Sim game Terra Nil accepts the apocalypse — then moves past it

polygon.com:

Management sims have made me into a villain. If playing a simulator game is like playing god, then I’m certainly a wrathful one. In Factorio, I remind myself “the factory must grow” as I fight bug hordes that, understandably, attack my base as pollution saturates their settlements. In Frostpunk, I force workers to endure 18-hour shifts and sawdust-gruel meals, all while living in an impromptu shantytown.

Terra Nil is a balm for this kind of aggressive gameplay. In this “reverse city builder,” as developer Free Lives has described it on the game’s Steam page, you rewild desiccated and barren land across four major biomes in a series of four scenarios. It’s a game for this era of climate anxiety, where we’ve gone past the climate “point of no return.” Healing landscapes across Earth’s biomes is the ultimate comfort fantasy — especially amid a sea of games premised on destruction and dominion — where reversing the toll of habitat destruction comes at the click of the mouse. But the game also has an identity crisis, where these meditative tile-placement mechanics chafe against the complexity of its late-game systems.

Terra Nil’s themes of rebirth and reconstruction are translated beautifully through its delightful visuals and an ASMR-like soundscape full of clicks, rain sounds, and wind riffling gently through the grass. It’s viscerally satisfying, almost dreamlike work, slowly reviving dead, crisp-looking land with lush pine, bamboo, or mangrove forests. You revive oceans with coral reefs and thickets of kelp in which sea turtles can thrive. You rebuild ice caps, making a home for virtual penguins, even as they’re threatened in real life.

Early gameplay is purely atmospheric, in the vein of tile placement games like