Hovering just below a bank of clouds, I scrutinize a scalloped island specked with trees and rocks and teepee-like huts. Nondescript people tromp around the landscape, building more huts, before vanishing within to do what people do when they want to make more people. There’s birdsong and wind and waves lapping at the shore. Nothing much is happening, but it’s seductively pastoral, like listening to one of those nature relaxation CDs.

Peter Molyneux sounds like he could use one. “I'm a little bit of an emotional wreck at the moment," Molyneux says, as we begin to chat about his new game Godus. He sounds tired but exhilarated. The game’s been live on the iOS App Store for 30 minutes. I'm the first to speak with him on launch day.

In Godus, a new version of the "god games" like Populous and Black & White on which Molyneux built his career, you nurture embryonic worshippers using your fingers to explore and sculpt the landscape and basically try to figure out what it's all about. It’s been around in rawer form via Steam Early Access since September 2013, but the free-to-play iOS version is supposedly feature-complete. I’d only been poking at it for 15 minutes when Molyneux called.

"Godus is the end of a three-year journey, or the beginning of one if you like,” says Molyneux, referring to his surprise departure from Microsoft a few years ago. He got 22Cans off the ground in 2012, then launched a Kickstarter for something called “Project Godus” while simultaneously releasing a bizarre little iOS app dubbed Curiosity in which players, working together, tapped minuscule blocks to very, very, very gradually demolish a massive multi-layered cube.

The winner—the person who by happenstance tapped the final block—won the role of "god of gods" in Godus, as well as a share of the game’s profits. It was bold and weird, inscrutable and fascinating, irritating and hubristic and disturbingly compulsive: in other words, 100 percent Peter Molyneux.

With Godus (he pronounces it like "goddess"), Molyneux tells me he wanted to craft a game that appealed to both traditional and casual gamers, and not just casual in the stereotypical sense: “I feel this app says something to a casual audience that’s been kind of spoon-fed one type of game, and this is something that is completely and utterly different to anything that’s been done before,” he says.

I wouldn't say I'm bored after playing for a few hours, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Godus is visually gorgeous and easy to pick up and charming in its way, but the game itself feels utterly tradition-bound, built around population expansion and simplified resource-juggling. You built 10 people? Build 20 more. Cleared 100? Give me 130! Dig there for a bonus item. Go fix that dock. Keep an eye on that sketchy-looking tribe of people over there. It's like a museum of god-game tropes. The one wrinkle I've encountered involves hopping in a boat, visiting a string of islands and playing some Lemmings-like mini-puzzlers.

22Cans

I drag my finger around the screen to siphon pink dots from the tips of primitive abodes, the game's representation of "belief." Belief is cash in Godus, and you can gorge on it with actual cash by dropping anywhere from $5 to $100 on gems, which accrue at less than a snail's pace in the game itself.

Time is 22Cans' freemium bait: As your tribe's complexity grows, structures take longer and longer to complete. So where shelters take a few real-time seconds to finish, grass huts might take dozens of minutes, while wheat fields can take hours... unless you buy out the clock.

The only way around paying is to wait and watch nothing much happen, or minimize the game and do something else. Since the clock doesn't stop, you can go about your business until you receive an iOS-level notification signaling the task is complete. It's not an unreasonable tradeoff, assuming you're willing to work sporadically.

The problem is that most of that work feels just like tapping Curiosity's billions of cubelets.

Growing your populace is about making habitable space, but as in Populous, "habitable" is just a synonym for "flat." Thus you're either working the land up or down, finger-scrubbing away the beauty of natural contoured turf until you've carved out fields of sea level, sand-colored blah. Stockpiled "belief" is simply license to pulverize, and with the game's leapfrogging population demands, maximizing results is about coming to terms with topographical uglification. Maybe there's a philosophical point about overpopulation here, but it's kind of a downer having to convert hill and dale into barren flatland.

Eventually you're able to control your subjects directly, yanking them around the landscape individually or in groups with directional swipes the game calls "leashing." But even that has problems: the trouble with micromanaging objects that look like pins zoomed all the way in on an iPhone 5 is that a 3.5-inch screen wasn't made for this sort of interface. Godus feels like an iPad game that should have been an iPad-only game. You can make it work if you're patient, but it's like trying to play dominoes wearing boxing gloves.

You are not, by the way, an omnipotent god. Things hide under other things that you have to tap to unlock, and all that turf-shifting takes time. Nor are you a monotheistic creator: Eventually you'll discover that you’re merely another god in a pantheon equivalent to Godus’ player base, and this may be where the game finally gets interesting.

“We're giving players a few weeks to get their worlds to a point before we connect you to everybody else's world," Molyneux says. "And once everybody's connected, then we'll be switching on the god-of-gods role."

Molyneux's example of what a god-of-gods does—he's coy because he doesn't want to spoil the surprises to come—involves moral choices, which he says occur throughout the game.

"Your followers will for instance ask you, 'Is it right that women go out and work the fields, or is it right that men go out and work the fields?' And you have to decide. We accrue all of those decisions, and if there's a deadlock, that's what god-of-gods decides. So it's a light touch that he's putting on the world."

22Cans

Speaking of light touch, the most interesting thing about Godus is that you're actually touching your world and peoples instead of wielding a mouse pointer. There's something about delicately tapping the landscape, even through a glass veneer, that personalizes the experience. If keyboard and mouse exemplify media theorist Marshall McLuhan's notion that inanimate objects become extensions of ourselves, Godus is partly about removing that extension: You're god, after all, and god doesn't play dice with a gamepad.

But Molyneux says Godus as it currently sits is just the start, and that 22Cans' long vision is to connect people and get them to challenge or cooperate with each other.

"When people first started on Curiosity, they'd tap, and they'd think they were the only person tapping, but then they'd have this wonderful moment when they'd realize there were other people tapping, and that sort of feeling's what I want from Godus as it goes forward," he explains.

"If you play Godus today, I hope you'll get the feeling of a world that's intriguing and fascinating, that's living and reactionary," he says. "If I can just get a little bit of caring from you, then I think marvelous things can happen."