From Dust

First published on 15 Aug 2011. Updated on 20 Nov 2011.

I’ve played videogames where the main character is a criminal, a military hero, a child with psychokinetic powers, a high plains drifter, a space weasel, a teenage girl, a cop who plays by his own rules and a man dressed a bat. This is, however, the first time I’ve effectively played as the weather.

 

In From Dust you are “the breath”: the physical manifestation of the spirit of a tribe of all-purpose primitives who have, it would seem, decided to base their civilisation around the most perilous environments they can find. Whether it’s a chain of islands undergoing regular tsunamis or a valley beneath an active volcano, these plucky little risk takers are determined to unlock The Secrets of the Ancients, who either got wiped out in the distant past or, sensibly, decided to move somewhere they were less likely to be killed every few minutes. Fortunately the tribe have you on their side, ready to manipulate soil, lava and water to protect the villages and buy them time to open the portal to the next screen even as the elements conspire to destroy them.

 

This is basically a god simulation with elements that should be familiar to anyone who has played Black & White or a Civilisation game, while sending your people to gather elements and open portals draws comparison with most RTS titles (or, for that matter, the Overlord and Pikmin titles). The biggest difference here is that the entire environment is dynamic, making every level a juggling act. Construct a land bridge using earth and you’ll rob an area of soil for jungle expansion. Use lava to build a wall of stone and it could well start a forest fire – and water channels that you may block this way will erode new paths, or flood the area behind.

Thankfully most levels have charm stones that, once recovered, will teach your tribe the songs that repel floods or lava flow, so you can more or less leave their thus-educated villages to look after themselves while you work out how to found the next village along, but you’d be well advised not to muck about. Time is precious in From Dust, and spending too much time meticulously building an impregnable stone barrier around the next site may leave your original village surrounded by floods or lava, unable to send people to the next objective – and watching a single shaman make frustratingly casual progress to a village with the secret of repelling water while a tidal wave builds in the distance gives the game a tension that, perversely, becomes maddeningly addictive.

 

Things get more complicated – and more satisfying – as you increase your powers (every new village founded on a level’s map confers a new d-pad ability, such a turning water to jelly or conjuring earth from nothing) and the maps can be replayed as you develop new ways to solve each problem.

 

It also looks incredibly beautiful, with water flowing and rushing, lava bubbling and cooling and vegetation sprouting as new earth is laid, with strange beasts flocking to newly-forested areas. It might have been smarter for the folks in From Dust to settle in the middle of a nice, safe continent, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good a game.