During the lull of interesting PC game releases, Ubisoft Montpellier found it in their hearts to offer up From Dust for a cheap entry price and the promise of a little god game fun. After watching its world demo video and the lure of the god game genre, I began to miss the days of Black & White. Figuring From Dust would allow me to act on my divine delusions I decided to give it a go. Besides it’s another free helmet for Team Fortress 2 — amirite?

Gameplay

In From Dust your goal is to guide your tribe of followers in the search for their ancestors. Though they’ve seemingly forgotten who they are. They still seem to have retained the knowledge of what to do with their ancestral artifacts. Plot holes aside, we set forth on our Moses like epic journey.

To accomplish our migratory goals, we must usher a group of tribesmen to all of the totems found on the map. Once settled, they’ll tend build dwellings and begin propagating. Once the map’s totemic areas are populated, you may choose to issue the decree to your people to venture forth through the “passage.” After being subjected to a quite unskipable cutscene you’ll find your godly self and your flock in a new environment.

This is where the game’s mechanics come into play. Initially able to manipulate and disperse basic elements, you must terraform the areas around the totems so that they’ll be habitable. You’ll also need to provide the devotees with a means of getting to the prepared areas so the cycle can begin again. As you progress you’ll unlock skills to aid you in this task based on the associated totem that you control.

Calling for help is something a god always expects its followers to do from time to time. “Help there’s a pyroclastic flow enveloping our village.” Or “Help, there’s tsunami currently sweeping us out to sea.” These are fairly reasonable situations in which you really aught to play god. On the journey your subjects are likely to encounter all manner of obstacle, for example an unpassable river or a slightly moist bit of dirt left over from your freshly created island paradise. Seriously, these bastards are more hydrophobic than a vampire at a baptism. Other times the lovely chaps will stand next to their target yelling for help but with no real reason as to why they can’t take a step to their left and be home free.

Progressing deeper into the game you’ll eventually come to environments wont remain static during play. Volcanoes will create new earth, while water may move earth creating or destroying trails. If left ignored, these forces can bring ruin to your tribespeople’s civilizations. To avert certain catastrphic failure, you must send villagers to obtain the skills to hold back these disasters. Once your village learns these skills subsequent villages will inherit this knowledge.

Unfortunately these mystical powers apparently aren’t foolproof. On several occasions I ran into an issue where my villagers who could toot on their didgeridoos and hold back the awesome power of nature would simply decided not to — a bit of a Nero complex perhaps.

The controls scream of being created for console and ported to the PC as an afterthought. You can move the map around with your standard WSAD which is great, but my cursor also would drag the map about while placing elements down. This made for a few mistakes while trying to be delicate with my lava pour — I’m pretty sure I heard the villagers referring to the incidences as “calamities.” You can zoom in and out however I found being zoomed in completely pointless unless you didn’t want to watch as some disaster ravaged elsewhere. It’s also possible to rotate the map, but only horizontally. I really would have preferred a full range of rotation to simplify puddle detection.

Overall I did manage to stick with the game through to its end, I didn’t feel as if I had wasted away my investment but I’ve had more entertaining puzzles offered up in simpler packages like flash portal. The mechanics are fun, but the challenges seem become repetitive busy work toward the end.

Audio/Visual

The environments are attractive, but lack variation. Once you’ve seen a few of them, you really have seen them all. Some elemental effects such as a rainstorms or the evaporate skill make it incredibly difficult to see what’s going on. Sometimes you’ll realize too late you just bathed a few of your brave villagers in a flow of lava. These visual effects were pretty entertaining. I’ll admit to letting a Tsunami or two do their worst just to watch it play.

There is an option to zoom in and watch the villagers wander about their path. This could have been a cool feature, unfortunately they’re all the same and have no character. Thus, I spent most of my time with at full zoom out. As far as the interface was concerned, it was clean and to the point and never obscured any of the gameplay.

The audio is pretty minimalist, the only real musical score is the one played during your copy pasted cut scene between maps. This was really disapointing as more background music in the game would have enhanced the experience. There were some issues with sound effects overcasting one another which made for some unintended difficulties during play. Like everything else, it just seemed to lack polish.

Summary

I do feel the game was clearly brought to the PC as an afterthought. Still, I was given some entertaining puzzles and it did pander to my god complex. The game ran a few hours in playtime and clocks in at the tolerable $15 price point on Steam and 1200 Microsoft Points on XBLA. While I feel I got my moneys worth out of the game the various short comings of the pre-patch PC version makes it a better idea to either pick it up on XBLA or wait till Ubisoft addresses the numerous issues with the ported version.