A fascinating gameplay concept that has a potential to create a lot of different puzzle situations interesting to figure out, but sadly the game lacks for content and does no job of explaining its fundamental mechanics to the player at all. I am a big fan of games that await wit from the player and reward him for his clever solutions and unique findings (metagame in game designer's language), however even these games must be designed in a way that promotes such way of thinking by hinting this kind of gameplay by different means. Even for me this process in Terra Nil was frustrating as I've spent almost 80% of total playtime just to find out things in this game which cannot be found by just thinking about possible solutions, which basically is the same problem of explaining the toolkit, so the only viable strategy that you can come up with is just to spam everything you have, if the displayed number is colored green... most of the time, at least. Unfortunately, the game has not only poor metagame, but also poor puzzle design: whenever you stuck in Terra Nil, you'll run out of possible parallel tasks very fast, so you'll be just looking at your screen and begging for help. The game does not give you any hints when they are trully needed and leave you alone fighting with uncertainty. This destroys all the joy of solving puzzles

A fascinating gameplay concept that has a potential to create a lot of different puzzle situations interesting to figure out, but sadly the game lacks for content and does no job of explaining its fundamental mechanics to the player at all. I am a big fan of games that await wit from the player and reward him for his clever solutions and unique findings ([i]metagame in game designer's language[/i]), however even these games must be designed in a way that promotes such way of thinking by hinting this kind of gameplay by different means. Even for me this process in Terra Nil was frustrating as I've spent almost 80% of total playtime just to find out things in this game which cannot be found by just thinking about possible solutions, which basically is the same problem of explaining the toolkit, so the only viable strategy that you can come up with is just to spam everything you have, if the displayed number is colored green... most of the time, at least. Unfortunately, the game has not only poor metagame, but also poor puzzle design: whenever you stuck in Terra Nil, you'll run out of possible parallel tasks very fast, so you'll be just looking at your screen and begging for help. The game does not give you any hints when they are trully needed and leave you alone fighting with uncertainty. This destroys all the joy of solving puzzles