Gods Will Be Watching Reviews
Gods Will Be Watching is an interesting and novel little game, but one that's quite horribly flawed in a number of ways.
If Deconstructeam made success and failure feel less arbitrary they would have had a classic game on their hands, instead the game starts to wear on you at the halfway point. I'd still recommend playing this game because it does have a lot of interesting little quirks and innovations to the genre, but you'll have to slog through some poor design choices to get to them.
It definitely has a bold sense of tension and impressive style, but there's a lack of consistency to it that makes things more frustrating than difficult.
We really wanted to like Gods Will Be Watching. The concept is brilliant, the scenarios are tense and the story is thought-provoking. But the combination of the random trial-and-error gameplay and the horrible bugs made us want to slit our wrists long before the conclusion.
Gods Will Be Watching shows a lot of thematic and gameplay dynamical promise, but the whole package let down by its lack of polish and consequence.
Gods Will Be Watching is a divisive game. The bleak story and equally dark scenarios are interesting, even if they seem to go one for far too long. The sense of adventure is overwhelmed by the blatantly apparent resource mechanics and lack of character development for everyone, except for Jack and Burden. The random nature of the game mixed in with the lack of checkpoints and high probability of failure due to forces outside of your control would be more frustrating if it weren't for the game's (newly added) multiple difficulty levels. The lack of control over events can lead many to give up on the title far too quickly. The premise is solid, but the game relies too much on chance and trial and error, so it's hard to recommend this title to anyone but masochists and those who are hell-bent on experiencing the story — no matter what.
Gods Will Be Watching strives to be meaningful. The story ruminates on how hard it is to find purpose in a world where things are often outside of our control. Many may never get a chance to appreciate that message, since the game ruins its own potential. At no point does Gods Will Be Watching make the struggle worth the effort.
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.
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.
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.
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?
By pulling off an unforgiving juggling act of resource-management and survival, it nails the atmosphere of despair it aims for. But there's a point where the statement has been made and players need something more - and unlike Sgt. Burden and his crew, the player can simply walk away from Gods Will Be Watching.