From Dust

I'm pretty sure there's no spoilers, but don't complain if there are.

If The Discovery Channel has taught me anything, it is that nature has the potential to be quite powerful and terrifying. It can kill you in a variety of sadistic and inventive ways and would most likely enjoy the act; like the Jigsaw killer, but without the morals. This is what From Dust, a new God game developed by Ubisoft, tries to convey, though with a much more reverent tone. The makers of the game have attempted to capture the fury of nature as well as the fear early man must have felt in its presence. For the most part, they succeeded.

The game starts off with a small, unnamed tribe of people playing music and calling into being The Breath; a spirit which can control the element which is the closest thing to a player character that this game has. The rest of the game requires the player to use the spirit's powers to guide The Tribe to giant totems left by a group of people called The Ancients. These totems bestow the player with useful powers such as jellify water or evaporate which both do exactly what it sounds like. After The Tribe as settled around all of the totems, they then can leave through a little gateway which leads to the next map. The whole story is building towards a final place where The Tribe can finally settle down. The ending is an anticlimax, but an anticlimax I actually kind of enjoyed. It is surprisingly deep, if a bit lazy. Now, I'm not spoiling the ending because, to be frank, the story doesn't matter. This game wasn't created for the story. It was created for the experience.

Eric Chahi, whom I will refer to as the director of the game though I don't know his actual title, has stated that he wanted to make this game when he saw a volcano erupt. He witnessed the brute force of nature and felt that a game needed to capture this. This is an area the game gets absolutely right. The environmental mechanics in this game are fantastic. The water and the lava move realistically, finding the path of least resistance and turning into rock and steam when they meet. The tidal waves and volcanic eruptions in the game can be truly terrifying and awe-inspiring. There is one map especially where there are two volcanoes in an ocean that is spectacular. You can watch one volcano form into an enormous, imposing, Mount Doom-esque peak while the other one fills with water and becomes a sandbar. The sandbar also happens to have a spring in it, called a source in the game, and this spring forms a river and eventually a delta. I loved playing around with the features of these gorgeous maps by diverting rivers and building giant walls of sand or igneous rock. I'm sure there are a multitude of ways in which this game can be used I didn't even think of in my short time with it (I only played it in two days because the other game I was playing is starting to bore me.) This environmental gameplay is a really fascinating and innovative play on level editors like the Halo Series' Forge Mode.

Now, I wasn't as impressed with the human side of the game. While I liked this idea of The Tribe and the totems, I didn't feel like the AI was there. It was a bold move to make arguably the most important part of the game impossible to directly control. The only way the player can influence The Tribe directly is by choosing which totem or power marker to walk to next. The player cannot pick the route. This becomes increasingly frustrating as the difficulty of each map ramps up. It got to the point where I found myself dumping hot lava on my people because they refused to use a ramp I built them and insisted on staring at a sheer wall and crying for help. It would have been amazing if the AI for The Tribe was as good as the environment. If they could find their way around obstacles or even decide that a flood was probably something they should

run away from, the frustration factor around this game would have been greatly diminished.

As I mentioned before, From Dust is a part of the God game genre. This is an often overlooked genre of game which includes The Sims series and almost every game ever developed by Peter Molyneux, most notably Populous and The Black and White series. I would also argue that strategy games, including real-time strategy games like the Age of Empires series and turn-based strategy games like the Civilization series would also count as sub-genres. They all feature a third-person camera which is pulled back to create a sense of omniscience and lack a visible character for the player. Rather, the gameplay is centered around controlling units of people, animals, magical beings, et cetera to carry out some task, usually war. From Dust is something of an exception because, as noted above, the player does not actively control their units. This lack of control does not exclude From Dust from the genre, of course, as they are still units whether under player control directly or indirectly. Indeed, this lack of control reveals an interesting facet of the God game never considered.

By definition, God games are games where you play God. Whether this is literally or figuratively true depends on the game, but the player holds a God-like sway over the characters of the game. However, despite the apparent freedom these games allow, they are defined by their limitations. God, within the world of video games, means that the player is unbeatable. For instance, the often used "God Mode" which gives the player unlimited health/ammo/shields/whatever else allows them to cheat through a choke point within the game. However, a God without limits is not a game, it's a sandbox. There would be no narrative and no structure whatsoever. So in the RTS genre, you are limited by resource management or a number of units. Turn-based strategy games have similar limitations and much more including economies and other factors that vary game to game. Even The Sims, a game where you can actually delete the windows from your sims' house and light their house on fire, is limited by the amount of money that your sim makes. From Dust's limitation by way of The Tribe makes these limitations very obvious. The only real God in the world of games is the developer.

So, to sum up, From Dust isn't really deep, but it is fun. There is a story mode and a challenge mode I didn't really get into, but there isn't a crazy narrative or anything. It's more of an amazing tech demo with an interesting mythology (I forgot to mention that there are these little stories that The Tribe has in a Memory section that are kind of cool.) It's 1200 points on the Xbox Live arcade, and I suggest getting it if you have nothing better to do.