From Dust

What the hell is this? A game about sand, and water, and trees and lava, and little villagers braving the dangers of a shifting, violent proto-Earth-like landscape? That's pretty much it, yes. You're a floating, intangible force in this almost-literally-sandbox world of surging oceans and erupting volcanos, capable of manipulating and reshaping the earth to your whims. Your aim isn't immediately apparent, nor is it hugely important at first. A great deal of From Dust's appeal is simply in playing with sand - here's a game seemingly inspired by trips to the beach, by memories of digging troughs out to the tide and watching your miniature moat fill up with mucky seawater.

The game's creative director Eric Chahi (responsible for seminal platform adventure Another World), alongside producer Guillaume Bunier, demonstrated how this geological fiddling works. Hover over the stuff you want to pick up, hold the left trigger and it's pulled up into a floating, perfect sphere. Press the right trigger and you release your payload over whatever's below. Find one body of water above another and you can carve away at the sand barrier between, and watch the water flow realistically from higher to lower ground. Erosion comes into effect here too, with flowing water carving valleys in sandy terrain. Conversely, you can plug rivers with dams. You can plonk down trees and watch them spread and germinate across sandbanks. Drop lava on trees and they burn, drop water on lava and it hardens. From Dust is a vaguely scientific plaything, accelerating some natural processes and slowing others down, but existing within a rigid ruleset of interacting solids, fluids and... sandy stuff. It's clever, it looks beautiful, and it's an inherently inviting concept. Come, poke our sand, splash our water about, all you need are trigger fingers.

When it comes to attaching a point to this interactive screensaver, From Dust draws a comforting comparison with the similarly Earth-moving Populous. Villages exist in this world, and they need to be protected from various natural disasters - only one of which Chahi and Bunier were willing to show at Gamescom. A timeline appears to be the only element of a HUD visible on screen, thin at one end to denote incoming events in the long term, thicker at the other to show the imminent threats. A tsunami icon crawls from right to left as we're shown how selecting a village before selecting a location causes a villager to plot a path to that location. The location in this instance contains a relic of sorts, some ancient water technology that'll protect the village from water-based tragedy. This plotted path is highlighted red at points where the villager will encounter trouble - cliff faces and rapids - and it's the player's job to engineer bridges, divert streams and block lava flows.

"We'll give her some help getting back to the village," remarks Bunier as he scoops up a large, shimmering orb of water and plops it on top of the poor woman. She's got the water tech in hand, with only minutes before the tsunami scours her village from the tiny island they've perched themselves on. She's swept into the river, tumbling down from the mountainside she'd been climbing and floating out to sea. "Now I'll bring the shore to her," he adds as he grabs sand and places it beneath her, allowing her a clear path to her home. The villager starts making her weird, inhuman woofing noises again as she returns the tech to the village. Bunier pulls the camera back to give us a view of the incoming disaster.

The tsunami is a strange sight - on a visual level it doesn't look like the engine "wants" to allow sheer vertical surfaces of water, so at the top of this wall of ocean are some jagged polygons and stretched textures. But on a technical level, it's impressive, an actual tsunami being rendered within the parameters of the fluid physics engine - there's no cheating here. It sucks the shoreline away long before it reaches land, arcing around the protected village (their singing and dancing forms some sort of inexplicable forcefield, thanks to the retrieved water tech) and continuing along the archipelago, diminishing and weakening as it crosses islands, beaches and volcanos. It takes one or two minutes for the level's water to fully resettle.

Chahi's not hugely forthcoming with many more details - he suggests there'll be disasters based around the other materials. Lava flows are a no-brainer, but village-threatening fires are also hinted at when Bunier demonstrates a technique for starving the flames of their fuel by burning away a ring of vegetation and "enclosing" the inferno in a small area. Two disasters could cancel one another out - a tsunami would spell an end to a forest fire, for instance, but when you're looking after more than one village, careful managing of each village's elemental power will be crucial in keeping them all alive. RPG style "levelling up" of villages is also suggested - stockpile technology in one village at the expense of another and you'll create a settlement almost impervious to the destructive forces of From Dust's world.

Exploration is also your goal, and you'll need to set up new villages to expand your influence, increase your power and move through the world. With increased power comes the ability to hoist up greater masses of earth and water, until even your own idle manipulation of the world could threaten the villages you're attempting to protect. From Dust won't feature a multiplayer mode, but Chahi claims to have some strong ideas about how co-op might work. Understandably, both the developer and Ubisoft want to see how players respond to a game as unconventional as From Dust before they commit to further developing it, but being a downloadable title across PS3, Xbox 360 and PC the game is seemingly on a loose leash. Relatively inexpensive to produce, it's a low-risk title for the publisher too, and an absolute panacea to the exploding, bloody, gun-heavy and gut-spilling blockbusters filling the rest of Gamescom. Not that we don't enjoy gut-spilling, but the thought of simply sitting down and playing with a bit of sand seems to us an incredibly inviting prospect. Or maybe we're just getting old.