I got very excited about Terra Nil when I played a demo in summer 2021. Here was a game from BroForce developer Free Lives about repairing the world. A calm and gentle game about regrowing wastelands and then packing up and getting out of there, and leaving no trace. A kind of reverse city-builder, if you like, or an anti-city-builder, maybe. And it felt so refreshing to play that, as well as being current and topical.
Excitedly, I waited to find out more. And I waited and I waited, but nothing happened, Terra Nil fell out of sight. And it’s only now that it’s re-emerging with some very good news: it’s coming out soon. Terra Nil will be released on PC and mobiles (via the Netflix app) on 28th March.
Question is, what took it so long? Simply, as Terra Nil creator Sam Alfred tells me in an interview, “The game’s response was so much bigger than we thought it was going to be. When we released that demo in 2021,” he says, “the whole idea was it was just going to be a remake of the pixel-art version and that would be it…”
Sam Alfred was the one who created that pixel-art demo of Terra Nil, by the way. He made it back in 2019 for the Ludum Dare game jam, and you can still play it over on Itch.io. It did well, too, so even though he was new to Free Lives at the time, he kept working on it in his spare time, and eventually, with some after-hours help from colleagues, he had enough of a concept to convince Free Lives creative director Evan Greenwood to make it a studio project. That’s what led to the 2021 demo I played.