I picked up From Dust in a pre-order sale, and held back from playing it until just yesterday (due to all the press about horrible DRM and such). All this time it’s been sitting on my PC, installed, in my “pending” folder on Steam, taunting me.

And now I’m terribly disappointed.

But first, about the game

The game is reminiscent of the old Populous games, where you play a super-powered God and you have to guide your little tribesmen to various goals. They usually want to travel to some nearby marker to build a village, but an inconvenient river (of water, or sometimes lava) is in the way. From a top-down perspective, your main tools are landscaping-oriented; picking up and dropping down sand will be your primary duty in this game.

To add a bit of spice, the game also contains three unique plants: one that absorbs water (and releases it if the surroundings get too hot), one that randomly bursts into flames (and evaporates nearby water while doing so), and one that explodes, leaving nothing but a crater, if hot stuff gets nearby.

The good stuff

The game is beautiful. The way the waves slosh around in your lakes, the way rivers erode sand (and even rock!) over time, the way the whole landscape slowly becomes more and more real is just phenomenal. I love the aesthetics of the game and the liquid physics engine is awesome.

And it felt good to toy around with, too; crafting new valleys to redirect rivers gave me a nice rush. Directing the off-flow of a volcano to skirt my villages was neat. Tidal waves were entertaining to deal with, as was magically shifting terrain.

I think that’s where the game falls apart, at it’s most fundamental level, though: I didn’t have fun playing with it. I had fun toying with it. Which brings me to my long, bullet-pointed:

The bad stuff

This game had a lot of bad things hanging about it. I’ll try to touch on the most important ones:

• There was no challenge to the game. Nothing was particularly “hard.” There were some glimmers of hope here, but they cocked them all up. Here’s just a few off the top of my head:
• The name of this game is resource management. You only have so much sand to distribute around, and making smart choices with it is key. Sure you can change your mind and re-allocate the stuff, but do you make an isthmus to another area you need to access, or expand your vegetation? Build a wall to protect yourself from a threat or create a path to safety? Oh wait, you unlock the “unlimited sand” button in the second level. No more hard choices.
• Sometimes a tidal wave could wipe out your village. The challenging solution is to build a wall to protect your village; or perhaps raise your village up high enough on a mountain of sand that it exceeds the height of the wave. The game’s solution? “Water invincibility shrine“.
• Sometimes an erupting volcano will send a landslide of hot magma towards your village. It’s a fun challenge to divert the lava flow by molding it into a channel; you can blow up channels using explosive plants; you can even redirect a river to meet the lava and turn it all into cool rock. These are fun. The game’s solution? “Magma invincibility shrine.”
• Sometimes a small dribble of water slowly builds over time to completely swamp your village and drive the people out. Channelling this water away is my go-to solution; but you can even evaporate some or all of this water using a fire-tree plant, and it’s fun to balance the danger of it setting your village in blazes too. Oh wait, did I mention the “magma invincibility shrine” also protects you from all forms of fire? Challenge erased!
• Even then, if your village is in danger of being engulfed in flames, you can likewise balance the water-plant to put out the flames automatically, but risk it flooding your village. Did I mention the water-invincibility shrine?
• And if all of those horrible game balance decisions didn’t impress upon you with how easy this game is: if all else fails, you can MOVE YOUR VILLAGE TO A SAFER LOCATION. Sure, it takes about a minute for your villagers to pull it off, but you can easily say “screw you!” to the map designer when he tried to force you to live on the side of a volcano. I can build my own paradise over here, thanks.
• The cutscenes were terrible. I started up the first level, and there was a nice video showing my tribe’s journey to the location. “Neat!”, I thought. I kinda looked forward to unfolding the continuing adventure… Except they used the same cutscene between EVERY SINGLE LEVEL. It was basically a fancy loading screen.
• Maybe the cutscenes weren’t totally at fault; the narrative was completely terrible. Maybe they just had nothing to work with. The game never really made clear if YOU are a God, or if you are just representing the power of the shamans in your tribe. They seem to summon and control you? But you have free will and can be a dick to them? I don’t get it. They tried to build on some story where you are looking for your lost ancestors, but I didn’t buy it. Why was I doing this? I had no motivation!
• The big payoff ending was eye-rolling-ly uninspired. I won’t spoil it for you, but I can feel the game trying really hard to say the end scene was a big deal, but it just wasn’t.
• The game is too short. From first load to finish – including bathroom breaks, eating, reading blogs and doing other stuff alt-tab’d out, and a 3-hour evening reprieve in which I left the game open, I only logged 8 hours. I figure the in-game content is only 3-4 hours long. They try to tack on more content by introducing “challenge mode,” which is essentially doing all the levels again but this time with a time limit.
• The controls are awful. The game plays like it was designed for a console (it was). Moving around the map with a mouse is haphazard and I’m often over-correcting or under-compensating for my movements. I feel like nobody play-tested the PC version.

Allright, I’m stopping my list now mostly because I’m getting bored of typing them all out. I could go on quite a bit longer.

Conclusions?

It feels like a nice upstart (very talented!) programmer created a neat toy that included some great dynamic water modelling. He ran up to his boss at Big Studio X (Ubisoft?) and they tried oh so hard to turn it into a game, but it fell flat on it’s face – probably because of time or budget.

It feels rushed, like it’s still a prototype. This game has all the hallmarks of Awesome Tech, but developed via document and not via iteration. They tacked on a bunch of features that sound cool up front, but just didn’t pan out to a fun experience.

This game is particularly agonizing to me because – with a few months(?) of iteration, cutting, and adding features – this game could be awesome. Because half the features were essentially cheats, you could just CUT things from the game to make it more fun, more challenging, and more rewarding.

And this is exactly why smaller studios – and indies developers – can do so well in our field: We ship when it’s fun. Not before.