From Dust

FROM DUST
Platform: Xbox Live Arcade
Publisher: Ubisoft

From Dust is a decent short god sim that would really benefit from being much larger and running on the next generation of game hardware. In it, you play a sphere. Specifically you play a weakly-godlike entity called the Breath, raised up by a vaguely African/Polynesian tribe to help reconquer a variable landscape their legends say was once mastered by a race of ancients. The Breath's big power is lifting and moving the soil, water, and lava that make up three of the game's four most common materials, the fourth being rock which you can't manipulate directly. The lava, soil, and water behave according to a complex fluid simulation that creates one of the most visually-impressive dynamic landscapes I've seen in games, period. I haven't been this impressed with the ability to edit a landscape since Populous. Which is, I suppose, appropriate, since From Dust is basically a re-imagining of Populous.

It also makes my Xbox 360 run the loudest I have ever heard it run. Crunching the numbers to simulate all those interactions is evidently hard, and explains why all the worlds in From Dust are kinda small and the game is a DLC title rather than something huge and sold on disc for 60 bucks. I can't really blame it for being as small as it is, since I'm pretty sure if Ubisoft Montpellier made the levels any bigger my game console would melt trying to run them, and maybe set fire to my desk. We're not at the point where we can make the games From Dust wants to be yet.

Anyway.

The game's divided into discreet levels in which you're trying to accomplish some specific goal, always a variant of "Build villages around all the totems and then send tribesmen to leave through the portal to the next level."

Totems are big statues left by the ancients, and to build villages you need to make the areas directly around them habitable and then send five tribesmen to colonize them (difficult, if there's a river of lava in the way, because you can't just dam that up—you need to alter its flow), and then keep them habitable while the world sends tsunamis and volcanic eruptions to wipe them out. Each totem also provides a magic power for as long as it's inhabited, like making water solid, or evaporating it, or letting you create dirt from nothing or annihilate materials directly instead of just moving them around (this is the only way to get rid of rock). Actually colonizing all the totems involves a different challenge in every level.

This is the game's big problem. A lot of the time, it goes from being a god sim to being a puzzle game, and by that I mean the bad sort of puzzle game where you can see the solution but the game engine is finicky about letting you pull it off. Oh, no, you weren't fast enough, and your village burned down in a tide of lava! Oh no, you weren't fast enough, and a tsunami washed your village away! I spent a lot of the game playing through levels and getting almost everything right only to have a freak accident with the physics engine wipe out everything, whereupon the best solution was usually "Start again and try to be even more perfect this time."

The final level's a big fun sandbox, though.

I think it's worth checking out. It's impressive visually and technically. It's not that expensive—about $10 worth of Microsoft Points, I think. For us old grognard-types, it's a decent Populous nostalgia trip, and it's a fun way to pass maybe four or five hours of your time.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD