Terra Nil is sort of an inverse city builder, where instead of placing permanent infrastructure and growing a settlement, treating the world as a blank canvas upon which to create infrastructure and industry, this game has you play as a transient custodian, bringing life back to a toxic wasteland, cleaning soil, bringing water back to dried up riverbeds, and facilitating the growth of plant life and the diversification of biomes.

It's wonderful along a bunch of axes. Thematically, it stands opposite games like Factorio where you build in spite of damage done to the natural environment, positioning players to defend against indigenous life fighting back against the player's presence. While Terra Nil might mechanically be a terraforming game, it provides enough thematic cues through clear signs of prior life to frame your acts as more restorative than creative.

From a mechanical perspective, it does a wonderful job of presenting an interestingly paced and resonant experience, dividing restoration into three distinct phases that each have their own distinct focus and nuance without detracting from the game's thematic framing.

In the first phase, the focus is on building infrastructure to support detoxification and nurturing generic greenery. Layout is less of a concern, and with few building options to choose from, the resource management/placement efficiency puzzle that the game represents is comfortably straightforward.

In the second phase, that generic greenery must be converted into a range of different biomes, with each having a minimum threshold to be met before the phase's goals are complete. Throughout the second phase, expansion and allocation of spaces created within the first phase is complicated by the relationships that biomes have with each other - meadows require trees, arboreal (forest) biomes can only be built on spaces burned by uncontrollable fire that may destroy other biomes, and so on.

The third and final phase requires an entirely different approach, where instead of building facilities to aid the growth of life, the goal is to dismantle all of your existing buildings, with their recycled parts being used to build a rocket that will take you away. Rivers that were critical for power and fertility in the first and second phases now become the transit network for bringing recycled materials back to the rocket silo, creating a lovely situation where most of the infrastructure necessary for the third phase is already in place, but may still require some tweaking to be adapted for this new purpose.

The first phase says that dead land needs to be made fertile before life can exist, which is an easy enough concept to grasp. The second phase highlights that life (as we know it anyway) isn't sustainable without ecology, which is a really important concept that builds on the first phase's messaging. The third and final stage posits that fixing things isn't enough - it's important to clean up our own mess, regardless of whether that mess had a positive purpose or not. Ultimately, Terra Nil is about cleaning up, and bringing that home by saying that cleaning up after yourself is as important as and a critical part of the cleanup job that the entire game represents makes it all feel wonderfully resonant.

I like a lot of different games, and enjoy playing them for a lot of different reasons, but I feel like it's rare for me to come across a game that resonates with my personal feelings and philosophies the way that Terra Nil does, and I'm very happy to have had it cross my path.