God game Fata Deum will bring back those sweet Black & White vibes when it arrives in early access next month

Fata Deum - The God Sim | Official Release Date Trailer - YouTube

Fata Deum cites Black & White and Populous as inspirations, and it sure does look like a god game in the classic mold. You get to lord it over a bunch of tiny people, granting their wishes with miracles or punishing them arbitrarily at your whim. If God really is a gamer, we're probably screwed, aren't we?

One of Fata Deum's hooks is that it's got a day/night cycle and, while you can spend the days doing miracles, building up your civilization, and striving against rival gods, at night everything gets more chill. You spend the hours of darkness planning long-term strategy—and also whispering into people's dreams.

Your rivals are a gang of four: gods of violence, pleasure, deceit, and fertility who compete for followers. Your loyal believers can be blessed with miracles that alter birth rates or city expansion, boost their stats, or help them in combat, though you can also sacrifice them for power or zombify them, which presumably makes them more obedient and less likely to start asking awkward questions about what kind of benefits the god of pleasure is offering over in their city.

It's also got "real-time physics-based destruction", "over 20 building types and flexible city management", and "morality and influence systems that shape both people and landscape". So look forward to your peaceful valley turning into Hell if you get a bit too triggerhappy with the zombification, I guess.

"Our journey started with a humble Kickstarter," Christoph Schulze of 42 Bits Entertainment said, "where 1,451 amazing backers believed in our vision and gave us the momentum to create something truly special. Since then, that support has grown into a community of over 200,000 wishlisters on Steam, something we could've only dreamed of back in 2021! Fata Deum is more than just a game to us. It's our tribute to the god games we grew up with, and our chance to breathe new life into a genre we love. We can't wait to welcome players into the world we've built, and hope they will enjoy creating wonderful worlds… or destroying them!"

Fata Deum will be available in early access on Steam from September 15.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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