Terra Nil: I spent 7 hours on a 30-minute demo.
Through all my years playing games, I’ve killed millions, set continents afire, and hoarded billions in gold, raw materials, and wheels of cheese. Maim, kill, burn — Khorne would be proud.
On my radar of future releases, there are still gods to kill, empires to raze, and wheels of cheese to hoard (just in case). But in the quiet hours where my only company is my insomnia, I found Terra Nil on Steam.
Free demo, quick download, and — birds chirping, gentle piano notes, lush greenery, and wind turbines.
There’s nothing in the way of a story in the demo. Although the goals and the end screen hint toward something, Terra Nil’s demo is focused on letting you experience its mechanics & gorgeous art style. It doesn’t start off pretty. You’re given some resources, represented by leaves, and a randomly generated map. From a bird’s eye view, you’re looking at a barren wasteland. Cracked earth, dust clouds, hollow riverbeds. Your job is covering it all in greenery.
Slowly, on your first playthrough, you unlock structures that help you terraform the land. You use wind turbines for power (no mining for fossil fuels here) and need to keep green-ifying the land to progress. You later get to create new rivers, wetlands, and even do controlled burns. Khorne’s probably still watching because my burns are all but controlled. You even have temperature and humidity targets for the region but the demo is very much focused on you hitting your goals rather than dissecting your performance.
The first run-through of Terra Nil is a delight in discovery and if any of it sounds intriguing, just go play the demo now. It’s free. Watching the dead trees and desolate land come to life again in the painterly tile-based art style is like taking little sips of pure, ethically-sourced, serotonin.
If you ever played any sort of strategy game, you know that first runs tend to be disastrous. You run out of resources, you fumble where you placed what building, and so on. Thankfully, the demo is generous enough with resources that it doesn’t become stressful. Still, you can’t really just throw all your resources away and call it a day. And here we get to an interesting little crossroad: what genre is this and does that matter?
The closest genre would be a city-builder except that, well, you’re not paving over natural beauty in shades of soulless grey. Terra Nil is, in the broad strokes, a strategy and puzzle game. But while an appropriate category, it’s an imperfect one.
Decision-making is the crux of the game, just like good aim is the crux of an FPS. But it’s not all there is. See, those terraforming tools are also like paintbrushes. You decide where to place your wetlands, you pick whether to link two rivers together, what kind of biomes go where, and so on. Creativity thrives under some measure of restraint, and the resources and conditions that the game lays before the player in Terra Nil make for so much replay value.
There’s a key element to anything worth doing and that’s chaos.
My so-called ‘controlled’ burns going overboard and throwing my biome balance out of whack is worrying at first but it creates a little pushback, a little bump in the road to make things exciting. It also gives me an incentive to understand how the game’s different structures function so that there is a degree of skill expression. In another game, I’ll leap into the air and thread a sniper shot between lattices drawn by scarred walls and debris, in Terra Nil I’ll learn just where to place an excavator to best expand my wetlands later on.
Mentally, it’s also a breath of fresh air.
Let’s be real, the news is suffocating. It wears people down, it’s a constant grinding down of hope and willpower. That extends to climate news too. Terra Nil isn’t going to solve anything on its own but it’s a perfect little rest stop. Think of it like an oasis where no one has to tell you to unclench your jaw. It’ll just happen. With those ethically-sourced serotonin sips, you’re also microdosing hope.
I genuinely can’t wait for more. While I haven’t delved into the community Discord server yet, I’m hopeful for the release of Terra Nil. It’s not going to supplant my diet of guns, explosions, and hoarded cabbages, but it will feel like a nice little dessert. Speaking of, a desert region would be amazing.
