A Fun & Funny VR Job Sim With Something To Say

In Terry’s Terraforming, what begins as a simple, low-stakes job simulator in which you terraform planets for refugee aliens soon morphs into something deeper.

Before game’s end, you’re not just puzzling out how to balance planetary ecosystems, grooving to a phenomenal soundtrack by Swedish electronic duo Carbon Based Lifeforms, and interacting with a lovely cast of wonderfully voiced robots and aliens, you’re also considering what it means to be homeless and grappling with who gets to decide if people have a healthy place to live.

And while the developers never beat you over the head with the game’s deeper message, its last hour does hint at harder conversations about ecology, greed, and the potential destructiveness of progress, all while thankfully maintaining a wry sense of humor and an engaging gameplay loop.

Terry’s What?

In Terry’s Terraforming, you play as a new hire at the titular company and spend your working days turning dead or dying planets into habitable worlds for alien clients. You’ll warm atmospheres, lift mountains from the sea, dig life-giving rivers, prod volcanoes into bursting, and grow lush forests, all to shape the ecosystems of the planets to best suit the aliens who wish to live there.

Each alien species wants something different: this one may need tropical beaches to live, while another may need a frozen tundra or a dry desert. Crafting the perfect world isn’t easy. You’ll need a veritable tool chest of gizmos to make each world just right, and each tool may be used only at a cost (literally – Terry’s Terraforming is a for-profit venture, after all). The goal for much of the game’s five-or-so hour playthrough is to achieve the ideal planetary conditions as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

Before long you learn that you’re not actually terraforming worlds, but rather creating expensive simulations for the alien clients. And a meeting with your company’s mysterious CEO (sitting in his perch at the highest point of our orbiting space station) confirms the true ambition of Terry’s Terraforming; to make money.

By the end, your interactions with the bereft aliens and rapidly diminishing coworkers (budget cuts) put you in a bit of a pickle. Do you follow the CEO’s commands to the detriment of your coworkers and clients, or do you take the honest route? I know which one I picked, and earned a pretty satisfying ending for my trouble. Which path you’ll walk is up to you.

Playing God

Of course, Terry’s Terraforming is a video game, and to be successful, it must be fun to play. Thankfully, it is.

The gameplay loop is essentially this: you’ll hit Terry’s reception desk, chat with the friendly robots there, collect your assignment, and then head up to the lab to terraform a world into shape alongside your friendly floating computer, Sprout.

In the lab you’ll find the terraforming station. Sprout gives you a briefing on the world to be terraformed, and the aliens who hope to live there while a display shows you the “sweet spot,” a zone somewhere within two axes that the alien clients will feel is “just right” for them. You’ll then try to make the planet hotter or colder, wetter or drier, covered in oceans or dense with forests, depending on the aliens’ needs, by using a selection of tools.

These tools are all effective showcases for VR tech. For example, a cheap way to flatten mountains or destroy islands is to grab an asteroid from orbit and slingshot it into the planet’s surface, and a quick way to heat up a planet is to use the blowtorch to start a forest fire. Each of these interactions feels distinctive and immediate, and as is the case in all the best VR puzzle games, Terry’s capitalizes well on the tactile nature of the medium.

There are fifteen tools in total, and each is unique and interesting in its own way. Furthermore, some tools are non-usable at various points in the adventure (budget cuts, again?), which adds a little wrinkle to the otherwise fairly straightforward gameplay.

In addition to the terraforming, which makes up the vast majority of the gameplay, there’s also a tool called “Sweet View,” a play on Google Street View. Using this tool teleports you down to the surface of whatever planet you’re currently creating. Here you can freely teleport in any direction, exploring on foot and snapping photos and videos with a special camera. These you can save for your own use, or to be shared with your alien clients (indeed this changes some of the interactions in interesting, if minor, ways). It’s neat, but somewhat underdeveloped. After a few moments on the surface of the planet there is a distinct feeling of, “Okay, now what?” At the same time, it’s interesting to see just how greatly your terraforming actions impact things on the ground level, and the photo geek in me does love making virtual photos, too.

Terry’s Terraforming is a comfortable game for most VR players. Movement is teleportation based, and there’s a blink teleport system which can be toggled on and off. There’s no smooth walking, no artificial locomotion, and the game can be played seated or standing.

Between terraforming sessions you’ll chat with your robot colleagues and with the visiting alien clients. There’s an observation deck with a translation machine that lets you chat with the aliens, and while some of these interactions are fairly innocuous and shallow, others are surprisingly affecting. It is this emotional content that spurs you on to the game’s surprising conclusion, one which will almost certainly have you reflecting on conditions found in our own real world.

Terry’s Terraforming Review – Final Verdict

Terry’s Terraforming surprised me. It’s a tactile and funny job simulator with great VR bones and some interesting mechanics. It also tells a surprisingly earnest story about who gets a home, and who gets to decide who gets a home. It never lectures, but it certainly has something to say. The fact that it can speak this way while also remaining fun and funny is a real testament to the creativity and heart of the people who made it.

Terry’s Terraforming is available now on Meta Quest 3. It’s coming to Steam at a later date.

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