This news story about Fata Deum is written in homage of a random early access Steam reviewer who remarks that if you’ve never played a god sim before, they’re kind of like idle sims. My word, the casually ferocious and embittered atheist poetry of that. Consider my fedora tipped, milords and ladies. I’m off to read the Screwtape Letters again.
Fata Deum isn’t just any born-again idle sim. It pays overt homage to Lionhead’s Black & White, with higgledy-piggledy 3D island maps and a familiar hand cursor, used to carry believers to safety or lob them into the sea. There are some significant differences, however.
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For one thing, you don’t get a Creature avatar to first mold in your holy image and then end up squabbling with when you decide to do an Old-New Testament of sorts, flipping from Benign to Vengeful or vice versa midway through a campaign.
Ah, I remember how my Lion Creature kept extinguishing the houses I smote with thunderbolts, exactly as I’d taught him when he was a cub, and I was a smiling beard in the sky rather than a cosmic arsonist. I’m sorry to see less of that in Fata Deum, but the upside of not having a Creature is that you’ll spend less of this god sim cleaning up godbeast turds.
Another difference is that Fata Deum operates around a day-night split encompassing two genres of godliness. By day, you’re more of an indirect presence, influencing villagers through visions and blessings. By night, you can intervene directly to make them build stuff and, if you like, raid the dominions of rival gods.
There’s a familiar spectrum of Nice and Nasty divine behaviour. You can sacrifice villagers to raise demons or turn the corpses into zombies. Or you can pat them on the head and have them throw wild parties. Or you can mix it up – a little from column Altruism, a little from column Bastard.
There are other gods to worry about. They include deities of Violence, Deceit, Fertility and Pleasure. Each god’s behaviour is reflected in the appearance of the terrain. I don’t see one for Idleness in the trailers or on the Steam page – I guess I’ll have to thrash that one out myself, by leaving the PC running for 10,000 years.
Developers 42 Bits Entertainment plan to keep this humming along in early access till late 2026. “We firmly believe that reviving the god game genre is a rather difficult task that can only be successfully accomplished through intensive dialogue with the community,” they note. Do you consider the god sim in need of reviving? I thought last year’s Reus 2 did a pretty fine job of it myself.