Previews// From Dust

Mention the phrase ‘God Sim’ in the same breath as ‘home console’ to someone and they will do one of three things: tut disapprovingly, laugh in your face or explode in a fit of fear of a genre apocalypse.

Of course, it depends entirely on the mental stability of the people you associate with, but the general feeling is universal - the lack of a mouse makes for quite an unintuitive experience.

So when Another World creator Eric Chahi demonstrated From Dust, a strategy simulation game on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that sees you indirectly protect a surviving tribe from natural disasters, I was intrigued if not apprehensive. After having played the first three stages of this digitally distributed title, I can say that a lot of that apprehension was unwarranted.

From Dust doesn’t play out like your typical PC God Sim, for example. A lot of the things you would expect are either gone or streamlined. Instead of being plonked in an expansive world with no real objective other than to build and prosper, here you complete challenges within self-contained stages.

The general aim in each chapter is to have your tribe repopulate all of the land, by building villages around special totems, before leading them towards the exit door. But rather than directly commanding your tribesmen, you take control of the elements of nature to help them accomplish tasks. Using a swirling black snake icon known as the Breath, you have the ability to pull up sand, water, lava and other elements and re-arrange the landscape as you see fit to help your little friends on their way.

Pressing the action button on an objective - like a totem or a specific object - will send only the appropriate number of tribesmen necessary to accomplish the task, saving a lot of pointless micro-management. Their path is indicated by a white line, keeping you in check of their progress, but if your scouts come across a problem, you’ll see a red line instead. And they will yell at you a lot.

One basic example is a group trying to cross a river. Now, it doesn’t come into the mind of these fellows to simply try and swim across (said body of water was not very deep), so instead they have a go at me to do something about it. This is where the triggers come into play - hold down one to suck up sand from a nearby beachside, and then hold the other trigger down when your ball of levitating matter is above the river to create a bridge for the team to cross.

Its simplicity in this manner is really quite engaging - you can choose to simply populate the totems and sod off to the exit door, but I found myself spending additional time in the level making sure the world was going green. When you begin each stage, the world is a complete dustbowl - creating villages automatically sees plant life sprout in the surrounding area, like a virus. A healthy virus. An optional progress metre in the corner of the screen shows just how much of the land you’ve turned into a forest, and if you reach certain goals you can even encourage wildlife to appear.

You’ll be faced with new challenges as you progress through the stages however - the second level saw me trying to save the villages I created from being destroyed in multiple tsunamis. These natural disaster monsters arrive at five minute intervals, and so it becomes a race against time to send a tribesman out to learn a spell that can create an invisible wall to block the tide.

In another stage, my people had decided to settle right next to an active volcano. Probably not the best example of intelligence in the tribe’s history. I can kind of see why these guys almost became extinct. But even lava can be used to your advantage, creating a rock wall around the tribe so that deadly waves don’t smash them to smithereens.

Unleashing the power of special totems will also give you unique powers that can be used in a pinch to complete a mission - in this volcanic stage I was able to use the Jellified Water ability to rubberise an ocean and part it, Moses-style, to allow my tribe to run to the exit door. These powers are time-limited however, and are accessible by the d-pad.

With all the things that have been streamlined for console accessibility, From Dust looks to be a pretty addictive game, and a great take on the strategy sim genre. The graphics and effects look stunning even at this stage, and the optional environmental challenges will be an enticing factor for completionists and those who simply want to get lost in the elements.

I wonder how the rest of the game’s chapters will play out. The first three took me about an hour to complee, so I’m hoping there’s more challenge and replayability value further into the story. In the meantime however, this is an imaginative take on a genre that has yet to score on home console platforms.