Each step that turns dull gray wasteland into lush green meadows not only earns points to spend on more nature-restoring machinery but is satisfying and strangely comforting to witness. So it feels deeply weird to use some of those machines, like a solar amplifier and a combustor, to brutally torch some of that greenery to huge, sizzling patches of ash.

But hey, Mother Nature goes hard. Forest fires, as horrifying and destructive as they can be in the real world, come with benefits like clearing the forest floor of underbrush and dead foliage, nourishing the soil, killing disease-bearing insects, and removing weaker plants from the ecosystem so the stronger ones receive more nourishment and sunlight. In Terra Nil, sometimes you’ve gotta burn something down even if you’ve just spent long minutes building it up.

I’ve been playing a new build of Terra Nil that lets me rehabilitate the first two biomes of the game. The first map works mostly the same as when I played it a couple years ago, strategically placing nature-restoring machines, making the world turn green, and then cultivating new mini-biomes like marshy wetlands, thick forests, and shrublands pollinated by beehives. The final step is to remove the machines I built to make all that happen. The rivers become a network for recycling ships to travel the map and take everything apart, and then use the materials to construct a hovercraft that lifts off and flies away. All that’s left behind is nature. There’s no sign any human-made tech was ever there at all. 

The second biome is a bigger and even more interesting challenge. Instead of a continent you’re on an island, which includes sections of ocean, four mini-biomes to grow and balance instead of three, and fewer riverbeds meaning you need to establish a monorail system across the island to move equipment around.

With scrubbers oxygenating the oceans and cloud-seeding machines adding humidity to the atmosphere I can start getting properly tropical. Rivers were satisfying to create on the first map, but I have to say generating sandy beaches on the shoreline is even more appealing, especially when a notification pops up telling me that crabs have appeared. One of the quiet joys of Terra Nil is seeing animals begin to arrive in the world you’re working on, then zooming all the way in on the map until you spot one. Sure enough, a tiny, adorable crab is scuttling around on the beach I just created. Beautiful!

That’s just the start, though. Around the cliffs on the map I can place shadecloth to form canopies, underneath which grow towering tropical trees and eventually a massive rainforest. I can salinate the wetlands so mangroves will grow, and build sandy little islands in the oceans to place machines that can reach the farthest edges of the map to scrub even more ocean water clean. And as I lengthen my monorail line I can transport coral from my inland factories out to the ocean, where tropical fish begin appearing. Building an observatory lets me discover various forms of wildlife inhabiting the new biomes: I thought seeing a crab was exciting until I spotted a damn whale. A whale, in my beautiful ocean that was just minutes ago polluted gray water! It’s a kick.

With so many more machines to build in this second biome, recycling them is much trickier, as I have to build monorail lines that stretch out to reach everything and then send a little recycling drone down the line to pack all that equipment up (including the very line it’s riding). There’s much more strategy and planning in Terra Nil than I expected, and as my points grow low I have to undo some moves and really think about how I can manage to build new machines within my shrinking budget and use the fewest number of transport lines to cover the greatest amount of territory.

But it’s all worth it when the final drone hoovers up the last few machine parts and I’m once again left with nothing but nature to admire. And if you’re not up for the strategic challenge, there are difficulty settings you can adjust that will let you do more gardening and less planning.

As a bonus, finishing a level in Terra Nil lets you click the “Appreciate” button, which means you can sit back and enjoy as the camera slowly pans over the glorious green landscape, watching frogs, ducks, butterflies, and other wildlife frolic in the reborn world. It’s the best, nothing but scenery and good vibes. Frankly, every game should ship with an “Appreciate” button from now on. You’ll be able to appreciate Terra Nil yourself when it launches on March 28.

Just like Hermoinie in that one part from Harry Potter that is stuck in my brain forever because it’d play over and over again on ABC Family, the VoiceSpells mod (opens in new tab) for Hogwarts Legacy is keen to remind me that “it’s Leviosa, not Leviosaaaaaa (opens in new tab)“. As I sat at my PC desperately yelling “Confringo” into a mic while goblins impaled me with axes, I felt for Ron.

At first I instinctually blamed the mod (which works by hooking into Windows’ existing voice recognition systems) for every unrecognized command, but it worked consistently enough on other spells that I think I was having my own “Leviosa” moment. I know that I tend to mumble through my words, but it was tough to listen back to myself and accept that what I was saying sounded more like “Cnfrengo” or “Kafrego” depending how lazily I belted it out. When I’d slow down, take a beat, and produce the entire word, it’d actually work darn well. I even got the killing curse Avarda Kedavra to work on my second try.

Watch my mediocre spellcasting skills below (and if you’re having trouble viewing the video, here’s another way to watch it (opens in new tab)). 

There’s enough of a delay that you probably don’t want to use it for combat, but I can definitely see leaning on this for everyday Hogwarts puzzle solving. The voice commands coexist with your normal controls, so you can still manually cast spells too. Since the mod is really just a little app that listens for specific words to press keys, you don’t have to mess with your Hogwarts Legacy directory, either.

One weird thing though: the mod was flagged by Nexus Mods’ antivirus scans and remains unavailable to download directly from the site. As Nexus notes (opens in new tab), this doesn’t automatically mean the mod contains a virus, but it does mean Nexus can’t guarantee it’s safe. I downloaded the mod through a third-party site that the modder links to on the page and, while I also can’t guarantee it’s safe, I can tell you it works and hasn’t been flagged as malicious by Windows or done any noticeable damage to my PC (yet). So download at your own risk!

funk_pops_found_at_landfill_to_be_destroyed from r/funkopop

This dangerous burial should be accompanied by some kind of warning. When the inhabitants of Earth in the distant future stumble across this vinyl trove, they have to understand what they’re getting into. “We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor,” our message to future civilizations would begin. “No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing is valued here,” the inscription on our massive gravesite for upwards of 2.7 million Funko Pops ($30 million divided by approx. $11 a Pop) would continue. “What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.”

OK, so that’s actually part of a proposed message from Sandia National Laboratories (opens in new tab) to warn away those in the far-future from nuclear waste sites, but it is hilarious to me to imagine far-future archaeologists uncovering a vast trove of vinyl bobblehead Geralts, Grogus, and Green Goblins out in the wastes left behind by our society.

And maybe they’re not that bad. Funko Pops are not for me, but a self-conscious, pronounced dislike of the ubiquitous collectible has become one of those standard-issue, lazy signifiers, a reheated opinion you get to present like it’s some edgy or groundbreaking thing⁠—see also hating Nickelback and thinking Die Hard is the film to celebrate your spiritual or secular winter holiday of choice. Funko Pops aren’t literally nuclear waste, even if they are a bit dated⁠ by my reckoning—distinctly pre-pandemic, 2018-core like Instagram Live, “popcorn lung,” the pre-widespread-legal weed CBD craze, or having a sense of hope for the future. 

We’ve reached out to Funko to confirm the grim fate of the millions of little guys, but it doesn’t look good. A 2020 post by Funko fan account MayTheFunkoBWY (opens in new tab) documents the company’s destruction of excess stock in a prior write-down. This post from Reddit user edelwiess20 (opens in new tab) just a few days ago purports to show Funko stock at a landfill primed to be destroyed.

The burial of so many silly toys out in the desert (presumably, we don’t know where Funko’s treasure will be hidden away or if it’ll be spread across multiple sites), the sullying of Mother Earth with 2.7 million little vinyl guys? Now that’s a cry for help from a spiritually sick society if I’ve ever seen one.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this all before, though. Just this past week a Redditor spotted $100,000 worth of Magic cards (opens in new tab) in a landfill, while Atari’s mass burial of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (opens in new tab) cartridges remained unbelieved by many until it was uncovered by a documentary crew.

Still, it’d be nice if we could maybe learn a lesson from this sort of thing for once. We seem to keep acting out these simple, absurdist morality plays about pride, excess, and manic profit-seeking. If the far-future archaeologists determine that these buried Funkos were our gods, we’ll deserve that indignity.

In the video above, editor Josh Lloyd breaks down some of the subtle differences he noticed from the original game—as well as what’s stayed the same. We’re still excited to see so much of RE4’s goofier identity still intact, from the roundhouse kicks and suplexes to action hero one-liners.

To our memory, it looks like the Remake might be slightly expanding its boat section; there’s definitely a new weapon in there; and the Krauser knife fight looks fantastic, with its QTEs replaced by manual knife parries. We also get a better look here at how stealth can be used in combat with some of the game’s tougher enemies like the Garrador (Wolverine on meth).

By far the most important new feature, though, are the charms you can stick on your briefcase. We need that cute little chicken stat.