Games in various construction and management simulation genres, represented by the Roller Coaster Tycoon series or the Cities Skyline series, provide gamers with a sense of joy and achievement in the process of filling empty spaces with their own colors. You can arrange the most basic structures such as roads and water facilities one by one, and later, you can feel the joy of seeing various devices and buildings that are elaborately interlocked and function as you planned.
However, if you keep looking at the spaces that are filled with elaborate details without gaps, sometimes you will come to the moment when you want to go back to the beginning. That moment when you want to remove all the complex buildings and structures and return them to their pristine state, untouched by human hands. If you’re caught up in that mood right now, this game might be the answer. It’s a game that can only be cleared when it’s completely empty, not when it’s full.
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A thousand miles away from terraforming, a wasteland with nothing to a green planet full of natural environments!
In Terra Neil, players are tasked with using limited resources to restore the natural environment in a desolate ruin devoid of flora and fauna. It is necessary to create an environment where various vegetation can live through the process of generating electricity, installing cutting-edge facilities that integrate future science and technology, reclaiming polluted land or planting grass, and controlling temperature and humidity.
Up to this point, it is not much different from existing construction and management simulation games. We need a strategy to erect buildings in a wider area and with higher efficiency while using as little goods as possible. Since the resources and land available are limited, gamers will rack their brains in pursuit of extreme efficiency, regardless of what others say.
It is also fun to see the various futuristic science and technology that emerges in this process. From wind turbines that generate enough electricity without polluting emissions to run several facilities just by installing on rocks, toxin purifiers that clean up pollutants from land and sea with just electricity, and placed on cultivated land It is such an amazing technology that it makes me think that if it exists right now, any barren environment can be terraformed into an environment where animals and plants can run around. There is no need to worry about getting bored easily, as different skills for different environments appear each time you go through the stages.
After creating an environment where creatures can live by filling the barren land with grass, trees, and moss, it is time to discover the various animals that will live here. Different animals can live in various vegetation and environments such as meadows, forests, reed fields, wetlands, coral areas, snowfields, and sandy beaches restored by the player. expression.
If even one condition is missing, the animals will not return, so trial and error is required to create an optimal environment by using the various facilities and equipment provided for terraforming. The process of finding hidden conditions by referring to the short introduction introducing the characteristics of each animal and creating the environment one by one brings fun like solving a 20-question-answer riddle. If you find all of the 20 or more different animals that will live in the environment you restored yourself, you can feel a sense of achievement after clearing the game, saying ‘the gameplay so far has not been in vain’.
The difference between Terra Neil and other construction simulation games comes right after this. It is to remove all the terraforming equipment that has been accumulated so far, and leave the area, leaving only the restored natural environment and animals. Like a hero who, after defeating all the bad guys without any cost, suddenly walks toward the sunset without revealing his name.
In this process, all construction equipment that has passed through the player’s hands must be collected. Power plants deployed to generate electricity, water purifiers and irrigation systems once used to fertilize land, research facilities deployed to find animal nests and restore ecosystems, and even monorails and drones installed to collect equipment. There is no exception to the same collection mechanism.
If you thriftly pack all the scrap equipment that was hidden by the trees in the forest, you will finally be able to take off after completing all the missions. All that remains is to tour the area I restored and take a commemorative photo before the airship leaves the planet’s atmosphere. without leaving even the slightest trace.
Terra Neal is a game designed with the basic premise of ‘twisting’ existing construction and simulation games. The developer hoped that the player would have time to heal while looking at the green environment in the game, and to this end, it is explained that it was decorated as a nature-centered game that excludes any character, story, or character expression.
In fact, in a game, you don’t have to stare at the passages on the screen to figure out the relationship between characters or the story, or you don’t have to struggle to understand the story at all. Just like playing sudoku or nonogram, you just have to memorize the set rules and step through them one by one. This is also the reason why I want to recommend this work to those who want to empty their minds and find peace.
“Did you empty this too recklessly?”
Terra Nil is a short game in which you can see the ending by recovering all four continents in different environments. Five hours at the most is enough until you see the ending roll. Of course, even after the ending, new areas can be restored with the second round composition, but in fact, there is no animal or facility content added, so it can be seen that it is just a level of repetitive content that is comforting to those who are unhappy to finish the game. The developer, Free Lives, is also aware of this, claiming that “instead of making a game that can be replayed infinitely, we wanted to let people know that there are games out there with this design and style.”
I can fully understand the message and challenging spirit that the developer wanted to convey, but it is a bit of a disappointment for users who wanted to deeply enjoy games in the simulation or puzzle genre. Usually, games that claim to be in the city building simulation genre have a sandbox function that freely decorates the given space, and a generous volume that can be enjoyed freely for hundreds of hours as a feature of the genre. Although the main theme of the game was a twist on existing management and construction simulation games, the decision to twist it to the core fun of the genre feels somewhat regrettable.
Even if the overall volume is small, if each piece of content that makes up it is meaningful enough to make you want to keep tasting it, no matter how small or insufficient the volume is, you will play it over and over again. Unfortunately, however, the content in Terra Neal cannot show such depth of charm.
The most striking part is the way the animals express themselves. Animals are a very important element that can be said to be the main character of this game due to the nature of the game where people do not appear at all. Animals are an indispensable core content in Terra Neil, to the extent that there is a separate page explaining the ecology of each animal through the in-game guidebook. In fact, the reason we painstakingly clear the wasteland is also to ensure that the animals can live on their own after the player leaves.
But the way animals are drawn in this game is never the way you treat the lead actors. Even if you diligently infer the habitat conditions and prepare the environment, and even if you manage to find an animal, it is the end of just looking at the animal roughly drawn with 3D modeling. Still, I was glad to enlarge the screen and look at the animals, but I couldn’t confirm any other interactive movements other than walking or swimming a little. As this process was repeated every time I started a new map, I was left with only the excitement of ‘solving a one-time puzzle’.
Of course, even if you don’t watch the ecology of animals, the game itself builds its own original game style. If the process of restoring the environment in Terra Nil, which is a combination of puzzles and simulations, suits your taste, you can enjoy the second round in a different way. There is a difficulty selection option for those looking forward to playing the game on a higher difficulty level.
There are three types of ‘gardener’ who can test various environmental factors while building most buildings without worrying about cost, ‘ecologist’ who is in normal game mode, and ‘environmental engineer’ who must be careful in each construction. Difficulty options are provided, so in the second round you can try terraforming in a different way than you did in the first round. In this case, it is expected that up to 10 hours of playtime will be sufficient.
It is somewhat ironic that in a game that aims to protect animals, you cannot be immersed in observing the ecology of animals, but in any case, it can be said that it has an assortment of games. In a situation where there are full of half-seat games that advertise only the public interest contained in the game and when you open the game, even the basics are not properly equipped, the perfection of Terra Neal is at a level that can be applauded.
Free Lives, the developer of Terra Neal, is a shooting game with explosions and action, ‘GORN’, a VR gore action game with sadistic action of tearing limbs apart, and a male organ that moves by itself with will. It is famous as the developer of the casual game ‘Genital Jousting’. It seems that it will not be easy for users who expected the existing style with cruel, violent or radical expressions to adapt to Terra Neil, a game with a completely opposite atmosphere from previous works.
However, a soft and friendly atmosphere that pursues natural harmony instead of infinite growth, a light game tempo that allows you to start over at any time even if things don’t go well as planned, and a gentle soundtrack that helps you find peace of mind and body are the new direction that the developer Free Lives and they value. and value properly.
By the way, there is no need to worry that the existing game style and direction that the developer has shown so far will be completely cut off after Terra Neal. This is because the violent play style they showed in the past led to the new action game ‘Anger Foot’ and is being developed smoothly.
Developer Free Lives announced that it will donate a portion of the proceeds from the Steam sale of Terra Neil to the animal protection organization ‘EWT’ to protect endangered animals. From the beginning of development, we thought about how the game would have a realistic impact, and planned donations as a way to make this a reality. It is definitely meaningful to be able to contribute to the preservation of the ecosystem in the real world while playing the game. As such, it can be a game that has a special meaning for those who are interested in social contribution activities using the medium of game.
