Reviewed on Xbox 360, coming to PC/PS3 soon

I made my first serious mistake pretty early on. See, there was this volcano. I like volcanoes. They’re great, poxy blisters suppurating chunks of Hell itself – that’s an idea I can totally get behind.

Anyway, I was busy slopping magma all over an escarpment, making crags and ridges and other intimidating bits of scenery for my trembling worshippers to behold, when I realised that I’d neglected a drift of lava off to the other side of the crater. Over time, as this lava had run off down the bluffs and cooled, it had gradually, inexorably, and instantly regrettably bridged the sea between the volcano and a nearby village.

Which went up in flames. Everybody burned. So much for infallibility.

Fundamentally, From Dust is simple enough. You have a bit of a world, and some guys in funny masks scurrying about on it. You have to reach, claim, and populate some magic stone Totems scattered around the place, then move on to the next part.

But actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Things get in the way. Like rivers. And tsunamis. And, in one particularly memorable case*, the biggest ****ing volcano in the universe. It’s elemental insurrection in a very real, very Discovery Channel Ecology Gone Wild! special edition kind of way – but hey, you’re a god, so you can do something about that.

More immediately, you can pick up sand, water, and lava, and redistribute these as you like – sand raises the ground level; water creates pools, puts out fires, or simply soaks into the earth in more arid conditions; lava can be used to build rock walls, which in turn can be used to redirect rivers or even the lava flow itself. Basic, kids’ stuff terraforming, until you accidentally dump a fistful of lava on top of a village and get some quick, hard education in contingent thermodynamics. Oh snap, everything died. And now it’s on fire. I’m sure the tribal elders whispered tales of the Burny Skyfire Day for many years thereafter.

Once you’ve established settlements, you’ll also have access to additional megapowers, like the ability to temporarily evaporate all the water on the map, or increase your carrying capacity, to help you get all that being-god business done more efficiently. It’s not cheating when you make the rules.

Despite its sandbox paraphernalia, From Dust is more like a rather elaborate puzzle game. While there’s some space to muck about, there’s definitely one or two strategies that work, and many that just won’t. Protip: Don’t waste too much time playing with lava.

Underneath its admittedly very, very impressive facade, however, the game feels a little limited, or that the designers perhaps missed an important opportunity somewhere – or several, for that matter.

There’s no meaningful interaction with the people at all, for example, and if there’s one thing I learned playing Black & White, it’s that messing with your disciples is loads of fun. And if there’s another I learned playing Black & White, it’s that strategic deployments of lightning-based incentives promote obedience. Here, instead, there’s a peculiar sense of utterly indifferent detachment from your people, which kind of sucks the personality out of it all. Maybe that’s the point – I mean, it makes some sort of sense in context – but this isn’t the Old Testament, it’s a videogame.

And just as it starts becoming really interesting, it ends.

Sure, it’s a fascinating, occasionally even brilliant game, and I would recommend it to just about everybody, but in some ways it feels like a concept demo for something much better. Buy it, because I definitely want to play From Dust 2.

* Because I had to restart the stage seven or eight times.

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