From Dust Review
A beautiful and challenging downloadable game
Posted by
sirdesmond
on
From Dust, the new downloadable title from game designer Eric Chahi (previously of Another World fame) and Ubisoft Montpellier, puts you in control of “The Breath” and tasks you with defending and aiding a dying civilization of tribal people as they seek to journey across their world and learn the lessons of their ancestors. As the Breath, you must master the elements by breathing in one of several terrain types and then exhaling them elsewhere in order to keep deadly tsunamis, lava flows, and wildfires at bay through a series of dynamic game environments featuring fully deformable and reformable terrain. While it certainly made a big splash with its impressive fluid dynamics and art style when it was announced at E3 2010, does From Dust make a case for the return of the god game or is this one game is dead in the water (or lava or fire)?
Graphically, the game is quite impressive especially from a fluid dynamics standpoint. With water and lava acting as such important aspects of the gameplay, it is great that the developers appear to have really taken their time to develop a very advanced and very realistic fluid engine. The water flows as quickly as it should, erodes away dirt and sand as it should, and looks as it should. The same can be said of the lava which trudges along the landscape like maple syrup, burning through anything in its path (including villages), and leaving dark paths of cooled stone wherever it has been. Only when zooming in as close as possible in a rarely-used camera angle that allows you to follow a specific villager does the game look at all sub-par. The grass, plants, and village details are lower resolution than is desirable and the models (other than the villagers) certainly don’t look stellar from this viewpoint, but I found myself so rarely using this angle that it is a very small issue amongst an otherwise beautiful overall graphical design.
From a story perspective, From Dust is not very complex, not that it necessarily needs to be. Through a series of cutscenes at the beginning of each stage, it is revealed that the people of your tribe are part of a mostly dead and once great civilization that they are working to piece back together. Previous inhabitants of the world known only as the “Ancients” learned to harness the Breath as well as the powers of water, fire, and lava. They placed the totems and left the memories scattered about the world, but other than this, little is known and little is revealed throughout the singleplayer campaign. While I would have preferred something focusing less on the metaphysical and more on the specific culture and characters within the tribe, the story is more than the game necessitates and it does a reasonably good job of building up a naturalistic and primal mood.
While the initial concept of the gameplay, simply picking up material of one kind at a time and depositing it elsewhere, is easy to grasp, it is really only interesting, on its own, for the first few stages. Luckily though, Ubisoft recognized this as well and quickly introduces additional player abilities and interactive items within the environments normally on a one-per-stage level. This keeps things interesting as you go throughout the campaign so rather than each stage simply feeling like a slightly different layout of the one before it, each stage feels entirely unique and some game mechanics make an appearance and then are removed all within the lifespan of a single stage (such as an expansive desert that undulates every few minutes like the ocean tides). In addition to the basic objects of each level which include safely building a village at each of the totems on a stage and escorting your villagers to the exit tunnel, bonuses are granted to players willing to take the time and effort to spread foliage across the entirety of the environment and gain access to special, smaller totems that unlock a “memory of the tribe” which unveils additional pieces of the game’s very thin storyline. These additional objectives add a nice bit of challenge for players who are looking to go the extra mile or don’t want to continue past a certain stage just yet.
From Dust is a very good game and one that will scratch any god game itches you may have been having (or perhaps create some future itches if this is your first taste of the genre). While the story dips a bit too heavily into the metaphysical when it could have been more about culture and character, the overall arch alongside the ever-expanding array of tools and abilities granted to the player makes for a very rewarding and satisfying single-player campaign. The inclusion of challenge maps will appeal to those certain gamers looking for something a bit more nerve-wracking and competitive, but may ring hollow to some (like myself). Ultimately, From Dust is an excellent downloadable title featuring a fluid, physics, and gameplay mechanics that are begging to be implemented into a full-fledged, retail title more fitting of its god game roots. For now though, all we have is this beautiful and challenging downloadable game that is From Dust and that is certainly not a bad thing.