For this week’s critical play, I played Terra Nil, a city builder-like puzzle game developed by Free Lives studio. It is a unique blend of strategy and puzzle genre that appeals to general audience, especially fans of sandbox/simulation games. The game is available on mobile, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
The core game loop of the game is straightforward. Every level contains 3 phases, the first of which is to use toxin scrubbers to remove pollution from the wasteland, and use irrigators to turn cleaned ground into basic grassland. In the second phase, you need to construct specific biomes that provide habitat for the local wildlife. Biomes are grown by specialized buildings, for examples, arboretums for forests and hydroponiums for wetlands. Once all biomes are created, you enter the final phase of the level, where you need to recycle all the buildings you’ve built, collect them into an airship, and leave the map with the airship without a trace. In the end, you recover the wasteland into a thriving environment filled with greenery and wildlife.
While the game loop itself is simple, what makes the game a fun and challenging puzzle are the interplay between the environment and the buildings. To start off, many buildings have certain location requirements. For example, wind turbines must be placed on rocks, geothermal stations on lava, and all buildings that require power needs to be situated close to a power source. Many biomes also have specific requirements, like forests that needs burnt ground and lichen that can only grow on rocks. The game has 13 level spread over 4 regions, and each level introduces unique buildings and mechanics that players need to utilize. Buildings also cost money to build, the latter of which you earn by rebuilding the ecosystem or completing certain optional goals. Therefore, you can’t simply plop down toxin scrubbers everywhere to clean the map – one you are out of money, the game is over. The player therefore needs to be intentional about building layout and consider specific steps required to reconstruct biomes.
To add to the complexity of the game, each level has a number of optional goals that the players can achieve. Climate goals require the player to manipulate the climate parameters of the map to a certain range to trigger events. Some of these events are purely cosmetic, but others, such as rain and snow, will remove all pollution on the map and help player towards the end goal of rebuilding the environment. Players can use specialized buildings, such as cloud seeders, to intentionally manipulate the climate, but many buildings also change the climate as a side effect, which must be taken into consideration.
Analyzing the game with the MDA framework, the sandbox/resource management core mechanics, more restrictive than those seen in typical city building games, give rise to the player’s careful deliberation during gameplay as the dynamics, thus presenting the game as a complex obstacle course with interlocked elements. The main aesthetic that the game invokes, like most puzzle games, would be challenge. But as the player unlocks new regions and gets introduced to new buildings, biomes, and mechanics, a sense of discovery is also achieved.
At a glance, Terra Nil does not fit into Scott Kim’s simplest definition of puzzle. The game is surely fun, but given its sandbox character, each level does not seem to have a “right answer”, as there’s no fixed configuration that the player must build to complete the level. However, as one navigates the building constraints, resource management, and biome requirements, player begins to distill certain optimized strategies from the interplay of rules and restrictions. For instance, the best ways to grow lichens in the polar region levels is to dig a lava lake with a small island in the middle, freeze them into rocks, then plop an algae grower on the island. This kind of emergent solution arising from the player’s problem-solving process better aligns with another definition of puzzle that Scott presented, i.e., a rule-based system where one needs to find a solution. By straddling the fine line between sandbox and puzzle genres, Terra Nil creates a space that both feels open-ended and thoughtfully constrained.
Ethics question
While the game is heavily rooted in ecology and environmentalism, one does not need to be a biology or climate activist to play the game. The buildings in the game are fictional or otherwise heavily abstracted, with simple placement requirements and functions. The game also does a good job at presenting and documenting its mechanics. For example, in the building menu, each building has a tooltip window that not only contains a textual description of the building’s function, but also its requirement/production in icons, as well as an animated clip showing the building in action. Various mechanics of the game, such as biomes, wildlife, buildings, and level instructions, are compiled in a logbook that the player can easily lookup. This is a good example of how UI can help present players all the information needed to solve the puzzle, as argued by Bob Gates in Designing the Puzzle.
