Reus takes some deceptively rich mechanics and surrounds them with varied and rewarding challenges.
The Reus giveth, and the Reus taketh away. Dutch developer Abbey Games has managed to capture the dichotomous nature of being an all-power diety in Reus, which sees you overseeing four different “giants” in the hopes of creating a world fit for civilization. No single aspect of Reus is terribly deep, but the way that the various facets of the game interact with each other creates a ridiculously complex web of challenges that is guaranteed to both wrack your brain and bring a giant grin to your face. It’s a game that strikes a careful balance between structure and flexibility, and the result is a game that is simultaneously taxing, rewarding, and intriguing.
Each round of Reus, which lasts anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours, presents you with a blank slate and four giants, each infused with a different aspect of creation. You attract settlers to the world by placing plants, minerals, and animals, as well as the oceans, swamps, forests, deserts, and mountains that will house them. Villages will start constructing projects, which require you to provide them with certain amounts of the game’s resources (food, wealth, and technology) within a certain amount of time. Complicating the procedure are two things. First, there’s the fact that in order to meet a village’s increasing demands, you’ll need to make use of resource synergies. Placing certain resources near others generates bonus resources, and it’s the constant placing, upgrading, and shuffling around of resources in order to maximize these bonuses that consists of the bulk of the Reus experience. The second complication is that making like an AM-PM and giving your villagers too much good stuff will cause them to get greedy, which will lead them to burn down neighboring villages or even attack your giants. There are multiple ways to deal with this problem, including planting greed-inhibiting plants, using predatory animals to keep villages too scared to get greedy, or just smacking their riotous armies around a bit with a giant muck ball to put them back in their place. Keeping your villagers alive and productive will grant you ambassadors, which your giants can pick up in order to upgrade their abilities. Each ambassador grants different powers based on what type of village (swamp vs. forest, for example) they came from and which giant they are augmenting, and planning out which giant will pick up which ambassador at a given moment is an incredibly important decision that determines which types of resources you will be able to access during the game.
This ties in beautifully with Reus’ metagame, which essentially amounts to completing very specific objectives during a round. By completing milestones such as upgrading a project to a certain level or having a city that only uses plants and animals, you earn achievements that unlock new resources you can use. There are almost seventy such achievements, but before each game you can pick a few to keep pinned to the screen, giving yourself a few goals to reach for (though you’re still free to pursue the rest of the goals, as well). Many of the goals are, while not explicitly so, practically mutually exclusive, which means that in order to hit some of the harder achievements you’ll need to formulate a plan from the get-go. Creating a plan, which needs to account for everything such as village and landscape positioning, resource specializations, and the order in which you assign ambassador upgrades , is a mind-bogglingly deep process that feels very similar to deck-builing in a collectible card game such as Magic: The Gathering. But what is perhaps the source of Reus’ beauty is how each plan, even though it uses the same core mechanics as all the others, feels entirely new and unique. Playing a build with a lot of predatory animals as opposed to one focused on herbivores and plants will feel radically different, from the first minute to the last. And even when it appears that a particular approach has hit a wall, the way that the various ambassador unlocks interact with each other guarantees that you’ll be able to implement your design in some way, whatever it may be (it just may not hit a particular goal you have in mind). It’s a pitch-perfect blend of flexibility and structure that rewards both careful planning and clever improvisation. This duality also makes Reus easy to learn and get into, but very difficult to master as you unlock harder challenges that might require better planning and more careful execution. At its higher levels, this is a game that will leave you mentally exhausted after each round, and for all the right reasons.
And it’s this sublimely organic flexibility that makes Reus so irrestible (and, at $9.99, an incredible value). It provides you with a simple set of tools and then tasks you to find creative ways to implement them, providing just enough structure to find your way without stifling the childlike sense of wonder and exploration that it instills. If there are any complaints, they would be that the interface for keeping track of projects can get a bit busy, the learning curve has a significant spike in the middle, and that with no way to end a round early, you might find yourself waiting for the round timer to expire if you’ve met your goals and don’t want to upset the delicate balance you’ve created, especially in earlier rounds with easier goals. These minor grievances are barely worth mentioning considering all that Reus has to offer, though. It creates a perfect mix of wonder, terror, relief, and, if you’re like me, about a half-dozen sticky notes each describing a different build. Reus definitely gives back in proportion to what you put in, from a casual interest to a rabbit-hole obsession, but I think it’s impossible to have anything but a challenging and rewarding experience with it.
Reposted from my website, www.theschemehatchery.com