Fata Deum is an early access god sim inspired by Black & White, but I wish I was just playing Black & White instead

I didn't set out to be a terrible god. Feeding the hungry, inspiring speeches, fashionable sandals—it was going to be the JC playbook all the way. But it turns out that I am not a merciful god. I'm a petty, vindictive god prone to extreme temper tantrums.

At least I'd fit in perfectly in the ancient Greek pantheon—maybe Dionysus could use a sidekick? That would be handy, since I am actually looking for work, now that I've resigned from my gig in Fata Deum.

Best intentions

(Image credit: Aerosoft)

Like I said—my intentions were good. Fata Deum largely models itself off Populous and, more overtly, Black & White (sans creature), where you must compete with other gods by racing to convert mortal villages through warfare and miracles. The foundations are all present: you can inspire your followers, curse them with horrible visions, pick them up and toss them around, plonk down blueprints for new buildings that will make them happy, and send them off to find glory or death in battle.

The problem is, right now, none of it is remotely fun. Unless your idea of fun is a thankless grind where mercurial mortals place endless demands on your time because they can't do anything for themselves. It's micromanagement Hell.

I'd just taken over a new village and started plonking down construction sites. For some inexplicable reason—and to be absolutely clear, this is a feature and not a bug—your followers will never automatically embark upon a construction project on the same day you've placed it on the map. They'll wait until the next day. However! You can drag and drop them onto the site to make them start working right away.

Why is this extra step required when there's a system to automate this already in place? I can only assume it's a cruel prank, forcing you to engage with the ridiculously fiddly role assignment system, which will frequently leave you dropping followers into work areas only to find they still won't work there, because you've not dropped them on the right part.

Anyway! My grand vision for this newly converted village hit a speed bump: a lack of stone. And with no viable locations for a quarry near the village, I'd need some help from my primary settlement. Trades and gifts can only be activated at the end of the day, where you can send 20 of a single resource from one village to another. Another frustration. It's a theme!

But it should have been OK. I had two quarries and eight miners working in my first village. Or at least I thought I did. But when I flew back to it, I realised that I actually just had one working mine and two miners, because everyone else had taken the day off. Aside from hitting up the pub, there wasn't even anything for them to do. They just… hung about. Not helping me.

Gaslit god

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You'd be forgiven for assuming that this might be connected to various mechanics that determine the efficiency of my mortal morons. Each has a health, energy and productivity pool that depletes over time. They also develop skills based on what work they do the most, and on top of that you'll need to concern yourself with how strong they are and what their level of comfort is.

For a god sim, this level of micromanagement feels a bit much, constantly interrupting your big-picture plans. There are certain buildings that can help maintain these various numbers, but even with two pubs in my frankly-too-small-for-two-pubs village they were annoyingly underutilised. One pub, two pubs, three pubs—it didn't matter. And it certainly didn't help that the folk working in the pubs were frequently on holiday. Sadly, the most effective way to keep worshippers energised is by clicking on them one at a time and performing miracles until your mana runs out.

With every click, my hatred of these useless mortals grew. I can summon storms, sacrifice humans to conjure demons and create legions of zombies—I shouldn't be beholden to these idiots. I could feel my fall from grace sneaking up on me. I was starting to read from the Sauron playbook.

(Image credit: Aerosoft)

But what really inspired my sharp turn into evil was the fact that none of my hands-on nurturing resolved my initial problem: most of my mortals were still refusing to automatically go to work. Every villager was healthy and energised, but they were still just lounging around, recuperating. Fata Deum doesn't have the concept of weekends, and there's no way to track who needs time off or why, so I found myself at a loss.

And it's incredibly inconsistent, too. In my second village, where expansion had been halted because they were still waiting for stone, nearly everyone was still able to find something to do. This actually made me even madder. Are my worshippers gaslighting me? Can a god even be gaslit?

Maybe I just needed a righteous war to blow off some steam. Except I couldn't simply raise an army and send them on a raid. No, that would be too straightforward. Like sending gifts or trading, raids can only be planned when everyone's in bed. The logic behind this is that you're manipulating mortals via their dreams. Which is weird, because I can send mortals visions while they are awake, and I can directly force them to do things during the day.

Dreams of war

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I really wanted this invasion to go ahead, though. I had not yet given up on being a pleasant god (to my own followers), but all these frustrations had given me a desire for bloodshed. So I waited until night, sent them some violent dreams, and then watched my tiny army march off in the morning.

Battles are largely hands-off affairs, though you can bolster the odds by having a demon join the ranks, or by using some negative miracles to harm your foes. Unfortunately, battles are both hard to parse and incredibly anticlimactic. Soldiers messily hack away at each other for a wee while, a winner is then declared, after which the victorious troops just stand around celebrating while resources are magically drained from the enemy village and immediately transferred to the invading village.

This means battles are a one-and-done kinda deal. There's no time for counter attacks, and you can't chase the raiders down to get your stuff back. It's all decided by one brisk, messy scrap. Also, you can only raid your immediate neighbours, so if you've found a resource-rich settlement ruled by another god on the other side of the island, you'll need to slowly convert all the villages between you.

(Image credit: Aerosoft)

With the raid failing to sate my bloodlust, I finally gave in: fine, I'll be evil. I sacrificed some villagers to summon some demons, and I murdered a bunch of folks and raised them as zombies. This freaked the mortals out a bit, at first, but things soon went back to normal because, it turns out, demons and zombies aren't particularly monstrous.

Demons will just hang around waiting to be conscripted, while zombies will do all the things your mortals usually do, but without needing much micromanagement. They aren't very efficient, but they do work harder. Their main quirk is that positive miracles actually have a negative effect, and negative miracles have a positive one. So clouding their minds with dark thoughts gives them more energy. No, it doesn't make much sense.

I just wasn't getting much out of my zombie plague or the occasional meteor strike. And I'd already completely checked out of the race with the other gods to convert people. The last thing I needed was more useless worshippers. And that's when I just started grabbing people and throwing them into lakes or rocks. Sometimes I'd punch them with my god fist.

This achieved nothing, granted, but it did give me a brief feeling of catharsis.

End times

(Image credit: Aerosoft)

Since Fata Deum is only about to launch in early access, it's absolutely salvageable. But it's going to take a lot of work, and I'm not sure 42 Bits Entertainment's vision for its god sim is compatible with a fun game.

Take, for instance, all the needs each mortal has. It's evocative of a survival game, but in a regular survival game you're just looking after yourself. And while there are plenty of survival city builders, they tend to give you more tools to manage all of these needs and, crucially, have functioning automation. They expect you to resolve issues through setting priorities and some puzzle-like problem solving. That's where the fun comes from. Fata Deum only has micromanagement.

The one time I stopped what I was doing to admire a novelty was when one of my enemy gods manipulated one of my villages into attacking another. It didn't end up having much of an impact, but it felt clever. Aside from that, though, Fata Deum mostly evokes boredom.

Black & White launched nearly 25 years ago, but Fata Deum feels like a step back. It has some new ideas, but it's largely worse off thanks to them, and critically it doesn't have a brilliant hook, like nurturing and training Black & White's massive beasties. Or rather, its hook is that it's inspired by older god sims, while not actually being as good. I'd rather just fire up Black & White again—which is, sadly, easier said than done.