From Dust offers a fun if sometimes frustrating opportunity to play as a god.
The first thing you are likely to notice visually about From Dust is its art style. The game absolutely oozes the same a sort of artsy charm popularized by other puzzle titles like Limbo and Braid. The palette of the entire game is heavily saturated with a variety of bright, pretty colors that swirl and move as you interact with them. Pretty colors and good art cannot prop up a game by themselves, however, which is why I'm pleased to report that the rest of From Dust is also a success visually. Lava streams menacingly down the ever-changing slopes of the game's many volcanoes, water crashes down hills while eroding away the earth itself before settling into the nearest basin, and massively intimidating tsunamis wipe the ground clean while also offering one of the coolest environmental effects I've seen in a fluid dynamics-based game. It all looks fantastic, and From Dust is easily one of the most impressive arcade titles I've played both in terms of aesthetics and graphical technology. The level of detail does diminish if you ever choose to actually zoom in on the well animated but poorly textured natives themselves, but you probably won't notice too much of that as you will most likely spend ninety percent of your time in the fully zoomed-out god view.
Surprisingly, the audio experience in From Dust actually manages to keep pace with the game's impressive graphics. You are not likely to forget the crushing explosion of that seemingly dormant volcano looming ominously over your villages, and the sound of a tsunami breaking over an ever-too-short seawall as your people run screaming for their lives is more disturbing than one might think. The music played by your people to accentuate certain earned powers-repel water, repel lave, etc.-is also quite loud and intimidating; watching 100 foot walls of water pulsate to the beat of a drum and the moan of didgeridoos is truly an eerie experience. Unfortunately, the usually impressive audio is punctuated by repetitive cries for help from villagers who are stuck and some pretty irritating sound effects for sucking up elements like earth or lava. There are also times when villagers will scream as if Armageddon is upon them and send you rushing their way only for you to realize that they are actually running from flood waters that look like they could be contained in my neighbors' kiddie pool. Despite these flaws, however, From Dust's audio is generally excellent and really does enhance the overall experience.
As far as story goes, there really isn't one to speak of. There's some overly dramatized mumbo jumbo about finding the promised land of the ancients and learning about the powers of nature and…well, I'm bored just writing about it so I'll stop there. The bottom line is that you are a deity called The Breath who is somehow created by your people during the opening cutscene (which raises an interesting if ham-fisted spiritual version of the old "the chicken or the egg" argument that I shall not be getting into here due to lack of interest). As The Breath, you need to keep all those silly little ants down there alive long enough to complete the level by providing them with supernatural assistance in accomplishing their objectives, which in this case is building villages and eventually using the exit doorway. I suppose that the more emotionally inclined gamers out there could wring some value out of the sappy story, but for me it was little more than barely necessary filler.
Fortunately, From Dust's gameplay far outweighs its hokey storytelling. The Breath has the power to alter the environment in nearly any way it sees fit by sucking up certain types of materials and then depositing them elsewhere. The really nifty thing here is that the materials will interact exactly as you expect them to. Build a wall of sand in the middle of a raging river and the river will quickly erode the wall into tiny pieces which will, in turn, be deposited downstream as a delta. Mixing lava and water creates new volcanic rock that does not erode but cannot support vegetation, while burying a fire under water or earth extinguishes it. The interplay of the different elements is truly a marvel to behold, and there is a great deal of satisfaction to be had just in playing around with the different powers that you have even outside of the objectives. On one early map, I played on for nearly an hour after building all the possible villages and opening the exit just because I was enjoying the creation of a new landscape.
Each map in From Dust plays as a sort of self-contained freeform puzzle. In the dozen or so campaign maps the objectives are always to create pathways for your people to build villages at designated spots (villages can be moved once built, a feature that will likely save you a lot of frustration in the later levels) and then to protect those villages long enough to build the others, but the way one goes about those tasks varies wildly from stage to stage. One way or another, once all villages are built the exit will open and you must help your men reach it. To help things along, each village location generally unlocks a new power for The Breath to use as long as the village remains standing. These powers include the Jellify Water ability that turns all of a map's water into malleable gelatin that can be moved or even parted, the Infinite Earth power that allows one to create an endless amount of soft earth for a brief period of time, and the Amplify power that allows The Breath to suck up and redistribute more material than usual. Additionally, there are totems scattered around most maps that will give important buffs like Repel Water to your villages if your carrier can reach the totems and then make it back to the villages to teach the ability. To top it all off, there are periodic disasters on most maps that range from tsunamis and rising tides to full blown apocalyptic volcanic eruptions that must be dealt with on the fly. Everything works remarkably well, and I really enjoyed the open-endedness of it all. Do you want to reroute that lava flow, or would you rather just dump water over it to make some new ground? Should you dam that river and risk a major flood later, or would you be better off draining it out to the ocean at the expense of a land route between your villages? These kinds of choices permeate all levels of From Dust's gameplay, and the levels will turn out vastly differently depending on what kind of choices you make. I'd be willing to bet that no two players' maps look the same at the end of any given stage, and the complete freedom to solve things your way is a refreshing change of pace in the generally restrictive and trial-and-error based puzzle genre.
From Dust is not perfect, however, and it suffers from a couple of extremely irritating bugs and design oversights. First and most noticeable among these is the villager A.I. Men will frequently take routes that are, to put it lightly, less than optimal in a given situation, which leaves you to sort out the mess afterwards. For instance, I once built a perfectly suitable bridge from one island to another so that my villagers could avoid the gigantic erupting volcano in the center of the atoll that the map is based around, but rather than thanking me for my divine wisdom and using the route provided, they decided it would make more sense to charge up the slopes of the volcano. They were promptly engulfed in brimstone. I sent another group after widening the bridge a bit, but they too headed up the fiery slopes. They were promptly engulfed in brimstone. This went on for a while until I completely dropped my strategy and rerouted the lava to allow the men to safely traverse Mt. Death. These situations occur far too often to go unnoticed, and the feeling of losing control does not sit well in a game that rests its value entirely making the player omnipotent. Additionally, some of the disasters in the later levels feel downright cheap on the part of the developers given how late and suddenly they occur. One map has you building villages in a volcanic crater while trying to curb the flooding from frequent rain storms for more than 45 minutes before starting the biggest eruption in the game with no warning. This eruption flooded the entire crater with lava, decimating my intricate drainage systems and forcing me to restart entirely. You'd think that Ubisoft would have realized that in a game like From Dust, where levels frequently take over an hour and require a great deal of planning on the part of the player, random, earth shattering disasters that all but guarantee a first time restart are a bad idea.
Overall, though, From Dust is an excellent title. It provides more than a dozen campaign levels that will likely take the average player at least 8 hours to complete as well as a challenge mode that mixes things up and can really be as replayable as you are dedicated to the leaderboards. There are some problems, but at a $15 price point I'd say the fun of creating and destroying as you see fit outweighs the few glaring faults that plague From Dust. If you're looking for something to stimulate your mind while killing some time before September, this is as good as it gets. I recommend a purchase.