Gods Will Be Watching Review

Player choice and consequences have been major gaming themes for the past few years. Gods Will Be Watching is no different, but instead of giving you relatively clear cut choices, you’re in a sea of grey. What will you do to survive? Is it worth sacrificing a robot companion to keep the lights on or do you rush and cut corners in the synthesis of a desperately needed antidote before the lights cut out? From the start, you are thrown into situations where all the choices are cringe-inducing and you are forced to make tough choices to survive, some of which may be tougher to live with than others.

The game follows Sergeant Burden and his team as they go from one life and death situation to the next. You’re joined by your long-time friend and soldier, Jack; throughout the game you are joined by a few different groups of team members. First, you’re part of a rebel/terrorist group, then you are joined by a science team, which includes the debonair BR4N-DN, and later on in the game, you are stuck on a desert planet with a squad of soldiers.

As the game progresses, you’ll find yourself having to compromise a lot of the morals you could have stuck to in other morality based games. That doesn’t mean you’ll go full Renegade; instead, you’ll become very familiar with all the shades of grey between the two extremes.  As a point and click game, all your actions are contextual and depend on which of your teammates you select. The interesting twist in this is that each choice is color coded; while red choices indicate a passage of time, green choices are “free” and don’t affect the in-game timer.

Gods Will Be Watching splits the game into seven chapters, with each chapter throwing your team into another ordeal that you have to get them out of. As you play the game, you’ll bounce from a tense hostage situation, to being trapped in a cave while infected with a deadly virus, and even more tense scenarios. While it’s possible to carry your entire team through the whole game, chances are you will lose one or more of them.

Each chapter does an excellent job of existing independently of each other with just enough overlap to keep events and characters relevant in your mind. Survival is the main thread that intertwines all these chapters together, but the level of stress involved changes. In certain situations, your rations are the most important thing you have to worry about, while in others it is the morale of your team.

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]

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