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WHEN I was a child, my neighbour and I would often while away the weekend playing SimCity 2000 on his computer. We would work together to build a sprawling metropolis before destroying it by selecting from a tempting menu of disasters, which you could use to wreak havoc on your creation.

I have been a fan of the city-building genre ever since, but a 2013 interview forever changed the way I view the games. Speaking to about the release of a new SimCity, lead designer Stone Librande explained why his team had decided not to include car parks. 鈥淲e were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realised there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring,鈥� he said.

I find this fascinating because it shines a light on a somewhat dirty secret of simulation-style games 鈥� far from being neutral reflections of reality, they involve trade-offs that encode specific world views. In the case of the SimCity series, that is a US, car-centric model of urban living. The games have in-built beliefs about city layouts that make it hard to recreate the lived-in, weaving roads of London or Paris, yet easy to produce the stark grid of New York or the sprawl of Houston.

Now, a new generation of city builders are looking at different ways of modelling the built environment. Take Townscaper, which lets you create charming and colourful island towns with a swish of a cursor. With no way to fail and no specific goal, it is more of a meditative toy than a game. Then there is Frostpunk, a game which, despite being set on a frozen version of Earth, calls to mind some of the challenges we face on a warming world today. I reviewed the original in 2019 and am eagerly awaiting a sequel.

The latest game to widen the genre is Terra Nil, which is billed as a reverse city builder and a great example of how you can create something new by challenging the assumptions of a storied series like SimCity. The game tasks you with restoring lifeless wastelands, from dried-up river valleys to flooded cities, with the goal of building a thriving ecosystem.

While a traditional city builder might have you laying roads or placing residential zones, Terra Nil is all about creating the right conditions to promote plant species, such as trees or grasses. You do this by placing energy sources 鈥� renewable, of course 鈥� to power toxin scrubbers, irrigators, dehumidifiers and other facilities that manipulate the local environment. Each building costs you a number of 鈥渓eaves鈥� (the game鈥檚 currency), while hitting restoration goals grants you more of them, so it is a constant balance between encouraging nature and allowing it to take its own course. You can鈥檛 simply plaster the landscape in technology.

Once you achieve a certain spread of plant life, animals will start returning to the world. This happens through a nice mini game that has you hunting down certain habitats 鈥� a forest by the coast, for example 鈥� in your new ecosystem. Then, in a masterstroke, you can only complete a level by disassembling and recycling all the machines you have built. This creates its own puzzle, as you try to reduce your infrastructure footprint to a single airship that flies away, leaving a pristine landscape that the game invites you to contemplate. Unlike SimCity, there are no disasters 鈥� you will always leave the world a better place than you found it.

Jacob Aron is 快猫短视频鈥檚 news editor. Follow him on Twitter @jjaron

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