Gods Will Be Watching Reviews
In Gods Will Be Watching, however, its rare successes are overshadowed by an abundance of design decisions that are not only frustrating to play, but actively undermine any cohesion the story attempts to salvage.
Despite a few hiccups here and there, Deconstructeam has weaved together a solid title that will resonate with players long after the experience is over. As long as you're willing to put in the substantial effort, of course.
It's beautiful, no doubt. The pixel art is wonderful, and the soundtrack is splendid. Looking at just the screenshots, I'd be reaching for my wallet. But the core game is just so tedious. By the fifth chapter, you're literally wandering through near-identical scenes of desert, and at this point I'm honestly wondering if maybe this is the point?
Gods Will Be Watching is a sci-fi thriller that's all about making the right decisions. The thing is, there are no right decisions... and that's the good news.
Gods Will Be Watching takes some tired features like pixel art and adventure-style dialogue options, and makes them feel fresh. Choices have consequence, but the mortality of those around you can't be dwelled upon as your mission is far more important. You'll question how inhumane you have to be and then, without batting an eyelid, become the efficient lunatic you never thought you would be. While the decisions feel weighty, the story is essentially disjointed and becomes confusing. Where Gods Will Be Watching is really testing, though, is in its almost impenetrable difficulty. There's a fine line between challenge and frustration, and sadly, with all of its positives, Gods Will Be Watching will leave you questioning whether its really worth it.
An inspired take on survival, where you get to bring your own horror.
Abstracted through pixels, text, and the lens of science fiction, God Will Be Watching is a fantasy that captures a very real, disturbing hint of apocalyptic reality.
Gods will be worth it
Gods Will Be Watching takes adventure games to new, dark, and strategic places
Gods Will Be Watching is an interesting and novel little game, but one that's quite horribly flawed in a number of ways.
Nearly the whole of Gods Will Be Watching relies on your ability to act within situations, but when these situations feel so limited it's annoying to not be able to express yourself freely. This makes the game immediately frustrating as its premise, intention and art set the experience up for something incredible. But the badly designed and unnecessarily hard game design stop your actions from really 'meaning' something. Gods Will Be Watching is not necessarily frustrating in its difficult, it's that it really didn't need to be.
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.
Emotional storytelling and challenging gameplay can't wholly save Gods Will Be Watching from some of its bad design choices.
In Gods Will Be Watching, I feel bad not because of what I've done in the game, but because I feel like I'm the one at somebody else's mercy, and I have no idea what that person wants. This may well be deliberate, and if so this failure to communicate its intentions either makes Gods Will Be Watching a work of unusually cruel genius, or a work of astonishing clumsiness. Maybe even both at the same time. Either way, it's impossible to recommend to anyone but the most masochistic players.
I wanted to like Gods Will Be Watching more than I did. It was let down by a few technical issues, and one chapter in particular was highly frustrating. Overall, it's something a bit different and well worth checking out.
Gods Will Be Watching is an interesting experiment -- a game that puts a fresh new spin on PnC conventions and delivers are pretty unique experience. But its lack of narrative impact, its ultimately empty moral decisions, dependence on trial and error, and tendencies towards deliberate frustration rather than challenging fun make it something of a flawed curiosity piece rather than anything else.
Thought it shares some similarities with Telltale's The Walking Dead, Deconstructeam's Gods Will Be Watching isn't the same kind of game. Instead of a heavy narrative, the game is more of a resource management sim, with the resource being the other characters. When taken like that, it's a solid puzzle game with some rough, repetitive edges.
Born from a Ludum Dare scenario (an updated version of which has been included in the middle of the game) and spread into a full-length game, Gods Will Be Watching is far and away the most interesting game from 2014 thus far, and it wouldn't really be a stretch to call its design "pioneering." But the true joy, above its other admirable traits, comes from the emotional trauma and frustration it inflicts on the player. Accept no substitutes.
At the end of the day, Gods Will Be Watching is a title I'm sure to remember for some time for its many intense moments, but in the back of my mind, I'll always ponder what could have been if they'd fully realized their ambitions.