From Dust

What would you do if your were a god? I know what I would do. Screw up. Screw up a lot. I fail my duties as lord and saviour by watching the elements wipe clean my growing settlements of men from the earth through a series of natural disasters.

I swear. I think for a few minutes, talk land reformation with the people either side of me - then I hit restart. I bet even God never had a reset button.

Welcome to From Dust. It's Lemmings meets Populous from the mind of Another World's creator Eric Chahi.

It's infuriating, fun, soothing, beautiful, haunting. It's a digital download title that has you, as a omnipresent god - in the RTS form a glowing cursor - guiding a lost tribe through multiple levels, reshaping the lands to allow them save passage and to protect them from natural disasters which threaten extinction at every turn.

You can draw deeper metaphors from gameplay, how it notes the brevity of human life, or discusses the unstoppable forces of nature. Alternatively you can piss about and create impromptu water slides to see how fast you can get your villagers from the top of a mountain to its bottom. From Dust is many things at once, and all of it intriguing.

It's due in no small part to the simplicity of the central world-building mechanic. A tap and hold of LT will leech particles from the world - be they sand, water or lava - into a compact ball. You're then free cast as much or as little as you like anywhere else on the level with a tap or hold of RT, building sand castles, flooding valleys, creating mountains.

From Dust is akin to those mouth-watering tech demos you see that showcase new hardware - a sandbox world that you wish you could have your hands on just to play about with, to mould, shape to your whim.

You control the Breath, the sentient geography-altering deity that has been resurrected by a last few remaining tribesmen to lead them to safety and restore their memories. Two simple wishes that lay the foundations of the gameplay; repopulate the earth enough offer them safe passage to the next level, and reconnect them with their memories to stave off extinction. It's religious metaphors a-go-go.

That is, if you want to read it that way. From Dust plays its cues similar to Limbo - it leaves you to decide what the subtext is Or you can ignore, and just enjoy what is a superb and unique puzzle game.

Each level, from a choice of thirteen on the main screen, drops you and a single tribe of nomads into a series of maps that steadily grow in size and complexity. Building sand bridges across rivers give way to building mountains to protect valleys of villages from tsunamis and deviating the course of magma flows to allow tribes a clear escape path.

Each level will be littered with totems, the touch of which will restore part of the tribe's memories, from the basic knowledge to build villages to granting them the power to form mystical shields around settlements to protect from natural disasters. There are totems to that will grant you new powers - such as jellifying water to make it possible to walk on - and other hidden ones that will fill an in-game journal fleshing out the world.

Once the level is finished, the powers and memories are reset, and you must start afresh in the next. The first totem will always give the tribe the ability to form a village, and allow plantations to grow. The main goal of each stage is to cover the landmasses with enough vegetation, tracked by an on-screen meter, to unlock the Passage to the next location (the capital ‘P' there is due to your exit being another totem located somewhere within the world).

The other totems are usually placed out of reach of the tribe, forcing you to form a safe path for them. You can't control tribes directly, only indicate were you'd like them to go by tapping A over points of interest of the map - once they get to some terrain they can't cross they'll stop and shout for help.

For example, one of the earlier levels sees a tsunami sweep towards the tribe - a totem located on another land mass stores the memory to create that mystical shield. Incoming natural disasters are noted by an on-screen timer, From Dust's one concession towards the need for urgency. Here, three minutes seems plenty of time at first.

Yet the simple procedure - ordering one villager to journey to the totem and bring that memory back to the village to save his kin - is the focus of much debate, swearing, and the odd chuckle from the development team as a room full of first-time gods (myself included) make a right pig's ear out of proceedings.

Efficient use of your geography-altering skills is essential. This puzzle has the elected tribesman separated from his objective by a river between land masses, then a step hill leading to a lake, filled by a nearby waterfall, in which the totem rests.

You can only absorb so much matter into your grasp at one time, and the materials you can manipulate stay true to their interaction with physics, gravity and the elements. Sand will be worn quickly down by the lapping waves of the river, so rapid trips to sand deposits on the next land mass are needed to fortify a bridge across the river long enough for the tribesman to cross. But by draining sand away from the next land mass has steepened the gradient of the hill to which he as to climb. Shoring up the waterfall has the consequence of the river's flow redirecting straight into the tribesman's path, sending him plunging into the nearby sea.

Your tribes will attempt to swim, and Chahi examples lifting and dropping water at a steadily faster rate in one spot to create waves in order to push the struggling swimmer back onto land. I do this, only for both tribesman and village to be swallowed by a wave of water as time runs out.

The developer explains this is just a small slice of what the game had to offer. There's more powers to show, more complexities to overcome. Once a level is finished, Chahi explains, it's state will be saved, allowing you to go back in at any point to either try and cover the land masses completely with vegetation, or simply restructure each world as you see fit.

Even with my brief time with the game, it's clear to see this has the potential to be yet another smaller, perfectly formed title that offers something special. Its themes and play style could easily branch the divide between the hardcore and mainstream, with a difficulty curve that means there's no concession to the casual.