Much of the traditional city builder template revolves around what you take from the land: build your base, design machines to extract resources from the ground, and pave everything in sight to build your industrial complex. You take from the land, but never give anything back – maybe you outline some manicured lawn or public green space, but you do it for comfort, not sustainability. You do it for better ratings or a happier population, not because you’re trying to give back to the planet that supports you and is the foundation of all your ambitions.
land zero Wholeheartedly reject the concept of city builders. Instead, it asks you to do the exact opposite of what you might be used to in your genre competitors; rejuvenate, rejuvenate, rejuvenate. You land on a dead planet—a withered, dry place poisoned by the short-sighted industrialization of a long-gone population—and set about trying to bring it back to normal. Whether it’s a tundra, a tropical island, or a ruined city, Terra Nil will take you to a piece of dead soil and say “save it,” no questions asked.
From here, a pattern starts to emerge. You need to reinvigorate a struggling ecosystem in three phases. The first phase always involves capturing some energy from the landscape—but there are no fossil-fuel-burning factories here, and no cooling towers in sight. Instead, you need to figure out which environment is better suited to generate electricity for you – for example, could you use a wind turbine or geothermal plant to power a toxic scrubber?
Once you’ve powered up, and extracted the toxins from the ground, you can start working on transforming this parched brown and beige disaster zone into something more… verdant. Placing machines that can grow grass and seed the land for you is a very cold affair, and is a gentle tidal pull into Terra Nil’s core gameplay conceit: environmental puzzles. Finding the right balance between how much energy you can draw from the local area and how much ground you can cover with green is the first step in Terra Nil’s enticing gameplay loop–and it’s likely to get you hooked quickly. After all, you can’t leave this beautiful place, but it’s only half restored, isn’t it?
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you can not. So, next step, you need to increase biodiversity. This can vary greatly across the game’s four levels – do you make the bamboo nursery crawl over the abandoned foundations of ancient skyscrapers and bring the world back to life? Are you trying to bring coral reefs back to once oil-flooded oceans? Have you carefully placed algae greenhouses to grow algae forests on otherwise uninhabitable rocky surfaces?
Here, the inexplicable elements of Terra Nil become even more apparent. Cultivating tundra, for example, requires you to plant irrigators on high ground while maintaining low humidity. Thus, you can burn some of the green space – ideal for encouraging more biome diversity – and satisfy the tundra requirements while building more biodiversity. There aren’t too many moving parts to get overwhelming, but enough that you start to see the gears turning as you get into the finer parts of ecosystem development. Perfect the balance and watch all the different biomes start working together? There is a sense of satisfaction unrivaled in urban construction spaces.
Considering that you can only draw power from very scarce energy supplies, and how little you can responsibly draw from the planet, the game’s resource management elements blend beautifully with variety. Using as few buildings as possible, leaving as few traces as possible, you will play by the rules of Terra Nil. This will get you ready for the third and final part of your event: packing your bags. Don’t leave traces of you ever being here. The antithesis of the urban construction genre, achieved to great effect.
This is the hardest part of the game — and perhaps that’s the message that developer Free Lives is trying to convey. Supporting conservation is all well and good, but the hardest part is taking a complete step back and letting nature take its course. So you build recycling bins to break down all the planted machinery. You collect your buildings with drones, load them onto dropships, and take off. On your first level, you can be messy; spreading buildings widely, trying to convert every inch of the map. But then you realize that there are consequences—packing is more difficult. So, in later levels, you can keep things more focused, or build along easy-to-definition lines to make it easier to pack up when the time comes.
From place to place, you’ll feel your mastery of recycling improve. Optional small goals (humidity over 80%, toxicity below 10%, etc.) will encourage you to operate beyond the bare minimum, and seeing the weather effects due to your hard work is breathtaking. One level in particular, The Return of the Northern Lights rewards you if you rejuvenate the area well enough.
The entire rewards cycle at the Terra Nil Center is designed to allow you to invest in the natural regeneration of the planet. From seeding to fine-tuning biome balance, there’s no game like this in its class or wider – with an environmentally conscious, utopian outlook. Free Lives’ experimental anti-city builder is a clever puzzle-solver dressed in a wonderful message, breathing cool, fresh air into a genre that’s been stagnant for a while. Take a deep breath and feel the change in the air.
