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Gods Will Be Watching

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I really enjoyed Deconstructeam Ludum Dare 26 entry, Gods Will Be Watching, which is a minimalist point and click survival game played on a single almost unchanging screen where a ragtag team of Buck Rogers style space heros are stranded on a planet try to escape to save the universe. Except instead of acts of dashing heroism and saving the day, you quietly sit around a dwindling campfire slowly trying to repair a radio to escape as everyone slowly dies. Cheery!

 

I liked it a lot though. There was something oddly serene about making the same decisions day in and out knowing that eventually your team would slowly be paired away one at a time until you either failed or succeeded at a horrible cost. You'd think that it would be stressful, but the repetitive actions and simplicity of the situation gave it a sense of inevitability and that's pretty rad.

 

Anyways, they launched a successful crowdfunding campaign last year to make a longer form version of the game with more situations and such, which now has a trailer and I have no idea what I feel about this game anymore:

 

My first impression is that it's now too gratuitous and I don't really know whether it can be justified. Just a trailer though.

 

Here's the game's Steam page:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/274290/

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Holy shit that's brutal for a pixel art game.  It looks like they've extended the model of the game jam experiment to a whole bunch of different scenarios?

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Wow that is brutal. Give it to me.

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Oh yeah, I remember playing this last year when it was a free webgame. It was coool! Is it just more scenarios now, or is there anything more to the game?

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I played the Web version and enjoyed the tone and style a lot, but pretty soon the actual game play choices were rote clicking rather than a set of interesting decisions that I needed to match to my circumstances. Did anyone else feel like this or think this new release does a better job of staving it off? I was dubious when the kickstarter was basically promising more levels but no game refinement.

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Man, I could not watch that trailer past the first torture bit. Ugh, not my cup of tea.

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GiantBomb did a quick look of this. I like the premise of being in a bad situation where you have to juggle a lot of different parameters to get out, but it seems to revel in the violence a bit too much for my tastes.

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I got this after seeing that Giant Bomb Quick Look. It's quite beautiful, but also graphic when it comes to violence. That aspect of it really dampens the effectiveness of some of the fallout from your decisions. So far the torture scenario has been the most effective at putting me on edge and making me dread my decision. The systems and puzzles are fun to mess around with especially in an adventure game style/context where problem solving isn't usually about managing several clear variables happening at the same time. Weirdly enough I like the part that was featured in the browser release the least, and haven't been able to get past it because of a crash bug on top of it being quite difficult and subject to a lot of random results.

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The steam reviews are just crushing this, almost universally negative.  But reading them I can't honestly tell if its bad, or if its just a bunch of dumb people leaving reviews. 

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The steam reviews are just crushing this, almost universally negative.  But reading them I can't honestly tell if its bad, or if its just a bunch of dumb people leaving reviews. 

 

The RPS review is incredibly damning, too, but John Walker's prone to getting turned off games over singular issues (high volume of repeated dialogue, in this case) so I don't know if that informs the rest of his critiques.

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The RPS review is incredibly damning, too, but John Walker's prone to getting turned off games over singular issues (high volume of repeated dialogue, in this case) so I don't know if that informs the rest of his critiques.

 

I think Walker brings up a lot valid points, but he is being a bit dense, so take that into consideration. For example, Walker states:

 

"It begins with a collection of people you know nothing about sitting around a campfire after an event you haven’t experienced, talking about people you haven’t heard of. It then flashes back to a year earlier, where you’re apparently a group of terrorists, with some hostages, attempting to hack a computer while holding off rescuing forces. Why? It doesn’t say."

 

However, in the scene referenced in the screenshot immediately above that paragraph explains who you are and why you're part of the terrorist group. In Vinny's Quicklook over at GiantBomb, he picked up on those things immediately. The GiantBomb East Coast guys also picked up on the mechanics of how the first scenario plays, while Walker didn't seem to have grasped the mechanics as he states:

 

"And you start over. And over. And over. You have to rapidly issue orders in turn, hoping you’re magically knowing which to do when, trying to plug leaks as fast as they spring up. Then you lower the difficulty, and get through it, not really knowing why."

 

The game itself is turn based, there is no need to rapidly issue orders. The mechanics are fairly determinate as well. When Vinny explained how the mechanics worked to Alex Navarro during the Quicklook, they were able to beat the first scenario on the harder difficulty without much trouble.

 

I personally didn't find the first scenario that hard to understand either, nor did I find it confusing in the least why a year earlier you were part of a terrorist group. So take that into consideration when reading his review: he probably played through the scenario quite a great deal more than others did because it doesn't appear that he understood the mechanics. You often have to play through scenarios multiple time to discover what the mechanics are, but they aren't as obtuse and incomprehensible as Walker implies.

 

If you want to see a good slice of what this is game is, then watch GiantBomb's Quicklook:

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-gods-will-be-watching/2300-9253/

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Anyone been playing through this?  I found chapter 3 really great as it was just about proper resource management without much RNG, but chapter 4 (the survival bit from the web game) is so bleak and depressing it's hard to want to go on.  Are the remaining chapters worth slogging it out?

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Apparently, they developers were excited to listened to the feedback of the consumers, and have patched in an both an easier mode, which removes some element of randomness that was apparently in there, and a pure adventure mode that I think has no fail state whatsoever. So if you enjoyed this game, but found it too punishing, you might want to reconsider.

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That trailer was very effective in helping me make up my mind about the game. Whenever Gods Will Be Watching gets mentioned, I go "Oh yeah, this is the game that is not for me at all," in my head.

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It seemed like such a cool game, but I don't think I can do that torture scene, sorry.

It's so hard that you'll likely need to repeat it 20 times to finish it, thus desensitizing you to torture!  

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Just finished this after being reminded of it by the Thumbs mention. A new build is up on humble that fixed the progression bug I was getting. I think this game is pretty special and I would love to see more adventure games or games with adventure game trappings use more system based mechanics like this one does. Like mentioned on the cast it breaks up the game into more digestible chunks which works well. As for difficulty, I played it on the harder of the original two options, and only ran into issues with the web-game based scenario, for which I had to look up a hint. Otherwise I think it does a great job of surfacing the mechanics, conveying how those variables are changing through visuals and giving you a wide variety of options to let you be morally expressive within each one.

 

I do have a lot of issues with the meta-narrative. Like an interpretation of the title can suggest, Gods Will Be Watching seems to be about being a character in a game with someone controlling them. I never really appreciate this sort of stuff, and the game narrative doesn't do anything interesting with that angle. On the other hand, the world-building of the universe, while well done, never gets in the way of the elemental scenarios you have to survive, and I appreciate that. There's some decent-if-heavy-handed theming going on as well that is conveyed through backdrop and gameplay.

 

My favourite moment is a section from the torture scene that I only encountered once.

One of the tortures is russian roulette with a 7 chamber revolver. Usually in the torture scenes there's a progression of injury that can result in death, and sometimes violence is threatened for a turn requiring another action to trigger it. So, to test things out I tried thinking to build up a bluff on my first action, and the trigger of the gun pointed at my character's head was immediately pulled. I broke down. I ended up telling the truth a few times, and begged for my life to no avail, but I still felt the need to delay to not lose the entire scenario. Each delaying action taken by my character and his partner felt like the most difficult decision, and I agonized for a long time before telling my partner to taunt him with a 1/3 chance of getting killed. Click. No bullet. The torturer says a fairly well written line about having to catch a TV show or something and the day ended. I had to sit for a while and catch my breath. The chapter as a whole felt like a game I could strategize my way through, running out the clock by trading hit points for time, but hitting me with that entirely luck-based binary life or death situation  made me feel desperation. 

And even though I was so effected by that experience, I feel like if I had failed and seen the explicit gunshot and had to play it over again, it wouldn't have left such an impression.

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I do have a lot of issues with the meta-narrative. Like an interpretation of the title can suggest, Gods Will Be Watching seems to be about being a character in a game with someone controlling them.

 

That's interesting, I only played the web version and I got the impression that the title was meant to be about the idea of a gods watching and judging how good (more likely, bad) of a person you were. Mainly to make you consider the moral implications of your choices because even if you make it out of a dangerous situation alive by desperate measures, you don't leave behind everything you did and you have to live with what you did to resolve the situation.

 

Is there anything about the final game that you think specifically implies it's more what you took from it or was that just how you responded?

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That part of the theme of the title is definitely there, and is supported by player choice breakdowns between chapters. It also assesses you on how your demeanour was as a player between missions and attempts (you were a ruthless/pacifist/foolish player etc.). All that stuff is great and interesting. That is more what the game is about, at least mechanically, and it's handled well.

 

I guess this might be spoilery, but I'll try be vague. There's also stuff like a justification for why you can retry missions, and dialogue about how this 'isn't your first time' doing a mission, when you retry. I'd be fine with it as it is used cleverly to allow them to do the scenarios the way they want even after certain results in previous ones. However, this also lets them ignore some of the fallout from previous missions, so you do leave some of your mistakes/choices behind. The main part I dislike is that it takes the forefront as the game concludes, and I just don't care for that stuff.

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