In Reus, you control powerful giants that help you shape the planet to your will. You can create mountains and oceans, forests and more. Enrich your planet with plants, minerals and animal life. There is only one thing on the planet that you do not control: mankind, with all their virtues and and all their vices. You can shape their world, but not their will. Provide for them and they may thrive. Give them too much, and their greed may gain the upper hand.
I first found God in 2001 at my mate’s house.
I was engaging in some retro Twitch streaming, which in 2001 meant watching him play a game from over his shoulder asking questions and suggesting he jump of this, drive off that and kill the other. The game in question was Lionhead Studios’ Black and White, a brilliantly creative, expansive and above all tongue-in-cheek game that positioned you as a potentially benevolent or malicious god. You gathered resources and accumulated followers, cast mighty spells, changed the landscape and imposed your will on the world through a giant animal avatar that grew to about 60ft tall and would crap a lot if you’d chosen the cow. It was a game that really epitomized the ‘god-game’ genre and this latest Plug and Play deals with one of the successors to that style of game, Reus.
Simpler in its appearance but with complex mechanics behind it, Abbey Games’ Reus is a true heir to the god-game genre. Presented as a cross-section of a globe, the first thing you’ll notice are the four giants standing on its surface, each one a force of nature and an agent of change. The crab-like Ocean Giant creates vast seas and herds of grazing animals, the Rock Giant brings forth mountains and minerals, the Swamp Giant spreads swamps and herbs and exotic creatures and finally the Forest Giant creates gigantic volcanoes and attractive condo units...
These tools (not meant offensively) shape the world however you see fit. Seas allow forests and swamps to be made on fertile land and mountains pull deserts into shape. These varying terrains are important as each one presents a different biome that results in different fauna and flora. Get your Ocean Giant to create animals in a forest and you get chickens, over in a desert they’re tiny kangaroo rats, in a swamp it’s frogs, in the sea you get mackerel etc. This means you can have a huge variety of elements in play, mixing and matching biomes and their resulting plants, animals and minerals and thus creating a beautiful utopia born from nature living in perfect harmony. Then along comes Humanity to screw everything up.
Once you’ve given your world a makeover and placed your first tortoise in your nice new desert, a nomad will rock up and plonk down a village next to it and start hunting those tortoises.
Why do they hunt those tortoises? One could say that 'hunting' a tortoise isn't even 'hunting' at all. They're basically living rocks with a small amount of motivation. Either way, they do this because Humanity is a plague and because villagers are dicks. Remember this, it’ll come up again.
Now, depending on where the nomad settles they’ll either found a swamp, forest or desert village which each focus on a different resource. Swamp villages will focus on science, forest on food and desert on gold. This small settlement will quickly construct a building on its edge like a shrine or a school that will start a timed mission to reach a certain threshold of one of the aforementioned resources. Once done the building completes and the village gets the bonus permanently and generates an ambassador. The ambassadors are perhaps the only evidence that villagers aren’t complete assholes as these guys will sit on the shoulders of the giant of your choosing and allow them to do new things or improve their existing abilities. This continues and becomes an intricate game of spinning village-sized plates as you try to complete projects with your giants like a short-order cook with the power to sink a continent.
So you know how to play god, but how well does playing god work?
Very well and with a loving detail that’s indicative of a developer’s debut but with a complexity that belies the thoughtful design and skill of a more seasoned studio.
Reus doesn’t really have a set win/lose scenario which I find really refreshing. Every playthrough sees the first villages settle, grow into towns and cities and eventually your four giants will stop moving and enter a slumber which ends the game as you ceding control of the planet to the meatbags populating it. Achieving certain milestones unlocks new elements to use in future games and this really suits the process of playing the game over and over and learning a new trick each time.
The more sinister part of this game, and the only real approximation of an antagonist, is Greed. Human greed. Something that creeps into the game whenever a settlement starts acquiring resources too quickly. Showering a small hamlet with all the food they could desire sends them into a selfish spiral that sees greedy villagers launching attacks on neighbouring towns and even the giants themselves! There’s nothing more heart-breaking than seeing the peaceable Forest Giant getting peppered with arrows after it’s laid down a bountiful grove of fruits for its attackers. This makes a suitably chaotic threat to a style of gameplay all about balance. But it’s also a great simulation of our current relationship with our actual planet, except in the real world you can’t command a Swamp Giant to punish BP by burning them with an acidic muck bomb.
However, as your complex plans for each settlement advance and become more and more reliant on augmented your initial elements, it can get quite difficult to figure out how to eke out another 300 food from the two apple trees you’ve got. Especially when they sustain the herd of deer connected to them, which sustain the wolves connected to them, which are there to stop the greedy villagers connected to THEM, who want to eat 300 more apples next to THEM. Interplay between elements could be cleaner, especially as there’s no upgrade tree to look at when planning out how to evolve your swamp frogs into swamp buffalo. Darwin be damned!
Visually there’s an admirable level of detail to the flat 2D animation, even at any distance you’ve zoomed to looking at the world. All the way out and you’ll see a globe covered in life and variety, all the way in and rabbits hop through their warrens and you can see villagers having pictogram conversations about money, giants, and how they’re going to kill all the tortoises. Why? Because (say it with me now) villagers are dicks.
In terms of music and audio a chirpy, upbeat soundtrack compliments the game and handy sound cues help players sift through the action on screen and keep them aware of attacking villagers or newly available ambassadors.
Reus presents a nice shift in focus from previous Plug & Plays as it’s your own plans and designs that dictate your progress rather than the scripted plots of narrative heavy titles like LIMBO or Hotline Miami. And it’s refreshing to see small indie games tackling intricate systems and mechanics when usually they can get away with presenting a singular, well thought out gimmick because of their size or budget. That ambition is clear in Abbey Games’ original take on world design too. So often you’ll see a sprawling map laid out beneath you to simulate that godly perspective but Abbey Games’ original engine lets them present something unique, letting you put the whole world in your hands.
Let Reus show you how to play god and head to Steam.
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Tom MidgleyI play, design and write about games when I'm not hoping for someone to pay me to do these things. Archives
October 2017
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