Terra Nil is a city-building game that isn’t really city-building. You play as one, so it’s easy to use that label for shorthand (the developers at Free Lives call it a “reverse city builder”), but Terra Nil doesn’t ask you to build roads or worry about property taxes. It’s more of a “resource management puzzle game” (in publisher Devolve’s words) that borrows heavily from the systems and ideas of city-building.
Instead of taking on the task of developing a vast metropolis on a large patch of empty green grass, here you're in charge of shaping a desert across a series of maps with specific challenges. Faced with a seemingly dead world, you must take a series of steps - most of which involve building something in the right spot - to bring the environment to life, transforming the dusty plains into living forests.
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The first of these steps is usually to put in some machines that pump water underground. Then, build a few more small buildings that clean the soil. Find areas to grow some grass and then maybe see if you can plant some trees. Once you get past these stages, you might want to start experimenting with humidity levels to make everything more humid and before you know it, you'll be growing your own corals and starting fires to encourage new growth.
Almost everything you place on the map has some kind of structure with some kind of effect on the world around it. Each one does a specific thing within a specific range, with effects in specific types of climate. As you can probably guess, this means you have to think very carefully about where you place each building, and it's easy to swap your classic concerns about fire station coverage for irrigation range without much hassle.
Terra Nil's central element is a fairly limited campaign that focuses on restoring a certain amount of life to a desolate world, across a series of different regions, each with its own climate. It's not even really a campaign, more like an extended tutorial of four missions, and there's only so much you can do before it's all over in surprisingly short order. Each map has a fairly linear sequence of things you need to do, so it feels more like you're going through a checklist than actually free-roaming through environmental problems.
The abstract setting means you can't rely on assumptions of existing knowledge about what something does and how it works, and once you're done with the campaign, the later missions are where you might really see the game's puzzle design.
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The best part about Terra Nil is that it's not just a city-builder, it's a city-dismantler. Maps don't end after you've achieved their objectives. Instead, they'll only end after you've "packed up," because there's no point in restoring nature to its original state if you're going to leave a bunch of deactivated pumps and scrubbers lying around. This involves deactivating and recycling every single thing you've built on the map, a hugely relaxing and satisfying way to complete each mission.
Terra Nil may have fantastical land shapes on its map, but the point here is that, centuries in the future, we have so completely destroyed Earth that the entire planet is just a vast uninhabited wasteland.
Terra Nil isn't about dwelling on misery, it's about hope. Instead of showing us a good world and then destroying it, it decides to start with destruction and work its way backwards. Yes, things are bad—later levels reveal maps that aren't just dead, but poisoned—but the entire game is designed to let you do something about it.
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This is not a simulation. Much of the technology you use here is fictional at best. Terra Nil is not a plan to save the climate, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's just a video game puzzle. A small diversion, however unrealistic, that instead of asking us to experience the destruction of the planet, let's try to recover from one.
source of information:kotaku.com
