From Dust is one of the more ambitious offerings on the Xbox Live Arcade. Part ancient world-builder, Populous, part puzzle game, and part a more serious take on A World of Keflings, From Dust puts you in the almighty boots of a benevolent God, with the power to rule over a race of people, and get them to do your bidding. Just not directly.
While you may expect you'll be able to build cities, harvest crops, and generally look after your little tribe of townsfolk, in From Dust, things work a little bit differently. In each level, there are a number of totems, and it's up to you to send your men to every one of them, so they can build a village around them, and unlock the gate to the next level.
Get the men to a totem, and they'll build a rudimentary village
Sounds easy, right? Wrong. As you may have guessed, From Dust has a little bit of a twist - and it's something to do with the game's name. Rather than being able to control your villagers directly (you're limited to only clicking on the totem you want them to go to, and little lines show you where they're planning on walking), or build cities, being an almighty God's given you a rather cool power - the ability to move earth. Using a power called the Breath, you can suck sand, lava, and even water into a giant hovering ball, before depositing it somewhere else, in order to build bridges, re-route rivers, provide an easy, gentle slope to get up a mountain, or simply clear out lakes to give your tribe room to move in.
Keeping itself as grounded in reality as a game about hovering balls of sand can be, elements in From Dust react roughly as they would in real life. Re-routing a river takes a while, as the sand keeps getting swept away until you've built up enough, while, if you happen to have an active volcano nearby, you can scoop up some lava, and drop it in the river, which'll turn it to rock, giving you a ready made dam.
The game does its best to ease you into things, with most of the early levels simply being a case of building sand causeways for your tribe to trundle across, giving you time to adjust to your new-found phenomenal cosmic power. In fact, the game plays quite a lot like a puzzle game, with you having to figure out the best ways to remove whatever obstacles lie in between your men, and their totems - whilst bearing in mind that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Moving water from one lake to another may flood one of your villages and destroy it, while the same goes for re-routing a river. Being mindful of the overall situation on the level, and careful of where you dam is of utmost importance.
Plonk some sand there, and you can build a bridge to the mainland.
Of course, there's a little bit more to it than that, too. In From Dust, you may play God, but that doesn't free you from the threat of natural disasters. From early in the game, Tsunamis, and volcanoes play a huge part in the game, although tsunamis are easily the more devastating of the two. In order to survive them, you need to find a special power that's hidden somewhere in the level. Send a man to get it, and he'll travel between your villages, giving them the power to repel water, so that, by the time the tidal wave eventually does come, it'll simply wrap around your village, rather than breaking straight through it. It's quite a sight when it happens too, as you pray your village survives, and the tsunami smashes through the rest of the level, taking out everything in its wake - and potentially blocking off routes thanks to the excess water.
However, there are other powers available to you to help your villagers get to far off totems. The more totems you build villages around, the more powers you'll gain, with a different set of powers available on each map. From the ability to "jellify" water, letting you carve a huge trench through the middle of a sea, Moses style, while your useless villagers slowly saunter through the middle as the clock ticks down, to the power to simply evaporate most of the water on the level, the powers can sometimes be the only way to reach a certain totem - although they can certainly make things a lot easier, too.
Scattered throughout each level is the odd collectible, in the shape of "memories" of the tribe, and the aforementioned tsunami-repellent. Additional memories can be unlocked by spreading palms across the entire map. As your villagers build settlements, greenery will spread from the village. By strategically scattering sand so that you connect large areas of desert to the village, you can spread your trees around the map, in turn attracting animals (which serve no purpose, and are only giant slug type things anyway), until you eventually collect the memory when you fill the bar. Again, though, how you spread the palms depends on the conditions - if it's phenomenally dry, you'll need to water the sand first, before the greenery will spread.
Speaking of greenery, that leads us nicely to one of our main problems with the game - the flipping plant life. Around half way through the game, you'll start to come across certain types of plants - fire bush, exploding trees, and water trees. Water trees slowly suck up water from the ground around them, until they're ready to burst - which they do, when they come into contact with any heat, whether it be from lava, or from a fire bush, sending a torrent of water cascading away from them. They're meant to be useful for putting out fires, and stopping them reaching your villages, but if you put them in the wrong place, they can be just as dangerous, sending their torrent cascading into your brittle wooden huts. Exploding trees, on the other hand, are pretty similar to the water trees, but react in, well, a slightly more explosive way. One sniff of some heat and BOOM, they explode, and are used mostly for knocking down walls, to let your villagers pass through.
But the fire bushes. Oh, the fire bushes. As a God, if there was one thing we could smite with an almighty lightning bolt, it would be the fire bushes. Again, much as our unofficial moniker may suggest, the fire bushes sit, simmering away in your world, occasionally giving off a random whiff of fire - which may be harmless when there's nothing around it, but when you've been happily spreading your greenery around, like a good God should do. Oh my. As you may imagine, trees + fire = devastation. Fire bushes like to wreak havoc across your land on a regular basis, starting huge bush fires that are practically unstoppable - and incredibly annoying, as they tear through your villages for the hundredth time, as you frantically squeeze a giant ball of water out overhead in an attempt to put it out.
Anything warm can start a fire. Remember that, kids.
However, the annoyances of the fire tree/bushes don't stop there. One of the biggest problems is that there's no map, making the fire bushes even more of a problem, as there's no way of telling a fire's broken out. With no real warning that a fire's broken out (the game only tells you when it's reached your village), and no way to switch between villages quickly, you can lose a settlement before you've even had time to react, which is a shame, to say the least. It's also a bit strange that your villagers often seem to dictate the way they want to go, as you can build a perfectly good bridge, but, for one reason or another, they'll want to take a different route, forcing you to move things round for them. After all, you're God - they should listen to you. At one point, our villagers actually refused to move, which was a little bit confusing. Repeatedly, we'd click on the last totem they needed to visit, but not once did anyone come. Luckily, pausing the game, and then unpausing it seemed to fix things - but is was concerning to begin with.
That said those, these minor problems can't spoil a game as impressive as From Dust. We figured out a (fairly) innovative work around for the fire bushes in the end, so that they were effectively no longer a problem, which also meant the lack of a map was less serious, too. With a pitiful sounding-but-actually-quite-long thirteen levels on offer, plus numerous "Challenge" maps available, which are even more puzzle based than the main game, pitting you against a strict time limit, or simply asking you to figure out a clever way to get your villagers from one end to the other, there's a lot for your money in From Dust - even if we aren't still all that comfortable with plonking down 1200 points, or around £10 on a downloadable game.
Still, with so much to do, and the whole thing feeling so fresh, From Dust makes you realise just how rare God games have become (bar the Sims). With any luck, if this is a success, maybe we'll see a resurgence.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
