From Dust review

Another World creator Eric Chahi’s latest is 
a surprisingly gentle game, given that its vocabulary is built of eruptions and tsunamis, and its founding principle is the chance to see nature working at triple speed. Oceans boil, mountains crumble and, somewhere in the distance, you might just hear the wails of some disciples that you’ve accidentally set on fire, but you’re pleasantly removed from it all – far too high up to feel the true sting of failure, far too powerful to see disaster as anything other than a fascinating setback. Is this what it’s like, being a god?

From Dust’s dreamy sense of distance doesn’t lead 
to callousness, however. Instead, it’s the very thing 
that elevates the game from a life as a sophisticated genre piece and turns it into something genuinely unforgettable. Short missions, quick restarts and a heavenly sense of separation from your followers 
allow you to retain a sharp focus on tactics while 
still finding the room to settle in and just enjoy the business of celestial tinkering. This is a strategy 
game on the outside, but in its secret heart it’s a 
lot more than that: it’s an elemental sandbox, a haunting fish tank, and perhaps even a bizarrely 
evolved form of painting tool.

Let’s talk strategy first. From Dust charges you with guiding your amnesiac tribe on an epic journey of rediscovery across a series of bright atolls, volcanic hillsides and dune-speckled flood plains. You move from one map to the next by capturing and building settlements around a series of ancient totems which, in turn, grant powers that augment your basic abilities for as long as your followers can hold on to the territory.

These powers are the sort of thing Moses himself might recognise, allowing you to snuff out fires, 
conjure passages through water and even destroy  matter completely, and they offer brilliant escape options when your more basic abilities – to pick up 
and deposit lava, water and loose sand – aren’t enough. That said, the game’s simple triumvirate of elements still has plenty of life to it: lava can be used to form new ridges of rock, which is useful for directing rivers or barricading precarious settlements, sand can raise and lower the ground in fine Populous style, while water interacts with the former two as a handy – and often hilariously dangerous – modifier.