How To God Aims To Channel Black & White With A New VR Sandbox Sim

How to God is a new VR sandbox god simulator inspired by Black & White that's coming to Quest.

Created by Thoughtfish, who previously released Living Room last year, How to God is a colorful sandbox game where you can choose how to shape this world. You can construct villages, solve the problems presented to you by the local population through quests, raise a loyal creature that evolves based on your teachings, or even fight other gods.

“How to God isn't just a tribute to classic god sims like Black & White, it's a chance to be a part of them,” advised Christina Barleben, CEO & Creative Director at Thoughtfish in a prepared statement. “You’ll quite literally embody your deity and use your real hands to manipulate the world around you and interact with your worshippers. We wanted players to truly feel what it's like to be a god – And sometimes that means throwing a villager into the sky.”

We were recently given a hands-off preview to showcase the upcoming title, and Thoughtfish demonstrated gameplay across a thirty-minute presentation. Returning to the world after a villager prays to you, How to God begins by asking you to help meet the needs of the locals with food, shelter, and other basic necessities. The specific manner of help is up to you, however.

Joined by two embodiments of good and evil, there's no one set path to solving quests and that could potentially offer some nice gameplay freedom. For example, do you solve a housing crisis by building more homes, or do you throw locals off the map to reduce the population? It's technically a solution, but as Thoughtfish reminds me, your solution doesn't necessarily need to be beneficial for the locals.

I almost feel bad for the villagers, who can suffer terrible fates beyond being thrown into the abyss. As a god, you can raise your creature to learn new abilities over time that relate to specific objects, like picking up trees or throwing rocks. Oh, and they can also eat villagers for good measure. This isn't inevitable, though. The fact you can spray them with a water bottle to stop such actions is pretty funny.

A few other features also caught my eye during this presentation. How to God provides a useful alchemy system for creating new elements, like making steam by mixing fire with water. Specific hand gestures can cast runes for handy abilities that include summoning fireballs or duplicating items, while the skill tree can enhance or unlock new abilities like increasing faith generation.

Villagers will deposit faith over time depending on how strongly they believe in you, and you'll need to collect this to unlock new areas across the world map. These are all based on real-world locations such as Egypt and Scotland with different sets of challenges and quests, though I'm told not every location offers story quests. I'll reserve further judgment until we've directly played How to God but for now, there's an appealing premise that's caught my attention.

How to God doesn't have a confirmed release date yet, but it's launching later this year on Quest 2 and Quest 3/3S.