The best way to describe Gods Will Be Watching is a morality-based point and click puzzle game, with a focus on strategy instead of puzzles. Throughout the game you’ll have to strategically balance your resources against the health of your team and the objective that you have to complete. You may have to sacrifice your team doctor to have enough food to last the two weeks necessary to be rescued. Yes, you’ll travel faster if you don’t use a scout to make sure the next area is safe, but then you run the risk of being captured and killed by enemies.
Each chapter has its own music playing and the score does a great job of injecting a sense of anxiety and dread into the game. As time progresses, you feel that stress more acutely and start to feel like the score is mocking you with how steady it is. During the second chapter, you and Jack are captured and interrogated, and the torture sounds that Deconstructeam added here make it hard to experience, even if it is stylized 8-bit graphics. At the end of each chapter, you are shown which choices you made compared to the community, a la any of Telltale’s games, except much more in-depth analysis. It’s a nice little touch to see the myriad of different ways your decisions could have turned out.
As well as Gods Will Be Watching sets the mood and forces you to make decisions for the greater good, it falters in a few spots. I’ve heard this game described as similar to Dark Souls and while it starts off with a similar “fair cheapness,” it quickly devolves into a frustrating mess. There’s no sense of accomplishment when you finally figure out the trick to progressing through later levels. You’ll either just barely make it by the skin of your teeth or fail over and over and over.
I was forced to play the introductory chapter at least 20 times before the game had any sort of mercy on me, then one chapter towards the end of the game was a breeze because I had a lucky guess. And if you do end up failing, you’re taken all the way back to the start of that chapter which is a pain in the ass when each chapter takes about 45 minutes to play through.
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.
Gods Will Be Watching is out now on PC, Mac, and Linux for $9.99.
Final Breakdown:
[+Suspenseful plot] [+Sets the tone beautifully] [+Each chapter brings a whole new kind of stress to you] [-Frequent grammar errors] [-Arbitrary success/failure] [-Gets frustrating when you unfairly fail constantly]
