Peter Molyneux's final game Masters of Albion will release in April - "it's the culmination of my life’s work"

New trailer gets handsy with the undead

Peter Molyneux and 22cans will release their new god sim Masters of Albion on Wednesday 22nd April via Steam. They’ve also pumped out a new trailer, rich in accents, exploding barrels and stone circles. If it were a game from any other developer, I’d be modestly anticipating it. But it’s a Molyneux joint - his last game before retirement, allegedly - so instead, I’m looking at it with a mixture of sadness and suspicion.

If you’ve somehow overlooked Molyneux during your voyages across the gamerwebs, he’s among the creators of foundational god sims Populous and Black & White. He’s also a former Microsoft honcho, known for wild promises about acorns that may grow into actual oak trees, and Kinect games that totally aren’t on-rails. He is still sort of cherished/mythologised online as an impassioned creative who can’t resist running his mouth about the project at hand, to the despair of his development team.

I myself remain susceptible to his tendency to gush about his latest projects, as you might guess from my relatively carefree announcement write-up of Masters Of Albion back in 2024. Still, there’s a point where uninhibited enthusiasm starts to look like actively misleading players, crowd-funders and investors, and Molyneux passed that threshold many moons ago.

He has treated us to disappointment after disappointment, while lashing his brandwagon to various unsightly new technologies. Fantasy setting aside, Masters Of Albion looks a lot like Legacy – another 22cans townbuilder which became a blockchain game during development, selling £40 million in land deed NFTs before release, with one “plot of land” going for £670,000 in cryptocurrency. It launched roundabouts the time large swathes of the NFT-buying faithful had woken up to the fact of NFTs at large being a grotesque Ponzi scheme.

Before Legacy, there was Godus, another god game, and its combat-oriented spin-off Godus Wars. Godus was pitched as a return to form for the god sim in the hands of a past master. It attracted half a million quid in crowdfunding via Kickstarter in 2012, but launched in a dire state, with many promised features either missing or arguably impossible to implement thanks to the developers’ choice of middleware. Godus Wars was supposed to be free to buyers of Godus, but in practice, it came with a pop-up charge beyond the first continent.

Both games were ignominiously removed from Steam in 2023. At the time, Graham (RPS in peace) commented that they should be remembered as “evidence that Molyneux's exuberant what-if approach to interviews and promotion is not that of a benevolent, irrepressibly creative Wonka-like figure, but of a businessman who desperately wants your money but hasn't made anything worth buying in over a decade.”

Masters of Albion doesn’t appear to contain any blockchain bullshit, at least. They aren’t advertising any generative AI content either, despite Molyneux calling generative AI “the future of games” back in September 2024. It’s a mixture of strategy, town management, action game and tower defence that once again aims to “reimagine the god game for today”, in the words of the latest press release.

There are a couple of ways to play. Firstly, you can be a floating god hand - casting spells, plonking down buildings, lobbing boulders, and godhandling the townsfolk Black & White-style. Secondly, you can possess NPCs to run around in their shoes, fight buglins of various kinds, craft gear, and raid dungeons. There’s a day-night cycle, with waves of monsters emerging after dark to assault your settlements.

As you’d expect from a game in the Bullfrog tradition, it’s all spun for laughs: you can possess chickens and make your townspeople dress like fools. But there’s a serious edge in such “key themes” as “power and responsibility”, “industry versus ancient magic”, and “freedom of choice and consequence”. It’s the work of a team including Bullfrog and Lionhead alumni Mark Healey, Russell Shaw, Iain Wright and Kareem Ettouney.

“Masters of Albion is the culmination of my life’s work, a game that owes so much to titles like Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and Fable,” quoth the Molyneux in a press release. “It’s a totally unique game that we hope will delight players, a game that brings God Games into the modern gaming landscape and puts the genre firmly back on the map.” We shall see. If I were you, I'd stick to the likes of Reus 2 and WorldBox for the moment.