From Dust

Keith recently talked me into getting an XBox One, and while I'm enjoying it so far, it did have one notable cost- I had to trade in my XBox 360. Only four games were left on my XBox backlog, and since I knew time was running short I had to figure out which game to play before I let it all go. The first easy cut was Alone In the Dark, a modern remake of an old game mostly known these days for being turned into a terrible Uwe Boll movie starring Tara Reid as an archaeologist. I love me some survival horror, but I have my limits, and since this one was sent in that package from Trevor back in the day, I had little personal motivation to beat it- I didn't buy it for myself, right? So, no more Alone In the Dark in the backlog. The second game I decided not to play was Perfect Dark Zero. I had some interest in playing it for series' completion's sake, but Keith has assured me that it isn't very good and this was also a game that I didn't purchase for myself. It's out. My final two XBox games were both bought on Live Arcade; Castlevania: Harmony of Despair and From Dust. Castlevania seemed like the obvious winner- I've enjoyed the three Castlevania games I've played so far and they're usually not too long, so I thought I may as well play that one too. But! The game was just plain frustrating in its first few minutes, unlike every other Castlevania game I've played. It's focused on multi-player, but no one is playing online since the game came out years ago and wasn't all that popular in the first place. Also the game is played completely zoomed out, allowing you to see the entire level/castle you're playing through, but seemingly had no way to zoom in on just the room your character was in. What was the point of that? I spent a few minutes looking for the solution before saying "fuck it" and giving up. There goes a third game, just purged from my backlog! I had one game left to play: From Dust.

 

I'm not even really sure why I bought this game; I thought there were good reviews at the time of its release but looking back it seems opinions on From Dust were mediocre. It was cheap though, and to its credit was a very different experience than any game I've logged. I think it played like a combination of Lemmings and Sim-City. Basically you play as a god whose primary action in the game is to change the shape of the environment to help the tribe that worships you to survive and prosper- you suck up material in the environment in one place and drop it down in another. Each level will require you to guide your little guys to three or four locations where they can set up villages, but the environment constantly gets in the way. For instance, if a village is settled, trees will start flourishing on the dirt around it as far as the dirt goes, but if any of these trees gets too close to a lava flume it can light on fire, which will slowly make its way back to the village and burn it down. You can put out a fire with water, but if you use too much you can flood the town. You can also suck up water to allow your worshippers access to new areas, or suck up dirt to place between islands to build a bridge. The best part of the game is how open-ended its solutions are- the game might be guiding you to an interesting solution to get your guys from one place to another, but if you'd rather brute force things like moving an entire lake drop by drop, you can do that too. Is your town getting hit by rogue tidal waves? You can tear it all down, drop a ton of lava on the ground, let it harden into rock, and presto- your town can now be settled at a higher elevation, far from the natural disasters at sea level. Still though, there were too many imperfections to keep me from really enjoying the game. The big one is AI- you don't directly control any of the villagers, but just tell them "walk to this point", and they will decide their own path, which frequently made no sense to me and wasted time. Another frequent annoyance was that the presence of the tiniest bit of water near your town's area would stop you from being able to settle there in the first place, requiring a bit of a pixel hunt as you try to suck up small drops of water to get them out of the way. I appreciate the novelty of the game and it was nice to switch things up after so many RPGs, first-person shooters, and third person action/adventure games, but there was a lack of polish that keeps me from wanting more from the genre any time soon.