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In this game you have to guide the most clueless tribe of Dodo people who do their best to die. They eagerly set up their villages in front of tsunami and volcanoes. If that fails, then they just establish their village inside of an active volcano before preparing to destroy the entire island. And you the poor spirit is expected to somehow ensure survival of those people those extinction is long overdue.

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First of all, this is not Black and White game. This is a small, experimental, indie project and it shows. It is a physics based game around few short levels where you are gradually introduced to few new powers and then rinse and repeat doing same stuff in increasingly more difficult levels. Controls in this are unintuitive, camera is clunky. If you fail, you have to go through boring cutscenes. and restart the whole level There are plenty of little annoyances like that in this game.

It often felt that I would win this game despite it. Like I had broken something, abused it, went in a way I should not had. There is this feeling that game breaks under your own playing. Physics based games can introduce such a feeling and this one certainly does.

A good example is at the last real level in a volcano. It is split between active volcano which lava you always have to manage and raining which floods everything. Well, my people had failed to get water shrine nearby nor I understood their mechanics at the time. Person just couldn't reach it and thus my village would get flooded. However, people wouldn't die, because usually they are programmed to die when they reach sea which game never recognized as open water. As a result, I would pour lava on top of it and would raise my village ever higher. Thus I rotated over an hour in a cycle of my villages dying and then re-establishing themselves ever higher. Eventually water level reached so high that I could just use all exploding plants and just barely open volcano edges for water to pour out. So, I built my villages just barely above water limit and they started surviving. However, then volcanos started appearing all around me. I thought that developers intended this as a hard kill on a player due to his slowness. However, lava started pouring out as it couldn't get much purchase in all that deep water in a volcano and it was far easier for it to pour outside of it. So, this big twist was broken from a get go. It is both fun and it contributes to the feeling that of unique sense of brokiness where you had beat the game, but it felt like you weren't supposed to do it this way.

This game looks better than it plays. Graphics are beautiful especially considering this is game from 2011. Concept is cool, especially from back then when indie gaming weren't a thing. Sadly, good points end right there. Game has a myriad of gameplay issues.

Lava Mechanics
• Lava is problematic in this game. It is supposed to be an infinite flowing river which you would need to redirect and to manage. Since all other sources of elements are infinite and dissipate into nature, lava should be the same. However, it is programmed to leave rock beneath itself where it solidifies. The problem is with its poor implementation in this game. First of all, lava solidifies in its own river. This means that no matter how you try to shape its course, it will always spill over its bed, causing endless headaches. This doesn't make sense, because lava is moving, it is hot. It needs to cooldown in order to solidify. As a result we have unrealistic volcano behavior where it disposes a lot more rock than they would do in reality. Its routes contantly changes over the course of a match and it becomes a pain to handle it.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350282699
  The second issue is that it fills up seas way too quickly. Even if you redirect it into the ocean, it will fill up bottom of the ocean very quickly which is silly. They should be a lot more stable flowing when you make a path for it to flow. It would fall into the ocean to slowly form a new ground while momentum would prevent it staying on the mountain. It also shouldn't solidify while there is lava flowing over it. This change is natural and logical, but sadly it isn't in the game and we have unrealistic and annoying volcano mechanics to deal with.
  
  Surprisingly micro-intensive
  
• All of these things contribute to a game where you surprisingly have to move fast and do a lot of clicking. It isn't relaxing God game. You do not feel powerful. You cannot reshape land to your liking. It feels most of the time as a desperate race. You are trying to prevent disasters. Then trying to get bad AI to grab necessary items, traverse through the map. It feels more like an RTS in its gameplay than god-sim game.
  
  Devoid of divinity
  
• You want to reshape the world, but you lack fine control to create something beautiful. You can only do very rough adjustments. Pouring a lot of sand is your most powerful ability. That is it. You don't really have time or need to irrigate land. You cannot make map pretty nor have any need to do so. It is just a rush to the end objective before game breaks under its own physics.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350288859
  Godlike Challenged
  
• Sadly, in this game you always feel that you can influence so little. Your limits even when powered up with special abilities doesn't feel impactful. The amount of dirt, lava or water you can gather pales in comparison to a torrent of those elements pouring in constantly. It gets so ridiculous that you cannot stop the river for a person to cross by draining its water manually. It gets simply ridiculous and it then creates an actual gameplay issue. Due to the amount of material constantly flowing into the map and your limit capability in handling them in a time sensitive environment creates a gameplay experience which is all about micro-management and constant rushing. You rush to divert lava. You rush to raise barriers. You rush to stop fires. Game is all about fast clicking where it shouldn't be and thus it reflects a fundamental failure of a game design. Game fails to engage player at a meaningful level with its gameplay mechanics and thus devolves into constant micromanagement forcing you to rush through mundane and boring stuff which then makes up majority of its gameplay experience.

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While it is a nice little experiment which is worthy of play if you found yourself interested in such a game, it cannot stand on its own merits as a good game. Physics are not worked out well. There is lack of mechanics of what you can do in this game. Game is short and unrefined. I found myself more annoyed at various elements in this game than satisfied by it. It is a good experiment and a novel game, but it isn't a good game by itself.

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