Reduce, Reuse, Replenish in Terra Nil

In a world where big, existential problems can feel impossible it's nice to be able to dissociate a little bit.  One of those problems is climate change and the human caused impacts on Earth's environment.  Sure, I can take personal steps to do things to help, but that just feels so little.  Just imagining being able to fix these major problems is some serious escapism and is exactly what Terra Nil does.

What is it?

Steam uses the following tags to describe Terra Nil: relaxing, nature, strategy, puzzle, and (somewhat inappropriately) city-builder.  I would agree with all of those except the city-builder one.  Terra Nil challenges players to restore the environments on a planet that has been heavily damaged by human-caused pollution.  The goal is to use your limited resources to restore certain biomes, climate conditions, and animals to various regions of a ruined planet.

How much playtime can I expect?

Like most games it can vary depending on how thorough you want to be.  If you simply want to accomplish the baseline goals to pass a mission it could be ~10 hours.  If you want to try to accomplish all the goals (go for 100%) you could probably push it over 20.  It's not a long game, but it's also not overly short either.

Pros:

+ Terra Nil is definitely deserving of the "relaxing" tag.  The music and laidback gameplay offer up the perfect opportunity to de-stress while gaming.  The most stressful part is when you realize you've messed up and have to figure out how to correct your mistakes.

+ The gameplay is relatively simple to understand and is the right level of challenging to keep it engaging but not too stressful.  Your dropship initially grants you a set amount of resources and your goal is to use those resources to place various structures to help replenish the environment.  As you reach certain goals you gain more resources that can give you a bit of a cushion to push toward meeting additional goals (such as climate goals).  Before you leave each map you have to remove any trace of your activities by recycling all your structures.  Ultimately each map wants you to meet a set of climate goals, restore certain biomes, and provide habitat for certain animals.

+ Multiple biomes with their own plant life and animals.  There are temperate, tropical, and arctic zones that each have their own challenges.  On arctic maps you must clean up the polluted snow first and then work to restore the environment.  It's fun to see the different plants and animals in each zone.

+ Each time you finish a level there is the ability to "appreciate" the restored environment.  The regular UI disappears and the camera pans and focuses on your restored area.  It's a cool feature that lets you have a bit of time to enjoy the fruits of your virtual labors.

A screenshot of a completed map.

+ Along with the "appreciate" function, there's also a fun photo mode that will take a full screenshot of your restored map and save it.

+ You can easily restart a stage or entire mission.

Cons:

- The gameplay is fairly easy to understand, but there are parts of it that aren't explained really at all.  For example, when you place certain structures there are numbers that pop up that can be either a green + or a red =.  Sometimes these numbers appear and sometimes they don't.  I assume that they are showing how many grid squares your structure is covering (and the negative numbers represent overlap or ineffective placement).

- You can "undo" one move/placement (per item placed--say you place something somewhere wrong, you get to use one undo).  In some ways this provides extra challenge, but in others, it's kind of annoying.

- There are many different kinds of structures but you don't get much time to get used to them before a new set is introduced.  It would be nice to have at least a couple of maps to get a feel for how to place/utilize items.

- At the end of each level there's always this awkward part where you need to satisfy the needs of the various animal species that appear on your map.  Each group of animals has a little informational chart that depicts what they need to reach "happiness," but it's another thing that isn't explained particularly well.  The information in the chart isn't terribly helpful--you mostly figure out that you want each animal to be in the green part of the bar chart.  Making this happen can require using a special structure that allows you to relocation animals to different parts of the map.  Passing levels requires getting a certain number of animal species to the "happy" level.  There's a lot of trial and error involved in getting it right.

Recommendation:

Terra Nil is a relaxing experience that is oddly satisfying.  Seeing the beauty of the environments you just restored is a nice feeling.  Unfortunately I think certain parts of the game are poorly explained and suffer from a lack of information.  Ultimately though, you can succeed and have a pleasant experience.  It is fairly short but does have some replayability in the form of going back to 100% the goals on each map.  I'd grab it on sale.