Reus Review

Everything is connected. Oceans provide the water needed to give rise to swamps and forests. Fruit trees support nearby animals, making them more plentiful. The barren desert earth can conceal precious minerals underneath, just waiting for humans to come along and mine them. But the flourishing of a planet doesn't happen on its own. As the world itself, you guide the changes that take place on your surface. In Reus, you guide four elemental giants to and fro across the land, using their abilities to shape the planet and to support the fickle little humans who settle in the spaces you create for them. Though it initially appears quite simple, Reus gradually reveals itself to be a game of considerable complexity, and it makes the pursuit of a prosperous planet a thoroughly absorbing one.

The ocean giant's just hanging out and doing some people watching.

In Reus, the world is a two-dimensional circle. Each small patch of land can support only one thing, be it apple trees or rattlesnakes or topaz. You bequeath plants, animals, and minerals to these patches of land via the four giants who do your bidding; your forest giant's fruit plant ability can make blueberries spring up in the woodlands, for instance, while the ocean giant's domestic animals ability can make kangaroo rats appear in the desert. Once even the hint of what the game calls a "source"--any source of food, wealth, or technology--is in an area, humans will settle nearby. Before long, these strange creatures start trying to build projects. Schools, markets, a lair for the local mad scientist--you just never know what ideas will get into their kooky little heads.

The hapless little humans have no chance of succeeding at even their most modest endeavors without some divine intervention, but helping them achieve their early ambitions puts no strain on your godly abilities. You just need to pay a bit of attention to the specializations of projects and the symbioses of your resources. If a village is working on building a granary, for instance, that granary might have a specialization that results in a bonus of 15 food for every patch of land devoted to animals that is within the village's borders. This makes meeting the granary's completion requirement of 30 food in use by the village a snap.

Symbioses are benefits that sources get from neighboring or nearby sources; chickens are a better source of food if there are blueberries nearby to support them, for instance. This concept is simple yet meaningful, suggesting the interdependent relationships found in real ecosystems. Specializations and symbioses are the foundations for most of Reus' challenge, and the intuitiveness of these concepts makes it easy to grasp the all-important fundamentals before the game ratchets up the complexity.

You are the world. You are the children. You are the one who makes a better day, so let's start giving.

And ratchet up the complexity it does. After successfully creating a modest market, a rapidly growing town may try its hand at building a blast furnace, which has considerably loftier requirements. To help humans succeed at these more advanced endeavors, you need to create more advanced resources, which you do with the help of ambassadors the humans reward you with as thanks for helping them complete projects. When your giants have ambassadors riding on their shoulders, they gain access to a wider variety of abilities called aspects, which allow plants, animals, and minerals to be transmuted into more advanced sources.

Specializations also become more complex, requiring more thought and more work if you're going to take advantage of them the way you need to in order to help the humans complete their projects. You might find yourself in a situation where a village has just enough wealth to complete a project, but is just short of the amount of tech it needs, and you must rack your brain to work out a way to increase the village's tech without totally disrupting the delicate symbiotic balance you've established that is providing it with all that wealth. Problems like this can be delightfully exasperating, and if you work out a solution and see the humans complete the project before time runs out, you share in the jubilation as the little creatures celebrate their triumph.