From Dust was designed by the company Another World and developed by Eric Chahi. From Dust breathes a whole new life into the god simulation genre, as publishers Ubisoft dubbed it the spiritual heir.
You take on the role of an overseer known as ‘breath’ and you must help a tribe of primitive humans through empty landscapes full of dangers and obstacles,while rebuilding the landscape, so your tribes people can build their villages around totems.You must help them on their way by re-building and re-forging the land. Re-forging the landscape is rather unique and you get to pull chunks of dirt,water and other elements that form into a sphere like object that you carry around and dump on to the ground to re-construct the area. All of this is done to help your tribe navigate safely around the area.
You play spiritual force known as the Breath; you get to shape the world by absorbing elements of earth, water, lava in a swirling glob and putting the materials elsewhere. The aim of the game is to guide a tribe between portals as they attempt to rediscover their forgotten past, setting up villages around totems, however despite the levels’ small size with only 12 chapters in total, From Dust is more of a sandbox than almost any ‘open world’ game, and it practically defines the concept of emergent play.
The Totems that your tribes build their villages around will also grant special powers (Not all the time) that you can use to change the world for a limited period of time, my favourite has to be turning all the water to jelly, this allows you to you create wobbly jelly like towers. These give you a great sense of control over the zone, and the well timed use of the powers can instantly turn the tables within any level. When you have completed a chapter you may return to this chapter as if you had not left it; no changes will occur allowing you to go back and continue or just fool around.
The option to break away from the main challenges and indulge in other fun aspects is always there. There is no pressure to grab all the totems and get to the exit to finish the chapter, unless you wish to apply yourself with haste to get to the next level. You only need one secure village to stay in the game, this that means you can lose yourself in constructing streams and mountains, peninsulas and dams, islands and lakes as much as you like.
As for the other side of the coin the Old Testament style of pure vengeance upon the world is always there, you are free to drown all the citizens or swamp the place with hot magma but really that is just a fast way to force the level restart (seriously wanted more fun here). From Dust simply isn’t the grand realisation of a creator fantasy and as such stands in the tall show of recent indie construction such as Minecraft.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
