Terra Nil
is an environmental Strategy Indie Game released on March 28, 2023. Developed by Free Lives, published by Devolver Digital, and described as a "reverse city builder", the goal is to take a barren Polluted Wasteland and restore it to life.
Terra Nil provides examples of:
- After the End: Something happened to make the world this desolate, but the nature of the cataclysm is unknown so far.
- Cue the Rain: As a reward for getting the correct humidity and temperature levels, rain will start to pour randomly, which further cleans wasteland tiles. This changes to snow in the Arctic biome, though it has the same effect.
- Gaia's Lament: At first glance it's a Downplayed version of this trope, with the desolation being "only" confined to a small parcel of land, but when you complete the Demo it pans out to show that it covers an entire planet, and you only restored one smallish continent, meaning your work is cut out for you. The trope is ultimately Reconstructed, by restoring the land to fertility.
- Ghibli Hills: The entire point of the game is to turn broken, sterile wastes into thriving ecosystems. The first mapset hues closest to this trope, as you create a patchwork of lush grasslands, forests, wetlands, and flowered fields.
- Green Aesop: The Game. You use technology to help the nature, and then in the final phase, you pack up, leaving no traces of the technology behind.
- Guide Dang It!: Some of the levels allow you to get stuck in an unwinnable state or lock out optional goals which only becomes apparent later. It is often possible to raise the temperature or humidity but not lower them, making certain climate targets permanently missable. It is sometimes possible to reduce the potential area for particular biomes so much that the required biodiversity targets cannot be reached without restarting the level.
- Heal It With Fire: In two of the maps, setting controlled fires is an essential part of gameplay, as it creates nutrient-rich ash from which forests can grow. The Combustor which burns only a small area is also important for its ability to quickly increase the zone's temperature.
- Heal It with Water: Creating a river will depollute the land tiles right next to the water tile. If you manage to get the temperature and humidity just right, it will sporadically start to rain, cleansing and greening new tiles.
- Hope Sprouts Eternal: Your efforts and careful management can turn a toxic lifeless landscape into lush fields and forests.
- Numerical Hard: Increasing difficulty results in starting each level with less cash and buildings costing more to place.
- Polluted Wasteland: The game starts out in a barren, sterile waste contaminated with pollutants. Your goal is to clean it, seed it with fresh life, and turn it back into a flourishing ecosystem.
- Reclaimed by Nature: The fourth map set is the ruins of a coastal city, one version being mostly submerged. The ruined buildings are used as foundations in place of rocks while you reclaim the zone as a deciduous forest.
- Scenery Porn: Once a region has been fully restored and the infrastructure extracted and recycled, the game gives the player an option to stop and admire their work for a while before moving on.
- Sickly Green Glow: In the City mapset, ruptured waste bunkers release green radioactive gas. The area must be cleansed and the bunker sealed with a Heliocage to progress.
- Simulation Game: The game is a simulation of an extensive ecological reconstruction project, and requires you to manage the careful restructuring of natural environments and reintroduction of plants and fauna.
- Swamps Are Evil: Inverted. Swamps are an essential part of the recovery process and have important ecological functions (just like in real life).
- Terraform: Primarily of the "introducing organisms" variety; the central gameplay concept is detoxication of the land and the planting of successive stages of flora to build stable ecosystems from the ground up. Temperature and humidity control is also present, and there's terrain sculpting tools that allow the relocation or removal of land to meet certain objectives.
- Virtuous Bees: Placing beehives in trees generate flowers in the surrounding field, creating the Fynbos biome. This biome is both required to restore the ecosystem and can be burnt to generate the ash needed to grow forests.
