. And when you do this, you earn a leaf-resource to buy more things with.
Game jam roots
It looks like Terra Nil was created in a game jam roughly this time last year. There’s an Itch.io page with a prototype you can play, if you want.
But! There’s a strategy to doing this. You can’t build anything wherever you like. Turbines can only be built on small rock formations, and only have a small power radius. Small rock formations are limited. You can create your own, but you need water, and there’s no natural water on the map, so you need to create that too. This all costs leaves, so if you’re not careful, you’ll run out, and have to begin again.
That’s just layer-one of complexity. New layers unlock when you satisfy your main goal. Goal-one was covering a certain amount of the land in greenery. Goal-two, for me, was covering the land in biomes – forest, wetlands and meadow – and I unlocked an array of new machinery to help me do that. But it’s never straightforward. You can’t just plant a forest: you need to burn an area down first to create the ash-rich soil it needs to grow. So, as the game opens up and new objectives filter in, the complexity ramps up.