TERRA NIL
Developer Free Lives Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC Release TBA
This ‘reverse city-builder’ involves taking a barren land and transforming it into a flourishing ecosystem, using machines to turn brown and grey into green and blue. Then, once it’s self-sustaining, your job is to get out of the way, removing any evidence that humans were there. It’s more an environmental puzzle than a strategy game, as you figure out how to sustain a natural equilibrium. An Excavator, for example, creates a riverbed but in doing so poisons the land around it; an Arboretum, meanwhile, uses ash to create forests, but you’ll first need to burn down one of your buildings. It’s a refreshing antidote to the genre’s usual colonialist approach, though we wonder if, in its haste to remove humanity from the equation, it might fuel the wrongheaded notion that there can be no reciprocity between us and our planet. Still, look at all that greenery.