Gods Will Be Watching Review (PC)

good
key review info
  • Game: Gods Will Be Watching
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: No
  • Reviewed on:
Gods Will Be Watching

Gods Will Be Watching is a sinister and twisted little gem of a game that disguises itself as a narrative-driven point-and-click title that attempts to do something new and something more than a lot of other games in the genre.

Unfortunately, it ends up fumbling its core gameplay to the point where it starts to become more irritating than enjoyable. Of course, there are those who need to show the world that they can prevail over anything when dared, but for the rest of the world, there are a lot of other things to do in life, in addition to feeding your ego by accomplishing something that someone sells as "difficult."

That being said, the game is indeed pretty difficult, and it is not half bad, if you manage to get over the fact that it's basically a micromanagement title wearing the coat of an adventure game.

The reason why I say this is that adventure games usually have a stop-go game flow, where you reach a new area, collect information, and then make logical connections and try to combine everything in your inventory or use it on every interactive hotspot in the environment in order to achieve progress and unlock the next available action/area.

Some games are better at this, some less, others have the benefit of addressing fond memories from other pieces of entertainment we might have enjoyed, such as Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. Gods Will Be Watching does a similar thing, in a much more universal way, reminding you of current socio-political debates you might have been following or of some good science-fiction novels you might have read.

Its initial premise is offering a no holds barred journey into a very realistic and mature adventure that tackles some pretty difficult issues and the moral gray area surrounding them. The events are presented in a pretty cinematic manner, and in spite of the pixel graphics, you can get a glimpse of the filmic greatness that lies beneath Gods Will Be Watching's unpolished veneer.

Unfortunately, it always seems to find a way to shoot itself in the foot somehow, by either relying too much on blind luck or by not offering you enough information regarding what you're supposed to do and how, and by being more of a time-management puzzle game than a full-fledged classic adventure.

Instead of relying on stop-go gameplay, Gods Will Be Watching relies on a more arcade dynamic of trial and error, where you gain useful information by dying repeatedly and slowly refining your methods until you are able to meet the challenge, which feels a lot more like solving the Rubik's Cube than a narrative-heavy puzzle that relies mainly on context-derived choice for progression.

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I managed to save everyone here...
...only to kill them all immediately after
This lack of depth unfortunately translates into its narrative losing the weight it should convey, especially when moral dilemmas like killing a hostage or letting him flee only translate into getting more time before the military busts in, but at the same time being mindful of your limited pool of hostages, the main reason why the armed forces don't simply charge in.

These dilemmas end up more on the resource management side of things, with you humming happily like an accountant thinking about sustainability, and less on the "oh my god what am I doing, shooting people in the head?" part of the spectrum.

It lacks the sort of consistency and focus on drama that its narrative would require for support. Instead of a meaningful and morally challenging experience, you're presented with micro management and grinding, guessing what the devs want from you before you die from not having enough information to gauge whether or not you are doing the right thing, or from the incredibly limited amount of options at your disposal.

Why can't I knock somebody out and tie them up when I notice they're losing it? Why are people fine and two minutes later running into the woods, mad or dead from an ailment that didn't seem to be affecting them in any way before?

There is certainly a huge amount of potential, and the depth of the themes that the storylines addresses is unfortunately wasted on the tiresome and repetitive nature of the game.

The idea of a resource management game where you don't have any sort of graphs and stats is appalling, especially since video games don't show you the formulas they use, but they judge your performance based on how well you adhered to those formulas, in a pretty scumbag manner.

Although there are a lot of pretty well though-out puzzles, the sheer difficulty level of any ordinary task is daunting. Instead of a thriller where you get to make harsh moral choices that bear future consequences, you are greeted with a pen-pusher's fantasy where you have to guess the right order in which to flick buttons in order to progress.

Should you fail, you are simply greeted by a game over screen. And it's not failing to manage a complex moral dilemma that ends up with you reaching the "you've been naugthy" screen, but instead failing to guess the equation of how your mechanical actions are used in order to achieve a certain objective.

I've never been a fan of overly difficult games such as Super Meat Boy, where moving through the levels is not seen as a means of getting somewhere and experiencing something, but instead the entire point of the game becomes the difficulty of that navigation.

You succeed at the game by taking 200 actions, failing, starting to memorize the "successful" actions, and repeating them until you complete the mission, which feels more like finishing a Super Mario Bros. level than a Legend of Kyrandia chapter.

I want to complete the level, experiment on the dog, shoot the hostage in the face, let my partner die, so I can explore the ramifications of my actions, not just so I can get to the next puzzle. I want to see how my choices shape the story, how being good or bad influences the outcome of the various events that are going one around me.

You’re never offered a guarantee that suffering through the tedium and arbitrary conventions will net you that. Instead, you’re being offered quite the contrary, with a dead teammate showing up in the next level without anyone batting an eye and without any possibility to do anything but accept it.

With that out of the way, the game’s premise is a rather exciting one. The first level starts off with you and your terrorist buddies trying to nab a deadly virus, taking some scientist hostage so their armed buddies don’t stop your operation.

If a hostage panics, he runs. If he sees you getting soft, he attacks. You can talk to them, kick them, shoot them, but whatever you do, the SWAT team inches closer. Shoot at them and the hostages panic. Talk to them and the hostages see you as distracted and get ideas.

One guy has to manage hacking while at the same time not get hacked himself, another has to either talk or shoot at the police squad, and you have to take care of pretty much everything. Every decision you make makes time pass and either gets the police closer, gets you hacked, or gets a hostage in a proactive mood.

If a hostage starts running, you can only kill him or let him go free. Which is where the game breaks down into an arbitrary convention of rules. The game offers you some visual cues that something is about to happen, but the bad thing is that they are inevitably going to go down on the next turn unless you address them.

If two cues pop up at the same time you can only address one of the emerging situations, and there are very limited options to do so. You can’t kick someone in the teeth while telling someone to do something else or when you seem them panicking. You can’t even tie them down or at least have them lie down on the floor so you have better control over them.

The fact that the terrorists are freedom fighters that are representing the cause of the oppressed under the heel of a massive galactic federation gets lost in the details. You’re no longer judging actions and decisions, trying to find out who’s wrong and who’s right, witnessing your own descent into villainy through the corners you cut in order to get the job done, you’re just trying to solve a puzzle.

Instead of being haunted by the choice to shoot a limping man that is slowing your company down, you merely regard it as having twice the time resources you had before, with the three soldiers who desert being three less pieces of cannon fodder to feed to the enemy while exploring your way to the end of the level.

Killing off an engineer and two doctors once they repair a radio and prepare enough antidotes for a deadly virus becomes just a way to have to hunt for less food, give less speeches and thus have less overhead micromanagement to perform.


The Good

  • Challenging
  • Interesting story
  • Novel take on adventure games

The Bad

  • Tedious and repetitive micromanagement
  • Overly difficult
  • Relies on RNG too much
  • Doing the same thing over and over detracts from the weight of your actions

Conclusion

Gods Will Be Watching is a very good example of a brilliant idea ruined by faulty implementation. It starts off with a fascinating idea that get slowly but steadily ruined by the tedious micromanagement it requires.

It offers a thrilling story and then renders it inconsequential through repetition and a focus on resource management that undermines the dilemmas it’s trying to present, gradually making them less and less meaningful by transforming people and circumstances into numbers or objects that have to fit into a certain pre-established and not quite transparent grid in order to allow you to get to the next level.

The tension it attempts to build is squandered by the trial and error approach the game takes, as the be-all and end-all of progression, and its extreme difficulty level and limited array of interactions, combined with the lack of an appropriate way to measure the effects of your actions make it a frustrating micromanagement game.

It’s not bad, just unnecessarily annoying and not delivering on its full potential. It’s certainly an interesting take on adventure games, adding new mechanics and a bit of struggle to the usual mix of storytelling and puzzle-solving, and its enthralling theme and mature content make the tedium more bearable.

Gods Will Be Watching is the sort of love it or hate it video game affair that only transformative titles that push the boundaries of their genre can present. It’s not trying to make you kick puppies, it’s not trying to make you hold hands and sing Kumbaya, it’s about finding a mixture of the two that leads to your survival and doesn’t give you too many nightmares afterward.

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story 9
gameplay 6
concept 6
graphics 8
audio 8
multiplayer 0
final rating 7
Editor's review
good
 
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