Reus

Dutch developer Abbey Games recently released a 2D god game called Reus, or “giant” in Dutch. The game is played on a small planet made up of patches of land. You control four different giants: ocean, swamp, rock, and forest. By combining their powers, you create forest, desert, and swamp biomes and use food, technology, and wealth to entice nomads to settle villages. Use the crablike ocean giant to plop down an ocean to moisten the surrounding area, follow it up with the forest giant’s create forest ability, plop down some fruit or wild animals, and they will come.

Each city runs on a different resource that you provide by plopping down patches of exotic animals, minerals, and fruit. Villages can only use the patches within their borders, so you have to be strategic about it – you get symbiosis bonuses for placing certain resource patches next to one another, like placing an animal next to a mineral patch or putting two strawberries next to each other. Further bonuses can be gained through specialization, like having three mineral patches in one village. As your cities get bigger, you need to fulfill projects – each project has an objective, like reaching X number of food or wealth, or having 3 different plants. Completing these projects nets you an ambassador – each ambassador provides biome-specific powers to your giants, which you use to add aspects to patches, evolving them into more beneficial patches. Raise a village too quickly, however, and the citizens become greedy and will go to war with other villagers or even attack your giants. At this point, it’s probably best to drown them all or cause a massive earthquake – Biblical poetry at its finest.

If you can wrap your head around the way the bonuses synergize with each other, you’re on your way to reaching development achievements. These are goals like “Finish an Era with a Village which has 250 Prosperity” - endgame evaluations that unlock more aspects and allow you to create larger villages using more powerful giants. In the beginning, an era is only 30 minutes, so it’s a race to see how far you can get before your giants fall asleep. You can unlock longer play sessions as you complete more developments, leading to more and more unlocking. It’s an addictive process, trying to balance a handful of villages at once while keeping track of project goals and making sure the villagers don’t kill each other. Once you finish an era, there’s always a feeling of “Okay, just one more era” – like playing a game of Civilization.

The game does an okay job explaining the basics, but I feel like it took me a few games to really understand some of the mechanics. Learning which aspects lead to what upgrades and how the symbioses work is a challenge, but when everything cooperates and your planet of villages is cooking along, it feels great. The presentation is solid – each giant has a cool, distinct look, and the villages have biome-specific aesthetics. Watching the villages grow and expand is satisfying. Little soldiers will march across the map and get into war boats to travel across the oceans and citizens will mill about town while word bubbles illustrate their needs. The music is pleasant enough and the sounds are appropriate; there’s a solid crunching as your ocean giant digs into the planet to reveal water, and a similar satisfying sound when your rock giant raises a mountain. If you enjoy games like Populous, Black & White, or even Civilization, this is an easy recommendation especially at the low price its being offered for on Steam and GOG.