A new covenant: Godus is out on iOS

Are you there, me? It’s God, Peter.

You know when your girlfriend is out of town and you’ve got the place to yourself and you think, “hell yes I’m getting a whole pizza” which you proceed to consume and then lie awake all night cold-sweating your way through a prodigious indigestion, wishing you’d remembered the previous times you’d done this awful disservice to yourself?

That’s serial over-promiser Peter Molyneux’s post-Bullfrog career in a nutshell. Lots of lofty promises about games like Black & White, and Fable, and The Movies which never really connected with reality.

Molyneux’s latest creation is Godus, which is out on the App Store right now after a long early-access period on PC. Godus is a return to one of Molyneux’s early-career triumphs, the god-game genre that he more or less created with Populous in 1989. In Godus you sculpt a world and then nurture its inhabitants as their civilization progresses. The press release calls it a “godlike” game, which is either an attempt to coin a new term or a boast of Biblical proportions.

Early press about Godus has not been good: Rock Paper Shotgun‘s Alec Meer called it “the most miserable gaming experience I’ve had in many a year”. Yow. But Alec has been wrong before, and Godus might be brilliant. Yet there is one more reason to hesitate about Godus: it’s free-to-play. Molyneux told Develop last year that he “hates free-to-play” and what the scheme is doing to the gaming industry, so the fact that Godus’s App Store page catalogs different buckets of “gems” to buy on its IAP listing is particularly galling, even for him.

I promise I’m going to give Godus a fair shot. Whatever you think of Peter Molyneux, the guy is hugely creative and immensely talented. But Godus has an Ararat to climb.

Trailer below.