Platforms: Xbox 360. PS3, PC. 3/5.
Superficially, From Dust would appear to be a “God” game. After all, you can literally carve great swaths of the earth as you see fit. Not limited to parting oceans, you might construct a vast wall out of cooling lava. Or even turn a tsunami into jelly.
I'd have to say, though, you are far closer to some sort of demi-spirit than a fully fledged Abrahamic smite-machine. For a game that operates on the geological timescale, From Dust ends up being absurdly frantic. It's all that your slightly anaemic deity can do to suck up tons of dirt in an undulating orb and drop it to form an escape route for your worshippers. Often your efforts to shelter your precious tribe-folk from the impressively frequent tidal waves and volcanic eruptions are in vain.
God has shown you the path, masked Pacific Islander, but if you choose to forsake the super convenient land bridge I just painstakingly constructed for you and instead choose to stumble blindly in the darkness because of your AI programming then that's entirely up to you. You have free will.
The dynamic physicality of From Dust is exceptional, though. The way water flows, splitting and reforming in a loose hair-braid of rivulets and swelling and pitching over in great waves, is particularly exceptional. Land masses will quickly erode too, just as vegetation spreads across irrigated lands and is destroyed by flash forest fires just as quickly.
But, as I said, you just aren't a very potent God. The solution to every natural disaster (that you, presumably, had no hand in.) requires you to pick up dirt, like a divinely sanctioned dump truck, or water, like an angelic monsoon bucket, and pile or sploosh it over someplace else. It's never bad, though it's often frustrating. Your interaction with the world is extraordinarily minor compared to the world's breathtaking interactions with itself.
From Dust
