YoAt first, there is nothing before you but cracked brown earth. This landscape of toxic soil and dry riverbeds is yours to restore on Terra Nil. But the seemingly cumbersome task is made satisfyingly easy for players: all you need to do is place a windmill on a stone surface, where it will provide the machines with electricity. The Toxin Scrubber and Irrigator are crucial, whether you’re restoring a continental zone, polar zone, or part of the rainforest. The scrubber detoxifies the space around it, preparing it for new life to sprout; the irrigator provides the crucial moisture needed to start that process, at least until you have the tools to make it rain.
A polyp collector, once dumped into the sea, will grow you a beautiful coral reef teeming with crustaceans, mollusks and anything else with a shell, and easily recyclable atomic reactors bring heat and electricity to regions where a windmill wind can’t do the job. . Recycling is another vital part of the process, as is the reintroduction of local wildlife. As soon as you’ve restored nature to a region, it’s time for you to go, which means picking up after yourself. Every piece of machinery you place must be collected, before it is recycled into the airship you will eventually depart on. You will leave knowing that the interaction between the local fauna and flora will keep the region alive, without the need for additional human intervention.
This is the juxtaposition at the core of Terra Nil: the game will make you feel almost like a god every time you see trees re-emerge and your first bears emerge from the forest, but by the end of each mission, you’ll have done your job. and they are no longer needed.
The game is mostly about tactical building placement, but it feels more like a puzzle than your average city builder. As you place each machine, you need to make sure that you can restore as much ground as possible, and that they don’t overlap too much, to avoid wasting resources. Likewise, you want to place everything in a way that makes it easy to recycle at the end of the day – your recycling drones, however advanced, 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 easy-to-understand tutorial to a fantastically beautiful in-game guide makes environmental restoration a hassle. The music and sound effects are very relaxing, and after each successfully restored map, there is a moment when you can appreciate your work. While a little 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 as easy if we wanted it to be. All that’s missing is a toxin scrubber.
Terra Nil is out March 28, £20.99. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the Endangered Wildlife Trust.
