The Breath: It guides us through life on our journey to discover the hidden secrets of the ancients. The breath guides us just as we guide it.
This is the story of the Ancients. This is the story of The Breath. This is the story of From Dust.
Right from the get-go From Dust doesn’t give you much of a story to go on. You play as what the game calls The Breath – the God of the game. You have the ability to pick up and control the elements of sand, water, and lava. You’ll be doing this while also telling the tribesman where to go. You’re objective in From Dust is to have your tribe build a village at each other the totems placed on the map (between 1 & 4,) and then get to the sanctuary. Once reaching the sanctuary your tribe will pass through, walking in the footsteps of the ancients that passed through so many centuries before them.
Although this may sound relatively easy, there is in fact a catch; while you may be God – you’re not Mother Nature. (Unless you really are, in which case I apologize.) Some of the things that Mother Nature will throw at you are volcanoes, flash floods, rain, and lava…Oh, and GIANT EXPLODING TREES, among other things.
From Dust is a very unique God games in the sense that it’s not hard, it’s simply challenging. As I played through it I found myself spending enormous amounts of time attempting to figure out a solution to a single map until it simply hit me, at which point I was able to complete a map I’d spend upwards of an hour trying to figure out in ten minutes.
Aside from the 12-14 hours story mode From Dust also has a ‘time trials’ mode and a ‘challenge mode.’ While the time trial mode may be pretty self explanatory, its challenge mode isn’t so straight forward. You see, Challenge Mode teaches you how to think outside the box. Challenge maps are earned solely by advancing through the story mode and will have you doing some odd things such as: killing your villagers to complete an objective, destroying your towns to save different ones, and even drowning villagers to get them down hills faster. With this the challenge mode proves to be a fun take on the game while providing a nice twist that will have you going “Oh… I get it now!” for hours.
The game itself looks beautiful to say the least – the scenery all looks very lifelike and the physics work wonderfully. The game is simply put: Amazing looking.
All said and done, From Dust proves to be quite a different – yet fun – take on the classic God game and will provide you with 15 hours of playability at the least.
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