I'm slow to trust when it comes to god sims, and I won't beat around the bush—it's mostly because of Godus. But Fata Deum is not Godus, even if it has a similarly iffy name. It's closer to earlier god games, with Black & White seeming like the most obvious muse, though there's a clear attempt to evoke the genre's heyday more broadly. It's getting a Steam Early Access launch next year.
You're a god—off to a good start—with the power to manipulate mortals, though they still have pesky free will. You can instruct them to build settlements, temples, farms and sacrificial alters, and when you get sick of them you can just sacrifice them to summon a legion of demons. You can be a nice deity too, I guess, but the promise of "debauchery and blood" is a lot more intriguing.
To consolidate your divine power, you've got elemental spells, dark magic and armies, with the little civilisation you're fostering changing to reflect how much of an arsehole you are. Instead of quaint pastoral villages with cosy pubs, settlements committed to an evil god will be full of gothic architecture and undead servants.
Other gods would quite like some of those mortals to worship them, instead, so you'll have to compete for their love and fear. Your fellow gods have their own proclivities, servings as the gods of violence, deceit, fertility and pleasure. And you're the young freewheeling god who gets to do whatever they want. You've probably got a leather jacket.
Fata Deum was Kickstarted earlier this year, with around £53,000/$70,000 pledged, and it's been in development for a couple of years already. Developer 42 Bits Entertainment is planning to release it in April, though just in Early Access, and at the moment it's predicting that it will stay in Early Access for nine months.
