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From Dust

From Dust

At one point in development, From Dust was a bona fide RTS.

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Micro-management and total control was given to you over the last remnants of a human tribe, who's extinction was to be measured only in how long it took Mother Nature to finally scrape them off the sole of her shoe.

Luckily for all concerned, Eric Chahi and his studio found their main enjoyment from toying with the game's level editor, to such an extent they thought it strong enough to carry a game on its landscape-deforming shoulders. Out went the direct interaction with the tribes, and gameplay went Old Testament, intent on shaping the world with hands that could as easily smite as save. Though we doubt God would get a Game Over screen for clumsily wiping out civilisation.

We'll never know what From Dust would have looked like if Ubisoft Montpellier had continued down that path, and we don't care; what lands on Xbox Live Arcade is, if not worthy of worship, it at least worthy of the 1200 Microsoft Points in your account.

The game for all intents has the vibrancy of a tech demo, the sort we've seen through the years to denote new hardware capabilities but never had the luck to test out ourselves.

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From Dust

Waterfalls carve rivers through the turf, tsunamis shift huge sandbanks like you'd toss a pebble off the map, volcanoes belch waves of magma and burn down forests. Ten years ago hardware manufacturers would be flaunting this as showcase for their console's power. These days we're getting it as a digital download for just over a tenner.

It's earth of the biblical era, and as such it's also capable of stunning vistas. Be it rays of sunlight cutting through the clouds when the camera is pulled back to its second, long-range option (one that'll become default come the midpoint of the game when you need to ready for the multiple dangers that Nature throws at you) or zooming down to a villager's side, their defiant cry every bit as mighty as the mile-wave that threatens to swamp their home, only to be held back by magic alone.

You're sculpting the world - or in this case, thirteen level-sized chunks of it - to aid the flourishing of your followers, growing them in sufficient number to gain passage to the next stage, where you start everything again.

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Even if you want to ignore the mysticism injected into each aspect of the title, from the half-wise, half-nonsensical dialogue that introduces each level and its particular challenge, to the vast descriptions of the recoverable Memories hidden in levels throughout the game, you'll still get a kick out of the God-like powers.

Each level starts with a handful of tribespeople, and a totem nearby. Interaction with the tribe is limited to hovering your reticule, named The Breath in From Dust's mythology, over it or other ancient artefacts, and tapping A to suggest the tribe investigate.

From Dust

At least five tribespeople are needed to create a village from the totem. Scale out to a global view with a tap of RB and you'll note multiples of these white structures, as well as a blocked gateway, dotted over the level. To unlock the latter, you need to repopulate the lands at each totem, then successfully send five people to the now-opened gateway to progress.

As side-effect, villages will galvanise the surrounding vegetation into growing and spreading, and early on, you can happily divulge yourself the extra time in chaining sandy outcrops together with shifted earth to gain as much green as possible. As an offshoot to a normally stressful God game, it's incredibly sedate and relaxing, with a on-screen green meter notching when you've hit 100% coverage.

It's not quite Animal Crossing though, and your efforts are under constant threat of flooding or fire damage, the threat escalating with each new stage reached.

Some are solvable through either land deformation or construction. Damming a lake on one side to direct its overspill down another and thereby keeping a valley with a totem buried within from flooding, or creating paths from one island to another by filling the sea between with sand or cooling magma. If a settlement gets into trouble, screams and an on-screen icon will alert you to the problem.

Everyone's tried to stem the tide of the sea with elaborate barriers at some point, or dammed a local river. The principle's the same here, albeit with entire families at risk rather than sandcastles. It's incredibly enjoyable even when you're frantically building a barricade to protect a settlement from bush fires, and that's due to a simplified control scheme.

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The Breath can absorb matter into a compact ball with LT, and release with RT. You learn with the basics of water and sand, but quickly upgrade to juggling lava and a selection of alien trees with curious properties. You've a limit to how big your ball of mass can be, and you can only drop it, like sand through your fingers, directly below your reticule.

Gaining precision on the drop can be tricky. For the most part your loads need to be fast rather than precise - building a temporary blockade to give a villager a few crucial seconds more to reach home and safety from an incoming wave, or blocking a fast lava flow from hitting your village - but there are moments when we'd wished for more control.

Such as: building a permanent wall to cover a settlement prone to destruction requires magma, which sets fire to any nearby vegetation as soon as its deposited, making you the unwitting destructor of your own creation. Twisting the camera so it's directly overhead still doesn't get the job done, as the angles aren't clear enough to gauge distance at times.

Otter obstacles are Mother Nature flinging you the middle finger. Tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, multiple volcanoes - all need some divine intervention.

Powers are limited in number to begin, the studio obviously building the blocks slow enough so you to become comfortable with the basics before moving on.

The first is the village ability to repel water, and its later counterpart, repel fire. Such spells need to be found first in marked glowing rocks, then carried back to the village for them to work.

Once secure, a large kite-like symbol, red or blue, flies over the villages that have the knowledge, and a shaman will walk to each settlement in turn to spread the power amongst the dispersed tribes.

You'll find locating these your immediate priority. On-screen countdowns flash when a tsunami or volcano eruption are imminent, and later levels toss these land-levelling and tribe-killing events in almost immediately; you'll need to bypass impatience and frustration on a few levels as you make game-ending mistakes in your panic. If you haven't enough tribespeople to start a village, its Game Over.

From Dust

Secondary powers come from certain totems, and are lost once the village built on them are destroyed. Unlike the repel powers which are automatically used by tribes once learnt, the execution of these is entirely up to you. Totem powers are assigned to the D-Pad, and offer a limited time use once activated, and require a recharge after. They're best used simultaneously for maximum effect.

Initially seemingly uninteresting, such as Jellifying Water, they quickly become critical to survival. There's an interesting moment near halfway into the game when, over the course of a level, you're kitted out in powers that prove essential from there on in, whilst altering the whole dynamic of the game.

Jellifying Water solidifies the liquid, but also ceases the velocity of a tsunami. With a generous 60 seconds of use, you can halt an incoming wave with one tap, increase your matter absorption with another, and gain unlimited matter creation with yet another. Work with speed and you can form towering forts around your villages, to which the newly liquidated wave, now bereft of force, will lap unthreateningly against.

There's multiple combinations, and we're being deliberately vague so to save the surprise for when you play. As we found out when testing a preview version of the game months ago, there's no "right" way of completing a level, and as you'll see when you play, there's plenty of variation in surviving.

From Dust

If there's any issue with the gameplay, it is in the disconnection with your tribe. Highlighting a totem or object will have the required number set towards it, uncaring of any danger and expecting you to bail them out. While there's the argument that it's part of the gameplay, it'd be good to have the option to nudge them one way rather than another, especially if you've spent so long shoring up another section of the map for that purpose.

But any annoyance is swept away when stacked against the complete package. Levels will remain as they are when you exit, a clear invitation to return and admire (though there's the option to reset). while Challenge Mode opens the stages for more Leaderboard-centric adventuring.

From Dust is haunting, captivating, stunning in equal measure. Play God, build towering mountain ranges, write profanities in sand two miles wide, but whatever you do; make sure you play this game.

HQ
09 Gamereactor UK
9 / 10
+
Fantastic visuals, great gameplay mechanics, natural disasters meet puzzle elements.
-
Tribespeople will blunder into danger, its over too soon.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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REVIEW. Written by Gillen McAllister

"Haunting, captivating, stunning...play God, build towering mountains, write profanities in sand two miles wide, but whatever you do: play this game."



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