I think Terra Nil is more than the sum of its parts, and the result is a minor triumph. It's a game that's got something quite thought provoking to say, and everything in the game supports that message, its ideas. It's an example of how focus and minimalism can enable indie games to achieve quite a lot.
Terra Nil has two big ideas: the first is a message about environmentalism, about climate change, and about how we do and should relate to nature. I'll return to this because I think the game has politics that are surprisingly confrontational and sensational, and I want to talk about that at length.
The other big idea is that's it's a "cozy" city builder. It also pitches itself as "Sim City in reverse", because much of the game concerns itself with responsibly dismantling structures rather than just building, building, building for the sake of making lines on graphs go up and to the right. But mechanically, what really sets it apart from other city builder/planner or economy builder/supply chain management games is the coziness.
"Cozy" is an idea in game design that's gained traction in recent years. It started with the notion of "cozy" as in the particular aesthetic of wearing a warm sweater and hanging out by a roaring fire with cocoa. But eventually the mechanical idea that was extracted from this was, to put it bluntly, easiness. The notion is that games don't have to resist you all the time to be interesting or meaningful. Of course, an experience with no actual mechanical, gameplay challenges can still be plenty meaningful and even challenging emotionally. Think here of the more poignant vignettes in What Remains of Edith Finch or the joy at the end of Gone Home when you learn what happened to the runaway teens. But "cozy" goes beyond this to also avoid evoking any "negative" emotions in the player. A cozy game should be comfortable, friendly, accommodating.
One the one hand, this troubles me. It seems to me that media or art should try to challenge the audience, to provoke thought and even discomfort. Games in particular have a bad habit of being unchallenging creatively, emphasizing quantity over quality. I'm thinking here primarily of Ubisoft open world games, that consistently brag about how big their maps are, or how many outpost attack missions there are, while not discussing how their games haven't had a new idea in them since Assassin's Creed II. Those games aren't quite cozy in that they do present a little bit of challenge, but once you invest a few hours into learning them, you inevitably reach some equilibrium with the game such that knocking out more of the endless side missions isn't a challenge, per se. It's just time consuming. Just something you can do without thinking all that hard about it, when you just want to kill a few hours before bed.
So I have a reflective skepticism of cozy games, because it's so easy to feel like they're just not very interesting, or pandering to an audience that doesn't want to have to make much effort to engage with some content, neither in the sense of skilled gameplay or critical thought. I mean, is it that you wanted to make your game "cozy", or that you couldn't figure out how to meaningfully explore your ideas using the tools that only games among artistic mediums has? But I'm very conflicted about it, because, well, I also like feeling cozy. And it's a valid emotional area for games to explore, just as much as emotions like fear or anger or excitement. And besides, it's generally not hard to tell the difference between mass-produced Ubisoft drivel, which has had all its sharp edges and unorthodox thoughts refined away by a conference room full of producers and markerting executives and sensitivity readers, and something that was created by an individual or a small group of people who really care about what they're doing and have something they insist on saying to you. There's just no mistaking that kind of authenticity in a work.
And Terra Nil is really, earnestly beautiful. But I'm not done talking about mechanics, so I don't want to get into theme yet.
So, the mechanics are pretty cozy, in that it's not very hard. Interestingly, the game does have a whole of systems. There's resources to track, there are some shallow supply lines you have to work out (you can't build a forest unless you have some ashy nutrients, which means you need to start a fire, which means you need to install a solar amplifier), you might have to do a little planning (for instance, you'll need power in that far-off corner of the map later, so make sure to use excavators to create rivers now, so you don't have to contaminate the nice forests you'll have planted). And different goals interact with each other: if you make a bunch of wetlands as instructed, you might find that it drives up the humidity, which will be a problem when you need to plant another kind of biome that needs dry conditions. So there's plenty here to think about, and I think the game is more engaging than most cozy stuff for that reason.
What's interesting is how well-tuned the difficulty is. I'm not particularly good at city builders. I get the appeal, I think they're interesting games, but I just never enjoy the level of long-term thinking you have to do to succeed in these games, and how many complex production system you have to learn to decide what to build first. But here, I found it pretty hard to lose a map. Even if you make some grave mistake, the game is generous enough with resources that you can buy your way out of any problem.
What should be the trickiest part of the game is its cleverest idea: after you build all the buildings and doohickeys to clean the wasteland and replant it, you have to dismantle it all, pack it up and leave the restored natural scene pristine. A strategic challenge, right? You must have to plan ahead really carefully to make sure what you've done will be reversible.
Ehhh... not really. By the time you finish any map, you'll have enough animal populations and probably rain every minute, which leaves your setup in a strong enough positive feedback loop that you can no longer really run out of resources, and it doesn't matter if you destroy loads of forest or marshes, because once you hit the thresholds demanded by the game at a given stage, it doesn't mind if you fall back below them. So you can get away with some pretty frantic and silly cleanup antics. I also found I never really needed to pay attention to the animal needs. Just pump up the temperature and humidity, tear down all your junk and the animal happiness will take care of itself. There's a couple maps where you need to bring the temperature down instead of up, but that's not any harder. At most you might need to drop some bridges to expand what tiles your animal thinks is in its habitat.
But that's fine. Like I said, I don't love city planners, and I don't love investing 4 hours into a game only to find I made a mistake in minute 1 and I have to start everything over. Terra Nil walks a razor's edge of making me feel insanely relaxed and joyful, while also feeling like I'm finally mastering one of these city builder games, but without requiring me to actually play it particularly well! Frankly, it's a good feeling and I didn't get tired of it. I loved it.
Now I want to talk about thematic stuff. Obviously this game is about the environment, and I think it's correct to guess that its authors care about the natural world. I think the focus on dismantling your equipment also pretty clearly makes this a game about degrowth. That's all cool, and I'm with it.
I think there's two further big assumptions the game makes, and both reveal ideology. First, the game has a strong opinion about man's relationship to nature, and it is that we don't belong there. Nature is for trees, and rivers, and especially animals. In the game, once you get normal weather going again (rain, or snow, depending on the map) and build viable habitats for a variety of animal species, the environment you built takes care of itself. Then, your job is to remove every trace of your presence and get in your spaceship and fuck off. That's how every map ends and even how the game's sketch of a plot ends: literally you build a rocket and leave the planet after you fixed it, off to terraform some other joint. But does this make sense? Man has harmed nature, yes, but man cannot exist apart from nature. Environmentalism isn't about cutting ourselves off for nature as penance for our sins, it's about figuring out how humans can fit into it more harmoniously. The idea of erasing man from nature is perplexing. It feels to me almost like an idealization of suicide.
Paradoxically, though, the game's second big assumption is that the same man who is unworthy of being in nature has mastered it, utterly. In Terra Nil, you use a lot of frankly magical devices that can purify contaminated soil and water perfectly reliably, with no side effects, and using so little energy you can power it with a single windmill. Generally, the thesis is that we can geoengineer our way out of the climate change death spiral. This betrays a faith in technology, a conviction that problems that we've incurred by recklessly employing new technologies will be resolved by simply employing sufficiently advanced new technologies. I don't think this is a fringe position, or anything, but I also don't think it's uniformly or even necessarily popularly held among all people who call themselves "environmentalists". I actually found this frustrating: while playing the game, I couldn't stop thinking about how nice it would be to work on environmental recovery for a living. To spend time among nature, knowing that you're working honestly to achieve something meaningful. But the problem is you can't really do that, because we don't quite know what to do about climate change. If it were really just a matter of building new machines, then I think we'd have done it by now. The challenges of saving the world from climate change are overwhelmingly political and social, not technological. None of that is represented in Terra Nil. Once again, man and all his ugly bickering and frustrating interjections is erased, unworthy of being part of Terra Nil's beautiful scenes.
But frankly, even if I disagree with one or two of its points, I give Terra Nil a lot of credit for making points coherent and interesting enough to even be worth disagreeing with. At the end of a Ubisoft game, I would feel sort of confused and ashamed. Why had I spent 60 hours of my brief life playing that game I don't even like? At the end of Terra Nil, I felt like I'd shed a lot of stress and had a nice long think about the climate. That's a great experience for a game to give you. Everyone should play Terra Nil.
Terra Nil has two big ideas: the first is a message about environmentalism, about climate change, and about how we do and should relate to nature. I'll return to this because I think the game has politics that are surprisingly confrontational and sensational, and I want to talk about that at length.
The other big idea is that's it's a "cozy" city builder. It also pitches itself as "Sim City in reverse", because much of the game concerns itself with responsibly dismantling structures rather than just building, building, building for the sake of making lines on graphs go up and to the right. But mechanically, what really sets it apart from other city builder/planner or economy builder/supply chain management games is the coziness.
"Cozy" is an idea in game design that's gained traction in recent years. It started with the notion of "cozy" as in the particular aesthetic of wearing a warm sweater and hanging out by a roaring fire with cocoa. But eventually the mechanical idea that was extracted from this was, to put it bluntly, easiness. The notion is that games don't have to resist you all the time to be interesting or meaningful. Of course, an experience with no actual mechanical, gameplay challenges can still be plenty meaningful and even challenging emotionally. Think here of the more poignant vignettes in What Remains of Edith Finch or the joy at the end of Gone Home when you learn what happened to the runaway teens. But "cozy" goes beyond this to also avoid evoking any "negative" emotions in the player. A cozy game should be comfortable, friendly, accommodating.
One the one hand, this troubles me. It seems to me that media or art should try to challenge the audience, to provoke thought and even discomfort. Games in particular have a bad habit of being unchallenging creatively, emphasizing quantity over quality. I'm thinking here primarily of Ubisoft open world games, that consistently brag about how big their maps are, or how many outpost attack missions there are, while not discussing how their games haven't had a new idea in them since Assassin's Creed II. Those games aren't quite cozy in that they do present a little bit of challenge, but once you invest a few hours into learning them, you inevitably reach some equilibrium with the game such that knocking out more of the endless side missions isn't a challenge, per se. It's just time consuming. Just something you can do without thinking all that hard about it, when you just want to kill a few hours before bed.
So I have a reflective skepticism of cozy games, because it's so easy to feel like they're just not very interesting, or pandering to an audience that doesn't want to have to make much effort to engage with some content, neither in the sense of skilled gameplay or critical thought. I mean, is it that you wanted to make your game "cozy", or that you couldn't figure out how to meaningfully explore your ideas using the tools that only games among artistic mediums has? But I'm very conflicted about it, because, well, I also like feeling cozy. And it's a valid emotional area for games to explore, just as much as emotions like fear or anger or excitement. And besides, it's generally not hard to tell the difference between mass-produced Ubisoft drivel, which has had all its sharp edges and unorthodox thoughts refined away by a conference room full of producers and markerting executives and sensitivity readers, and something that was created by an individual or a small group of people who really care about what they're doing and have something they insist on saying to you. There's just no mistaking that kind of authenticity in a work.
And Terra Nil is really, earnestly beautiful. But I'm not done talking about mechanics, so I don't want to get into theme yet.
So, the mechanics are pretty cozy, in that it's not very hard. Interestingly, the game does have a whole of systems. There's resources to track, there are some shallow supply lines you have to work out (you can't build a forest unless you have some ashy nutrients, which means you need to start a fire, which means you need to install a solar amplifier), you might have to do a little planning (for instance, you'll need power in that far-off corner of the map later, so make sure to use excavators to create rivers now, so you don't have to contaminate the nice forests you'll have planted). And different goals interact with each other: if you make a bunch of wetlands as instructed, you might find that it drives up the humidity, which will be a problem when you need to plant another kind of biome that needs dry conditions. So there's plenty here to think about, and I think the game is more engaging than most cozy stuff for that reason.
What's interesting is how well-tuned the difficulty is. I'm not particularly good at city builders. I get the appeal, I think they're interesting games, but I just never enjoy the level of long-term thinking you have to do to succeed in these games, and how many complex production system you have to learn to decide what to build first. But here, I found it pretty hard to lose a map. Even if you make some grave mistake, the game is generous enough with resources that you can buy your way out of any problem.
What should be the trickiest part of the game is its cleverest idea: after you build all the buildings and doohickeys to clean the wasteland and replant it, you have to dismantle it all, pack it up and leave the restored natural scene pristine. A strategic challenge, right? You must have to plan ahead really carefully to make sure what you've done will be reversible.
Ehhh... not really. By the time you finish any map, you'll have enough animal populations and probably rain every minute, which leaves your setup in a strong enough positive feedback loop that you can no longer really run out of resources, and it doesn't matter if you destroy loads of forest or marshes, because once you hit the thresholds demanded by the game at a given stage, it doesn't mind if you fall back below them. So you can get away with some pretty frantic and silly cleanup antics. I also found I never really needed to pay attention to the animal needs. Just pump up the temperature and humidity, tear down all your junk and the animal happiness will take care of itself. There's a couple maps where you need to bring the temperature down instead of up, but that's not any harder. At most you might need to drop some bridges to expand what tiles your animal thinks is in its habitat.
But that's fine. Like I said, I don't love city planners, and I don't love investing 4 hours into a game only to find I made a mistake in minute 1 and I have to start everything over. Terra Nil walks a razor's edge of making me feel insanely relaxed and joyful, while also feeling like I'm finally mastering one of these city builder games, but without requiring me to actually play it particularly well! Frankly, it's a good feeling and I didn't get tired of it. I loved it.
Now I want to talk about thematic stuff. Obviously this game is about the environment, and I think it's correct to guess that its authors care about the natural world. I think the focus on dismantling your equipment also pretty clearly makes this a game about degrowth. That's all cool, and I'm with it.
I think there's two further big assumptions the game makes, and both reveal ideology. First, the game has a strong opinion about man's relationship to nature, and it is that we don't belong there. Nature is for trees, and rivers, and especially animals. In the game, once you get normal weather going again (rain, or snow, depending on the map) and build viable habitats for a variety of animal species, the environment you built takes care of itself. Then, your job is to remove every trace of your presence and get in your spaceship and fuck off. That's how every map ends and even how the game's sketch of a plot ends: literally you build a rocket and leave the planet after you fixed it, off to terraform some other joint. But does this make sense? Man has harmed nature, yes, but man cannot exist apart from nature. Environmentalism isn't about cutting ourselves off for nature as penance for our sins, it's about figuring out how humans can fit into it more harmoniously. The idea of erasing man from nature is perplexing. It feels to me almost like an idealization of suicide.
Paradoxically, though, the game's second big assumption is that the same man who is unworthy of being in nature has mastered it, utterly. In Terra Nil, you use a lot of frankly magical devices that can purify contaminated soil and water perfectly reliably, with no side effects, and using so little energy you can power it with a single windmill. Generally, the thesis is that we can geoengineer our way out of the climate change death spiral. This betrays a faith in technology, a conviction that problems that we've incurred by recklessly employing new technologies will be resolved by simply employing sufficiently advanced new technologies. I don't think this is a fringe position, or anything, but I also don't think it's uniformly or even necessarily popularly held among all people who call themselves "environmentalists". I actually found this frustrating: while playing the game, I couldn't stop thinking about how nice it would be to work on environmental recovery for a living. To spend time among nature, knowing that you're working honestly to achieve something meaningful. But the problem is you can't really do that, because we don't quite know what to do about climate change. If it were really just a matter of building new machines, then I think we'd have done it by now. The challenges of saving the world from climate change are overwhelmingly political and social, not technological. None of that is represented in Terra Nil. Once again, man and all his ugly bickering and frustrating interjections is erased, unworthy of being part of Terra Nil's beautiful scenes.
But frankly, even if I disagree with one or two of its points, I give Terra Nil a lot of credit for making points coherent and interesting enough to even be worth disagreeing with. At the end of a Ubisoft game, I would feel sort of confused and ashamed. Why had I spent 60 hours of my brief life playing that game I don't even like? At the end of Terra Nil, I felt like I'd shed a lot of stress and had a nice long think about the climate. That's a great experience for a game to give you. Everyone should play Terra Nil.