Terra Nil

Terra-Nil is a short and sweet relaxing builder game about restoring barren lands.

The reverse city builder is trickier than it appears, but utterly committed to its environmental vision, taking the genre - and every level - to new places.

A puzzle-citybuilder about rejuvenating the environment, Terra Nil has an almost lovely message, but it's buried beneath tedious chores.

I love resource management games. Whether they be city builders, farming sims, or even a side mechanic in a game that largely focuses on other gameplay styles. Terra Nil immediately stands out as something completely different from its contemporaries in the genre as the game operates in entirely the opposite manner. The key thesis of Terra Nil is the return of nature, instead of the destruction of...

Terra Nil is a relaxing strategy game with an optimistic vision. What if it was actually possible to fix a devastated planet? You know, bring back the greenery, the biodiversity, and the animal life? While Earth might require a bit more work, you can at least fix this tiny version of it. Although there’s a lot of patient labor involved, the end results are quite beautiful.

Terra Nil is one of the most beautiful and peaceful games I’ve played in quite some time. Turning the procedurally generated wastelands into paradises has been really therapeutic. Free Lives not only did a great job of creating a reverse city builder but showed us why we need to give back to nature. Even with some frustrating elements, Terra Nil is worth your time.

More solitaire than strategy, Terra Nil is still a soothing, satisfying and educational environmentalist puzzler.

Terra Nil is an awesome little game that has you trying to give back to nature instead of destroy the land, which is such a nice departure. And with minor compromises and our control scheme, it is fantastic to play on the Steam Deck.

When all’s said and done, you leave, and nature remains. It’s a fitting end to Terra Nil. It’s a small-scale, unique city-builder that is short and sweet. It does just what it needs to, and moves on. Maybe that’s not as in-depth or infinitely playable as some strategy heads might want from a city-builder. But I personally loved that even Terra Nil itself is about entering, making a positive impact...

We all know, and are aware, and are doing our best to help the world with more environmental-friendly practices, be it with the simpler things like not using plastic straws and shopping bags, to changing our lightbulbs to more sustainable LED ones. That being said, there are times in which this discourse feels a bit too smug for the common folk. Between more arrogant electric car owners bragging a...

Video games often rely on the trope of saving the world from an impending apocalypse. Those world-ending events usually come via megalomaniacal supervillains or extraterrestrial invaders, but what happens when the threat to our planet is us? Terra Nil poses that question, placing you in charge of restoring a world ravaged by the effects of climate change and human civilization. The result is a dis...

Terra Nil avoids getting tired over its various levels, in part because of the different approach required for different parts of the world. Using geothermal energy in an arctic, volcanic climate is very different from building up coral reefs off the coast of an island, while the final stage tasks the player with dredging a flooded city to create a natural paradise. It's a replayable game, too, pa...