That's in addition to the northern hemisphere kind of wilderness already there - a place of meadows and forests and marshlands, once you've regrown it, that is. 'More ambitious' meant adding three brand new region types to the game - tropical, polar and urban. And we decided to try something more ambitious.' 'And we sat down and we decided we had to re-evaluate whether we wanted to make the planned, small game, which wouldn't have been appreciably larger than the demo or whether we wanted to try something more ambitious. 'And then it just exploded online,' Alfred says.

That's what led to the 2021 demo I played. 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.

He made it back in 2019 for the Ludum Dare game jam, and you can still play it over on Itch.io. Sam Alfred was the one who created that pixel-art demo of Terra Nil, by the way. 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.' I wish it worked like this in real-life.

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. Terra Nil will be released on PC and mobiles (via the Netflix app) on 28th March. And it's only now that it's re-emerging with some very good news: it's coming out soon. And I waited and I waited, but nothing happened, Terra Nil fell out of sight. And it felt so refreshing to play that, as well as being current and topical.Įxcitedly, I waited to find out more. A kind of reverse city-builder, if you like, or an anti-city-builder, maybe. A calm and gentle game about regrowing wastelands and then packing up and getting out of there, and leaving no trace. Here was a game from BroForce developer Free Lives about repairing the world.

I got very excited about Terra Nil when I played a demo in summer 2021.

Terra nil release