by theygamesWhat are the best god games on PC? Whether you’re a benevolent deity, carefully managing a virtual world so that everyone can live in comfort and harmony, or an agent of chaos who has gone mad with power ever since deleting the pool ladder in The Sims 2, god games are a great way to flex your management games muscles on a cosmic scale.
The traditional god game typically involves supervising some hapless humans, who you can’t directly control but will benefit from your benevolent oversight. On the surface, this might sound like a city building game, but your morality is tested when you decide to prioritize people over profits. You might even be able to level up your godly powers as your people worship you – let’s face it, gods are total narcissists. You’ll want to pray for some cash, as you won’t find these games on our best free PC games list. There’s nothing quite like exerting total and complete control over helpless little creatures, so without further ado, here are the best god games on PC.
The best god games are:
WorldBox – God Simulator
Ever wanted to rule over a small island like a God? WorldBox gives you the power to control the elements, giving your civilization everything it needs to flourish, or flounder depending on how evil you want to be. There’s something about setting up hundreds of dominoes only to watch them topple over each other in a matter of seconds, and that same appeal applies to being a God. Developed by Maxim Karpenko, WorldBox has been in Steam Early Access since 2021, 2024 might just be the year that the game officially launches.
Populous: The Beginning
Spawned from the genius mind of Peter Molyneux, the first Populous game – released on the Amiga in 1989 – essentially created the ‘god game’ genre. Its second sequel, Populous: The Beginning, was released in 1998 and was the first in the series to be playable on PC. While its predecessors’ gameplay focused on guiding the faithful to glory and battling other gods, Populous: The Beginning is also a fantastic RTS game, as you can issue direct orders to your people.
You play as a female shaman, commanding a small tribe of various types of followers, each with different abilities. There are three other rival tribes in your planetary system, and your goal is to lead your people to glorious victory over them, at which point you’re finally able to ascend to glorious godhood.
From Dust
Hailed as a spiritual successor to Populous, From Dust similarly charges you with the safekeeping of a small tribe, who have summoned you to help them communicate with nature and discover what happened to their ancestors.
Your godly essence, referred to as ‘The Breath’ that hopefully evokes some mystical life force rather than referencing your garlic bread consumption, can manipulate terrain to guide your people to totems, which unlock the secrets of their past. By manipulating the flow of lava, soil, and water, you can gather Great Orbs of Earth to help your people traverse the land and prevent them from perishing to tsunamis or volcanic eruptions, kind of like Moses meets The Last Airbender.
Dungeon Keeper 2
Dungeon Keeper joins Populous as another Bullfrog creation that defined what the best god games should strive towards. As an evil dungeon keeper, you must construct the perfect underground lair, retrieve portal gems, and defeat wayward heroes and keepers alike. Of course, you don’t have to get your hands dirty to make your villainous dreams a reality – you’ve got an army of evil minions to do the job for you.
The result is a delightful blend of real-time strategy, action-roleplaying, and god game mechanics, with that staple Bullfrog humor to offset the gloom. What this acclaimed retro game lacks in polygon count, it makes up for with copious charm and a veritable time capsule of childhood memories for anyone who lived through that era of videogames. You can even invite your pals and go head-to-head in a ruthless contest of ultimate archvillainy.
Black & White
Black & White is another god game from Peter Molyneux, but as the name suggests, you can take two different approaches to godhood. After being summoned through the power of prayer, you interact with your followers with a disembodied hand, throwing things around, performing miracles, and tapping on peoples’ houses until they wake up. You also have a mortal representative in the form of an anthropomorphic animal avatar of your choice, who you can teach to perform tasks – but they have a mind of their own, so you’ll have to spend time training them to do your bidding.
Your goal is to convert every village on the island to worshipping your godliness, which you can achieve by impressing them with your miraculous feats or terrifying them into submission by pelting them with thunderbolts. The landscape, your temples, and even the music morph to reflect what kind of deity you choose to become. It’s also got a successful sequel if you’re looking for even more subjects to glorify you.
Reus
Reus is Dutch for ‘giant’, and if you squint, it kind of looks like Deus, which is Latin for ‘god’ – so it’s no surprise that this god indie game gives you control of four elemental giants who can influence the planet beneath them. Each giant god – ocean, forest, rock, and swamp – can create landscapes and assign resources depending on their specialisms – after which the humans move in and set up shop on your planet.
However, nature is a delicate balance, so you can’t rain down resources willy-nilly, as humans will become too greedy and fight amongst themselves. To counter this, you’ll have to encourage awe and humility in your population or make their home environment so dangerous they’re too busy fighting for their lives to fight each other.
Rimworld
Rimworld isn’t your typical god game – it’s a colony management sim where your job is to ensure a group of colonists stranded on the frontiers of space survive for long enough to escape the planet on a spaceship. If you’re struggling to survive, check out our best Rimworld mods guide to make your life a little bit easier. The colonists have random traits and skills; you can give them instructions, but there’s a vital element of chaos and unforeseen disaster in Rimworld, so your colonists might disobey you and go on a fire-starting spree instead.
You might not receive the offerings, sacrifices, or songs of worship you deserve. However, in essence, there are still rival deities you must contend with – Rimworld’s inbuilt storytellers, who send waves of disaster at varying intervals toward your clueless pawns. Give our Rimworld review a read to discover what makes this game so special.
Ruinarch
Sick of caring for the ignorant masses? Tired of gently shaping the earth to help little humans achieve health, wealth, and happiness? Are you, perhaps, also a sadistic monster? If torture, cruelty, and lies are your favored methods of population control, Ruinarch lets you step into the big evil cloak of a demonic overlord on a quest to spread misery and misfortune across the land.
Like Rimworld, Ruinarch is a sandbox simulation game – a story generator without concrete goals. Instead, it gives you a multitude of cruel and unusual tools with which to terrorize the populace – you can brainwash the villagers, for example, converting them into cultists who worship you. You can create necromancers, zombies, werewolves, and other horrors – or you could dump a giant meteor on their heads.
The Universim
It’s still in early access, but Crytivo’s The Universim is a classic god game along the lines of Populous and Black & White. The Universim gives you the power to shape a civilization from Stone to Space Age and then across the universe. You’ll need to look after your ‘nuggets’ – your citizens – by ensuring they have enough resources to survive the ever-changing environment on their randomly generated planet and continue to develop into an advanced society.
If you successfully manage your nuggets, you earn Power, which you can spend on altering the world to make life easier for them. But if they get out of hand and start acting up, you’ll earn Wrath points, which you can use to punish them and scare them back in line.
O great and powerful one, we pray these god game offerings were enough to quell your immense and terrible wrath, at least for the rest of the day. Perhaps you would enjoy applying your large, almighty brain to some strategy games or resting your all-seeing, celestial eyes with some relaxing games. Amen.
This article has additional contributions by Jen Rothery