Terra Nil

Terra Nil? We’ll talk about it soon. But first let’s talk about Netflix.

The upside of Netflix’s foray into gaming is that Android is getting more games, including many excellent titles that wouldn’t reach the platform otherwise. The downside? Many of these games are horribly optimized. My Pixel 4a isn’t top of the line but it handles most games well enough. Some of these Netflix ports, though? They chug like a Ford Pinto struggling up a steep hill. It’s pretty clear they’ve been developed for superior hardware and then later shoehorned onto phones.

But I digress. Once I came to terms with the constant stutters, Terra Nil proved itself to be a real charmer. Though it’s rather short and not particularly deep, it does a spectacular job of executing its core idea.

Playing Terra Nil reminds me of cleaning up a wilderness campsite before leaving it. When you go camping in the wild, the proper camper’s etiquette is to leave your campsite in better shape than you found it. Terra Nil takes this concept and extends it to an entire planet. Set on the remains of a burnt-out, radioactive world, the game has you rebuild the world so that life – non-human life – can thrive. You’ll nurture vegetation, burn underbrush to create fertile soil, evaporate oceans to raise the local humidity, and lure animals to the Eden you create. When all that is done, you pack up your fancy terraforming technology and head to the next biome – leaving without a trace.

On a mechanical level, the gameplay is not unlike a typical city builder: You place buildings and they modify the nearby area. Irrigators cause grass to sprout up, dredgers pull earth up from the ocean floor, combustors burn vegetation to boost the ambient temperature, and so on. Building by building, you restore the pallid husk of the world into a vibrant, colorful paradise, with relaxing music accompanying you every step along the way. It all adds up to be a very meditative experience – one that’s hard to put down.

It’s a shame, then, that Terra Nil is quite short. But given that I paid nothing upfront for the game, I don’t feel too put off by its brevity. A bigger issue, however, is its linearity. While the gameplay isn’t totally linear, each biome does feel like there’s only one right way to solve it, and straying from that path will lead you to running out of the resources you need for building. No resources means game over. Because your resource budget is tight, there are no opportunities to fail spectacularly, as you can find in more opened-ended games. In Terra Nil the end comes quickly, and the difference between success and failure is subtle. When I hit a dead end and had to try again, my strategy never changed. Positioning my buildings with slightly more care was always enough to make up the difference between victory and defeat.

And I suppose that’s fine. Not every game needs to be SimEarth: The Living Planet. But when I engage with Terra Nil, it feels like I’m creating the interior of a snow globe rather than a real place – all beauty with no dynamism. Though I doubt I’ll return to the biomes I cleaned up, I did enjoy the five-or-so hours I spent with the game, and if the developers add more content, I’d be happy to check it out – doubly so if Netflix and the developers can squeeze a bit more performance out of the Android port!