The concept is interesting and I like the visual style. I'd like to come back to it some time.
Very fun physics game with a free story mode too!
I remember seeing Markiplier play this a long long time ago, so this has always been on my wishlist, bought it recently and wallah! Its pretty fun
It’s a great little physics game, I will replay it and update my review to reflect this.
I remember seeing Markiplier play this a long long time ago, so this has always been on my wishlist, bought it recently and wallah! Its pretty fun
It’s a great little physics game, I will replay it and update my review to reflect this.
Pretty fun seeing and agreeing with this tweet yesterday & blindly starting From Dust only to realise it was exactly the same thing.
I think being an observer of the press cycle and online blowback in 2011 for this game coloured my expectations a little - those were my halcyon Born Different, Born Innocent days - I expected shit from a butt I'll be perfectly honest with you. Thoughts and prayers for the unfortunates who purchased this game at release, full price, expecting a fully-fledged God Game by the then on-top-of-the-world Ubisoft. People were pretty scathing as a result of their expectations being sidestepped, to the extent that I was successfully scared away from even trying the game all the way until now, over a decade later.
Anyway I thought this was fine lol. A fun little puzzle game where you worm around a map, scooping up elements and plopping them where they'd hopefully aid and protect your villagers from natural disasters. Hits some surprisingly high notes at points with thanks to some surprisingly good fluid physics and overall level of presentation - making tsunamis, terrain-warping earthquakes and volcano eruptions a truu thrill. Routinely £2 on Steam, which I'd say is apt, but you're honestly better off pirating the thing. The version of uPlay From Dust is packaged with is about ten layers deep into being fucked beyond repair, and the port in general feels like it's peddling to power its own iron lung.
I think being an observer of the press cycle and online blowback in 2011 for this game coloured my expectations a little - those were my halcyon Born Different, Born Innocent days - I expected shit from a butt I'll be perfectly honest with you. Thoughts and prayers for the unfortunates who purchased this game at release, full price, expecting a fully-fledged God Game by the then on-top-of-the-world Ubisoft. People were pretty scathing as a result of their expectations being sidestepped, to the extent that I was successfully scared away from even trying the game all the way until now, over a decade later.
Anyway I thought this was fine lol. A fun little puzzle game where you worm around a map, scooping up elements and plopping them where they'd hopefully aid and protect your villagers from natural disasters. Hits some surprisingly high notes at points with thanks to some surprisingly good fluid physics and overall level of presentation - making tsunamis, terrain-warping earthquakes and volcano eruptions a truu thrill. Routinely £2 on Steam, which I'd say is apt, but you're honestly better off pirating the thing. The version of uPlay From Dust is packaged with is about ten layers deep into being fucked beyond repair, and the port in general feels like it's peddling to power its own iron lung.
Ubisoft has tried their hardest to make sure this game cannot be played
Suffers from too much 2000 jank, but it IS fun. I think a from dust 2 would be amazing... Any day now...
In From Dust, you control The Breath, a god-like entity with the power to move terrain elements, like water, soil or lava, from one place to another. Your job is to guide a tribe of humans as they seek their origins, while preventing them from perishing due to natural disasters. These humans, in turn, will expand their settlements, their prayers and relics enhancing your powers.
It's a nifty, inventive game that's all but forgotten nowadays. Generally speaking, god games revolve building around micromanaging your humans and their tasks, but in From Dust, the forces of nature are at the forefront, in all their power and danger, with humans, frail creatures whose lives can end on a whim, as mere spectators.
The game features a campaign mode and a large amount of challenge stages that present you with different scenarios, your job being to either nudge the tribe along to a goal, or protect them from impending disasters, like fires and floods. Instead of micromanaging, it instead focuses on the crisis management aspect of its genre, which makes for a novel experience.
Also noteworthy is the quality of its physics and terrain simulation, which as far as I'm concerned, was something unseen at the time of its release. Spilling water will have it gently flow across the terrain, while earth and lava will smoothly settle. With time, vegetation will come to cover the land. With that and some stellar sound design, From Dust's world not only looks, it feels alive.
I Just Think It's Neat™ and I wish someone would expand on this idea.
It's a nifty, inventive game that's all but forgotten nowadays. Generally speaking, god games revolve building around micromanaging your humans and their tasks, but in From Dust, the forces of nature are at the forefront, in all their power and danger, with humans, frail creatures whose lives can end on a whim, as mere spectators.
The game features a campaign mode and a large amount of challenge stages that present you with different scenarios, your job being to either nudge the tribe along to a goal, or protect them from impending disasters, like fires and floods. Instead of micromanaging, it instead focuses on the crisis management aspect of its genre, which makes for a novel experience.
Also noteworthy is the quality of its physics and terrain simulation, which as far as I'm concerned, was something unseen at the time of its release. Spilling water will have it gently flow across the terrain, while earth and lava will smoothly settle. With time, vegetation will come to cover the land. With that and some stellar sound design, From Dust's world not only looks, it feels alive.
I Just Think It's Neat™ and I wish someone would expand on this idea.
A simple god game with some neat deformable terrain, but not much else. I found it very tedious, slow and dull. The deformable terrain and water physics stuff is very neat, but I need more than neat physics in a video game.
My favourite god sim of all time, by a mile. Beautiful landscapes, intuitive manipulation of your environment, interesting mechanics making for exciting challenges, fun physics shenanigans, all around very rewarding. There are few things in games that evoke more pure excitement in me than playing around with sand and water and lava and seeing the simulated physics run its course.
I really wish there was a sequel.
I really wish there was a sequel.
(Review originally written in 2012)
From Dust is a challenging and rewarding take on the god game genre, powered by a fun, solid physics engine
THE GOOD
Fantastic visual and sound design - simple, versatile earth manipulation and physics system - encourages experimentation and creative thinking
THE BAD
Dumb AI - cannot control individual units - sometimes gives you too many plates to spin
---
The main reason why I tried this game in the first place was the name of its creative director: Eric Chahi, the man behind masterpieces such as Another World (renamed Out of this World in the US) and Heart of Darkness. After many years of absence from the gaming industry, thanks to Ubisoft Chahi returns with something completely different from his former projects, and it surely is a welcome return.
From Dust falls in between the god game and the sandbox genres, god game in which you have to ensure the survival of a tribe of primitives depending on you and sandbox in the purest sense, giving you the ability to reshape the game world at your leisure to allow your people to build their villages and keep them safe from the fury of the elements. Those of you who played around with the FarCry 2 map editor may have an idea of what we're looking at technically-wise: the game allows you to alter the terrain in a simple yet impressively deep way: using what the game calls "The Breath" (essentially a snake-shaped cursor) you can pick up earth, water and lava in a giant ball and redistribute them on the ground to achieve various effects. Want to change the course of a river threatening to drown your tribesmen? You can create a dam to block the riverbed. Need to cross to a distant island? Build an earth bridge for your men to walk on. Want to keep the lava from burning your village? Either build a wall around it with the solidified lava itself or dig a moat and fill it with water, the possibilities are endless. Earth doesn't sit still: it will realistically crumble and fall into place and it will be wiped out by strong tides or water currents. Just because you built a strong earth wall it doesn't mean it'll be there indefinitely.
To aid you in keeping your tiny minions alive, the game provides you with various powers, changing from level to level, which you have to earn by building villages around totems placed at fixed and often hard to reach locations. The powers include the ability to drop an unlimited amount of earth for a very limited time, the ability to 'jellify' water for a while, so you can dig through it as it were earth (is that how Moses did it?), the power of evaporation allows you to lower the water level around the map, allowing your villages to survive floods and heavy rain. Other powers allow you to expand the Breath carrying capacity, quickly put out fires threatening your settlements and other functions. You'll also find magical stones in remote areas of the maps, which grant your villages the immunity to tsunamis of lava flows: it's extremely satisfying seeing a huge tidal wave or a river of scorching magma destroying the scenery but leaving your little town unscathed, definitely worth the effort to acquire said protections.rnWhen a village is built, vegetation will start to spread all around it, propagating as far as fertile earth goes without being interrupted. This is both good and bad, since vegetation burns easily when coming in contact with fire or lava, often meaning the destruction of one or more villages. Luckily you can control this by cutting off fertile ground by creating stony areas or water basins. Vegetation is not always innocuous: aside from palm trees, the maps are often dotted with different plants that will sometimes make your life harder, sometimes easier: the razor weeds are gigantic pointy plants your men cannot cross and you need to burn or work around, fire plants and water plants respectively cyclically burst into flames, or release water when exposed to heat, finally exploding plants create a big explosion when burned with fire or lava. You can sometimes pick up and move these plants as well, which gives you even more strategic options: need to empty a lake? Why not blow a hole in the rock with an exploding plant and let the water pour out. Fire plants burning your villages? A strategically placed water plant can save your village even without your intervention.
You don't have direct control over your men: to command them to move you simply click on a totem or magical stone and they'll march towards it, your task being to ensure they have a safe path to reach their destination. Once all totems have been populated at the same time a portal will open leading to the next level, but don't relax too much: if one of the villages gets destroyed the portal will close and you'll lose that totem's corresponding power until the settlement is rebuilt.rnThe main issue here is with your men's artificial intelligence: their pathfinding is less than spotless, you'll often see them getting stuck where they should be able to proceed, sometimes leading to wasting precious time you could use to build and fortify your villages, which is especially frustrating when the game forces you to a conspicuous amount of multitasking. Even though you'll sometimes be left wanting to be able to give orders to individual 'headstrong' men, this is fortunately no game-breaking flaw and it doesn't detract too much from the overall experience.
Despite not looking particularly stunning, From Dust manages to amaze thanks to its striking visual style: characters and buildings share a charming and quirky design and watching a massive tsunami ravage the land is a sight to behold. The simple sound consists of quiet tribal music and chants and voices spoken in a believable pseudo-african tribal language. The music drastically picks up when danger arises, urging you to take action. All of this sets the perfect mood for what happens on screen.
Being a $15 downloadable game, From Dust doesn't offer a huge amount of content, only 13 missions. It does, however, feature 30 brief challenge maps, some of which are so difficult they should last you a good amount of time. You can experiment with alternative ways to solve each stage of the story mode and you can strive to achieve the 100% vegetation spread in all of them. This should keep you busy for at least a week, which is definitely a good value. It even offers a completely sandbox map to create your own stage from scratch with absolute freedom, shaping the landscape and, for once, controlling the forces of nature.
In conclusion, From Dust is surely a quality game for the thinking man. It requires good planning skills, creativity and quick reflexes. Losing doesn't cause much frustration, as you can always figure out what you did wrong and how to fix it and you can be sure the game gives you several ways to do so. It also allows you to save at any time, so you can try bold new strategies without losing all your progress. A definite must buy for anyone who loves a game requiring some thought and mental effort. A great return for a legendary game designer like Eric Chahi, which doubtlessly leaves us wanting more of his work in the near future.
From Dust is a challenging and rewarding take on the god game genre, powered by a fun, solid physics engine
THE GOOD
Fantastic visual and sound design - simple, versatile earth manipulation and physics system - encourages experimentation and creative thinking
THE BAD
Dumb AI - cannot control individual units - sometimes gives you too many plates to spin
---
The main reason why I tried this game in the first place was the name of its creative director: Eric Chahi, the man behind masterpieces such as Another World (renamed Out of this World in the US) and Heart of Darkness. After many years of absence from the gaming industry, thanks to Ubisoft Chahi returns with something completely different from his former projects, and it surely is a welcome return.
From Dust falls in between the god game and the sandbox genres, god game in which you have to ensure the survival of a tribe of primitives depending on you and sandbox in the purest sense, giving you the ability to reshape the game world at your leisure to allow your people to build their villages and keep them safe from the fury of the elements. Those of you who played around with the FarCry 2 map editor may have an idea of what we're looking at technically-wise: the game allows you to alter the terrain in a simple yet impressively deep way: using what the game calls "The Breath" (essentially a snake-shaped cursor) you can pick up earth, water and lava in a giant ball and redistribute them on the ground to achieve various effects. Want to change the course of a river threatening to drown your tribesmen? You can create a dam to block the riverbed. Need to cross to a distant island? Build an earth bridge for your men to walk on. Want to keep the lava from burning your village? Either build a wall around it with the solidified lava itself or dig a moat and fill it with water, the possibilities are endless. Earth doesn't sit still: it will realistically crumble and fall into place and it will be wiped out by strong tides or water currents. Just because you built a strong earth wall it doesn't mean it'll be there indefinitely.
To aid you in keeping your tiny minions alive, the game provides you with various powers, changing from level to level, which you have to earn by building villages around totems placed at fixed and often hard to reach locations. The powers include the ability to drop an unlimited amount of earth for a very limited time, the ability to 'jellify' water for a while, so you can dig through it as it were earth (is that how Moses did it?), the power of evaporation allows you to lower the water level around the map, allowing your villages to survive floods and heavy rain. Other powers allow you to expand the Breath carrying capacity, quickly put out fires threatening your settlements and other functions. You'll also find magical stones in remote areas of the maps, which grant your villages the immunity to tsunamis of lava flows: it's extremely satisfying seeing a huge tidal wave or a river of scorching magma destroying the scenery but leaving your little town unscathed, definitely worth the effort to acquire said protections.rnWhen a village is built, vegetation will start to spread all around it, propagating as far as fertile earth goes without being interrupted. This is both good and bad, since vegetation burns easily when coming in contact with fire or lava, often meaning the destruction of one or more villages. Luckily you can control this by cutting off fertile ground by creating stony areas or water basins. Vegetation is not always innocuous: aside from palm trees, the maps are often dotted with different plants that will sometimes make your life harder, sometimes easier: the razor weeds are gigantic pointy plants your men cannot cross and you need to burn or work around, fire plants and water plants respectively cyclically burst into flames, or release water when exposed to heat, finally exploding plants create a big explosion when burned with fire or lava. You can sometimes pick up and move these plants as well, which gives you even more strategic options: need to empty a lake? Why not blow a hole in the rock with an exploding plant and let the water pour out. Fire plants burning your villages? A strategically placed water plant can save your village even without your intervention.
You don't have direct control over your men: to command them to move you simply click on a totem or magical stone and they'll march towards it, your task being to ensure they have a safe path to reach their destination. Once all totems have been populated at the same time a portal will open leading to the next level, but don't relax too much: if one of the villages gets destroyed the portal will close and you'll lose that totem's corresponding power until the settlement is rebuilt.rnThe main issue here is with your men's artificial intelligence: their pathfinding is less than spotless, you'll often see them getting stuck where they should be able to proceed, sometimes leading to wasting precious time you could use to build and fortify your villages, which is especially frustrating when the game forces you to a conspicuous amount of multitasking. Even though you'll sometimes be left wanting to be able to give orders to individual 'headstrong' men, this is fortunately no game-breaking flaw and it doesn't detract too much from the overall experience.
Despite not looking particularly stunning, From Dust manages to amaze thanks to its striking visual style: characters and buildings share a charming and quirky design and watching a massive tsunami ravage the land is a sight to behold. The simple sound consists of quiet tribal music and chants and voices spoken in a believable pseudo-african tribal language. The music drastically picks up when danger arises, urging you to take action. All of this sets the perfect mood for what happens on screen.
Being a $15 downloadable game, From Dust doesn't offer a huge amount of content, only 13 missions. It does, however, feature 30 brief challenge maps, some of which are so difficult they should last you a good amount of time. You can experiment with alternative ways to solve each stage of the story mode and you can strive to achieve the 100% vegetation spread in all of them. This should keep you busy for at least a week, which is definitely a good value. It even offers a completely sandbox map to create your own stage from scratch with absolute freedom, shaping the landscape and, for once, controlling the forces of nature.
In conclusion, From Dust is surely a quality game for the thinking man. It requires good planning skills, creativity and quick reflexes. Losing doesn't cause much frustration, as you can always figure out what you did wrong and how to fix it and you can be sure the game gives you several ways to do so. It also allows you to save at any time, so you can try bold new strategies without losing all your progress. A definite must buy for anyone who loves a game requiring some thought and mental effort. A great return for a legendary game designer like Eric Chahi, which doubtlessly leaves us wanting more of his work in the near future.
I just love this game, super interesting mechanics, great puzzle/strategy
The kind game moloch would enjoy
Basically you pick up sand and put it back down again.
The story is you play a magic ferret to help the cheese face people to toot their horns and go in the tunnel. Thanks Eric Chahi!
The story is you play a magic ferret to help the cheese face people to toot their horns and go in the tunnel. Thanks Eric Chahi!
Kind of janky God-game. It's super unique though.
Fun and unique. I just couldn’t beat the last level.
Not my genre of game at all but the artistic impact of Eric Chahi drew me in and the enjoyment kept me there. Wasn't particularly challenging and was extremely short but a nice little indie title for relaxing and messing around with terrain generation. Physics in the game were really neat. Low rating is because there really should have been more content. Blame Ubisoft.
Oh yeah! I was really excited about this game before it came out. It was structured way differently than I expected (less sandbox, more mission based puzzle set pieces) and it worked really well! I'd love to play it again, if not for the meddling Ubisoft and their intrusive software.
play god
A god-sim where I didn't feel all that powerful