A Gods Will Be Watching Review

Written By: Tyler
Platform Played On: PC

Rating: 6/10
Verdict: It's got an amazing premise, and solid ideas for fun gameplay, but it's unfortunately held back by some poor design choices.

Gods Will Be Watching is the expanded version of a Ludum Dare game. In the original, you were tasked with surviving for forty days by managing your resources, making hard choices and possibly sacrificing people for the greater good. Even though I never played the Ludum Dare version of the game, the level from that version is in this one, and a lot of people were excited for the full game. I was excited too because I thought it looked like a cool idea... the kind of thing that indie games get a lot of recognition for. If it isn't outright innovating in at least some miniscule way, it's doing something that is very uncommon these days.

The concept of the game is that with each chapter, you are thrown into a different environment, with different goals, and you have to control your team in order to successfully complete the mission. This will involve a lot of clicking on the different characters. You will manage them and also keep an eye on the resources you have. There is a lot of variety in the missions, as one has you taking hostages, one has you being tortured, one has you walking through a desert, and much more. 
 

So I started a new game...

I have some pretty negative things to say about the game, but I have to admit that I absolutely adore the premise of the game. I love that the game throws you into a mixture of different kinds of situations and expects you to figure out how to best solve the problems while never holding your hand, and at best, only giving you a little bit of information on how to proceed.

I also give a lot of credit to the artistic side of things. While the pixel-art may turn off some people, and many have proclaimed that Gods Will Be Watching -- and other games of its ilk -- have terrible graphics, you have to compare it to other games with the same style. Because I do that, I can safely say that there was a lot of work put into the visuals and it shows. The characters are about as detailed as they can be, which is an important element because the game relies a lot on visual cues to inform you how the characters are doing. It's a testament to the talent involved that it is usually pretty easy to tell when the people are feeling a certain way.

...then this happened, a few times, and I was very confused.

The environments are varied and beautiful, with a lot done to breathe life into them. You may only see one room at a time, but they are a joy to look at and really add to the atmosphere, especially some of the outdoors levels. The indoor levels do a satisfactory job of making you feel claustrophobic and shut-in, like a survival game should. 


At first I was going to say that while I enjoy the soundtrack, I'm glad I didn't buy package on Steam that included both the game and the soundtrack, but as I write this review I'm listening to some of the tracks on Youtube and I'm changing my tune a little bit. At first I didn't think the music stuck out, but in retrospect it may have been because I was so caught up in making decisions that I didn't pay a lot of attention. Now that I sit here and listen to the songs individually, it's very clear that the music does a good job of (usually) making you feel like you may be going insane. Since the nature of the game is that things get tougher and tougher as they go on, and you're constantly being pushed to the brink, it makes sense that the music reflects that, with a lot of the songs slowly building... like your insanity.


There are minor issues with the game, such as some poor English, but those can be brushed aside because there are flaws that are much bigger; such as the lack of narrative-cohesion and how tedious it gets.               

Gods Will Be Watching attempts to tell a strong narrative but there are some painfully obvious hiccups in that. For the most part the story is fine; you play as a group of people who are trying to stop the "terrorists." It's a game that tries to tell the side of both factions and does a good job of explaining that things aren't black and white in a conflict such as this. I really have no gripes about the plot as a whole, but they've done a terrible job of making your actions have any kind of consequence. You can literally lose a member of your team during a mission and he/she will be there the next mission. I lost Jack during a torture scene, and I was still talking to him during the rest of the chapter. I thought I was just talking to a ghost, and while I think that's a bit of a cheesy mechanic to employ in storytelling, I accepted it. Then in a future chapter, people were talking to him and he was performing tasks like he was alive. I could sacrifice people and they'd just show up next level. This is pretty much unforgivable in a game like this and breaks the immersion immensely. They really needed to fix this because once you figure that out, outside of accomplishing the challenges, who cares if so-and-so dies? And really, the challenges isn't enough glue to hold it together when the game is so story-driven.
 
Take a look at the first image on this page: I picked it for a reason. Unfortunately I chose "Exit Game" more than I would have liked when trying to play through it. I read preview after preview, watched video after video, of professional critics being in awe of how bad the game made them feel, or how intense the missions were. I can see why someone would get sweaty when playing this because it does expect you to multi-task a lot. Ultimately though the game gets bogged down in tedium because a) I don't think the choice-making is that interesting and b) the chapters are too long with no mid-level checkpoints.

You could spend 45 minutes playing a level only to die and have to start it over again because there is no saving in the middle of a chapter. The problem with this is that the game isn't exciting enough to warrant that. The first time you play a mission it's fresh and there's a joy in figuring it out, but then it becomes routine and the choices you make are more static than kinetic, and this gets highlighted when you die. You will end up falling into a pattern at some point, and their solution for that seems to be to add parts in each mission that are insta-death. These are random and there's nothing more frustrating than having to play something for so long only to be killed by something you have absolutely zero control over. The game stresses that you are the master of your own destiny in a lot of ways, but then the execution leaves a lot to be desired. I understand that in real life anything can happen, but this is still a poorly thought-out design choice. With that said, I can get past the random death but I have a much harder time with it when it takes so long just to get back to that point again in a replay.

I kept turning the game off because I just couldn't bring myself to do it again. That's where the game loses probably two points for me, because I can't get past this aspect of the game. There is a great idea in here, but it was implemented poorly.

Gods Will Be Watching had a lot of promise, and some people clearly enjoy this game more than I do. As it stands, it's actually one of the bigger disappointments of the year for me so far. It's only $10 on Steam though, so by all means give it a shot... it may appeal to you more than it did me.