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In the Beginning
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The game opens with an idyllic world, a tiny island practically glowing with lush vegetation. Your goal is simple: Get the whole world to believe in you and worship you as their god. You the player are manifested as an elegantly simple, all-powerful hand hovering above the earth. Not wanting to break the illusion of the gameworld with buttons, tabs, and menu screens, the designers have made the hand the entirety of your interface. You'll grab spells from your citadel and cast them with a wave, and you'll move through the world by "grabbing" parts of the landscape and "pulling" the world until your destination reaches you.
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While you cannot interact directly with the primitive tribes peppering the landscape, you can influence their lives indirectly. Spells let you rain manna from the heavens to feed starving tribes or to rip their fragile villages with vicious ribbons of lightning. Either approach will convince the tribesmen there is something greater out there, and they will begin to worship you, either out of fear or out of adoration, and therein lies the heart of the game. Do you model yourself after Kali, the Indian black goddess who ate her own children, or the more benevolent Christian New Testament God?
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It's the sort of decision games have rarely addressed. Just as every moral choice you make in your life shapes and molds your existence, so will it in Black & White. Live a life of callous evil, and the gameworld becomes a blighted environment, scarred with volcanic fissures, while your place of power becomes an increasingly forbidding place. Nurture and care for your worshippers, and the world flourishes, your palace growing to resemble a fairy-tale ideal.
Child of God
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