Here’s how Gods Will Be Watching starts off: Four freedom fighters have infiltrated an imperial science lab and are stealing a bio-weapon. One’s guarding the door and holding off a police squad, one’s hacking the system, the third’s defending against counter-hacks, and the fourth—your character—is covering the hostages and keeping track of everything. If a hostage panics too much, he runs. If he gets too comfortable, he attacks you. The police creep ever closer. The hack has a chance to shut down if you don’t pay attention. Shoot at the guards to drive them back and all the hostages freak out.
There are six different things going on at once, and any one of them can fall apart and make all the others worse. Now your
guard is having a nervous and if he doesn’t snap out of it the hostages are gonna run and dammit it’s all gone to hell again. Here’s the fascinating bit: Gods Will Be Watching isn’t a blockbuster shooter. It packs all that action into a point-and-click adventure game.
All of its chapters are life-or-death crisis points, where blood has or will be spilled and any slightly wrong choice could lead to total disaster. You click on the ground to move, on other characters to tell them what to do, and click on yourself to talk. Only tradition says that adventure games should be puzzle-heavy stories set in charming worlds, Gods Will Be Watching is a refreshing and challenging new direction for this type of game.
Gods joins Telltale’s recent much-acclaimed games, The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, in reframing adventures. But it works in an opposite fashion—Telltale’s games moved away from puzzles by focusing on dialogue and unique ethical choices, while Gods Will Be Watching focuses on resource and time management, judging random numbers, repeating tasks, and gathering information. And instead of the moral choices of a BioWare-style RPG, Gods uses a strategy game concept. Pay attention to everything and make the best (or the least terrible) choice available. Succeed or fail, learn and repeat. It’s a novel feeling, while never veering from the form of an adventure game.
Each scenario generally gives you the overall plot goals quickly, then details about the specific manner of escaping the room. And it is usually a room—Gods isn’t a game with much exploration—which can give it a claustrophobic feeling that works well with the extreme tension of its scenarios. Then you’re told exactly what your characters can do in that situation. In one, for example, you’re trapped in a cave where only a robot companion can recharge the power to keep the lights on, while only one of the other humans can repair the robot, and only those two can charge a machine that prevents your characters from freezing, and so on. While these scenarios often sound complicated in initial description, they’re pretty straightforward in practice.
The chief problem with this form of adventure game is that the difficult can veer wildly. In that first hostage situation, I had to restart a dozen times or more, trying to find the balance between hostage management and hack acceleration to put me through. That’s fine—Gods makes it clear that it can be a very difficult game—but then the next two sections are relatively easy, with restarts that are totally optional. (Although it does troll you a bit by moving the goalposts on puzzles—sometimes to make them easier, but also annoyingly to make them harder.) There are six chapters in Gods, and each takes between 10 and 40 minutes or so, so it’s theoretically a short game… unless that difficulty causes level restarts, which is pretty common.
Gods Will Be Watching’s story works in harmony with its tense scenarios. The main character is an elite special forces soldier/spy, whose infiltration of a terrorist/freedom fighter group and status as a double agent puts him in the heart of the kinds of tense conflicts that Gods is built around. The jagged pixel art both suggests early 1990s adventure games and creates an appropriately disorienting mood around the brutality of the universe. That brutality can be somewhat overwhelming, however. The division of Gods Will Be Watching into small chapters of singularly intense events means that it relies on science fiction cliches of grand evil empires and hyper-competent soldiers to make sense, while the personal story is overwhelmingly bleak and occasionally nasty, filled with things like torture, murder, and human experimentation.
THE VERDICT
Gods Will Be Watching can stand with other contemporary adventure games as a revitalization of the genre. By utilizing time and resource management, inside claustrophobic and violent situations, it builds tension and instills panic like very few games. It’s a demonstration that even with the simplest of interfaces and old-fashioned graphics, new combinations of storytelling with gameplay are possible.
There are six different things going on at once, and any one of them can fall apart and make all the others worse. Now your
guard is having a nervous and if he doesn’t snap out of it the hostages are gonna run and dammit it’s all gone to hell again. Here’s the fascinating bit: Gods Will Be Watching isn’t a blockbuster shooter. It packs all that action into a point-and-click adventure game.
All of its chapters are life-or-death crisis points, where blood has or will be spilled and any slightly wrong choice could lead to total disaster. You click on the ground to move, on other characters to tell them what to do, and click on yourself to talk. Only tradition says that adventure games should be puzzle-heavy stories set in charming worlds, Gods Will Be Watching is a refreshing and challenging new direction for this type of game.
Gods joins Telltale’s recent much-acclaimed games, The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, in reframing adventures. But it works in an opposite fashion—Telltale’s games moved away from puzzles by focusing on dialogue and unique ethical choices, while Gods Will Be Watching focuses on resource and time management, judging random numbers, repeating tasks, and gathering information. And instead of the moral choices of a BioWare-style RPG, Gods uses a strategy game concept. Pay attention to everything and make the best (or the least terrible) choice available. Succeed or fail, learn and repeat. It’s a novel feeling, while never veering from the form of an adventure game.
Each scenario generally gives you the overall plot goals quickly, then details about the specific manner of escaping the room. And it is usually a room—Gods isn’t a game with much exploration—which can give it a claustrophobic feeling that works well with the extreme tension of its scenarios. Then you’re told exactly what your characters can do in that situation. In one, for example, you’re trapped in a cave where only a robot companion can recharge the power to keep the lights on, while only one of the other humans can repair the robot, and only those two can charge a machine that prevents your characters from freezing, and so on. While these scenarios often sound complicated in initial description, they’re pretty straightforward in practice.
The chief problem with this form of adventure game is that the difficult can veer wildly. In that first hostage situation, I had to restart a dozen times or more, trying to find the balance between hostage management and hack acceleration to put me through. That’s fine—Gods makes it clear that it can be a very difficult game—but then the next two sections are relatively easy, with restarts that are totally optional. (Although it does troll you a bit by moving the goalposts on puzzles—sometimes to make them easier, but also annoyingly to make them harder.) There are six chapters in Gods, and each takes between 10 and 40 minutes or so, so it’s theoretically a short game… unless that difficulty causes level restarts, which is pretty common.
Gods Will Be Watching’s story works in harmony with its tense scenarios. The main character is an elite special forces soldier/spy, whose infiltration of a terrorist/freedom fighter group and status as a double agent puts him in the heart of the kinds of tense conflicts that Gods is built around. The jagged pixel art both suggests early 1990s adventure games and creates an appropriately disorienting mood around the brutality of the universe. That brutality can be somewhat overwhelming, however. The division of Gods Will Be Watching into small chapters of singularly intense events means that it relies on science fiction cliches of grand evil empires and hyper-competent soldiers to make sense, while the personal story is overwhelmingly bleak and occasionally nasty, filled with things like torture, murder, and human experimentation.
THE VERDICT
Gods Will Be Watching can stand with other contemporary adventure games as a revitalization of the genre. By utilizing time and resource management, inside claustrophobic and violent situations, it builds tension and instills panic like very few games. It’s a demonstration that even with the simplest of interfaces and old-fashioned graphics, new combinations of storytelling with gameplay are possible.
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