I wanted to like Gods Will Be Watching more than I did. It’s a thoughtful science fiction game with great ideas regarding sacrifice, ideals, and the human condition. It wants to craft a personal story with epic consequences within the confines of speculative fiction and put the player in charge of making it through a horrifying journey. It ask a lot of difficult questions of the player. Unfortunately, it doesn’t ask many or even any of them very well.
There’s an old maxim when it comes to regarding the success of a work. Ideas are cheap. It is the execution that matters. You could have the most profound thoughts that the world has ever known, but if you cannot communicate them to another person, then their profundity will be lost. On the other hand, a grandly executed work can turn simple ideas and into deep revealing truths.
Gods Must Be Watching looks like a point-and-click adventure game. Its art style elongates pixelated characters, and it uses a varied palette of colors to create complex backgrounds reminiscent of Sword & Sworcery. Its interface also borrows heavily from the point-and-click genre as you will spend most of your time doing just that. However, you do so by choosing actions from a list of options rather than by solving item based puzzles. Thus, what Gods Must Be Watching really is is a strategy game at its core, a resource management game to be precise, in which resources aren’t always material goods, but the statuses of characters and time based threats.
The action of the game is broken up into several scenes each with a major obstacle that is overcome by managing the physical and social resources at hand. The opening scene, for instance, puts the player in control of a character named Sergeant Burden to try to manage a group of hostages as one of your compatriots hacks into a research station’s database to retrieve data on a bio-engineered virus. You are allowed all the time that you want to make a choice and only making that choice advances the scene.
During this opening scene, you have to watch the moods of the hostages and see that they don’t completely panic and make a break for it, nor get so relaxed that they think they can take you. Additionally, you have to charge up a special program that can help accelerate the hacking procedure, all while holding back a slowly advancing SWAT force. The situation becomes a balancing act between consequences. Shooting at the SWAT team pushes them back, but it also further frays the nerves of the hostages. Charging the program for a turn allows the SWAT team to come closer without redress and exacerbates whatever state the hostages are in. Calming or beating a hostage means the hacking will be slower going.
Each scene has its own set up and its own way of working things out. Each has different objectives, different resources, and different rules to follow. The second scene is a rather uncomfortable torture sequence after Burden is captured. During this scene, he has to survive an interrogation over the course of several days. The resources here are Burden’s health and the health of his companion, how much real information you let slip to your enemies, and the percentages of how well your lies will be believed under questioning, lies that will stave off torture for a turn.
These are incredibly harrowing situations based on inherently hot button issues that you must deal with, not as an abstract intellectual moral exercise, but as a participant with your own goals driving the outcome. The problem isn’t in how the material is handled via dialogue and storytelling. Both are pretty well written, allowing for some real pathos in the characters’ exchanges. However, one of the things that Gods Must Be Watching focuses on in order to convey the weight and dark nature of all of the these situations is how random chance effects your actions.
You have to think of a good when being interrogated, and each turn will make that lie more believable. However, sometimes a lie at that achieves an 80% or 90% credibility score can still be seen through. Maybe you are too low on health and need to risk a lie when the meter is at 36%. Even more random, one of the tortures is a forced game of Russian Roulette, and I found myself dying on the first shot because, well, that is how Russian Roulette can play out. In the first scene, the hostages behavior can be monitored, but isn’t always the same and therefore can be rather unpredictable. Hunting for meat in the wilderness may be successful nine times out of 10, yet, on another try it might end in failure and continue to do so on every succeeding effort, leaving your team starving.
While it certainly makes the game more than just a simple matter of “if you do this, then this will happen,” instead it admits that there is no right answer in a difficult situation. Pain and suffering still result even if one is trying one’s best. This is a reasonable notion, but the problem is that the message is completely lost on the player trying to advance.
Random elements mean that these situation are really, really hard to complete. I don’t mean get past them with everyone alive (though that matters less as dead characters will show up in the next scene regardless of the prior scene’s outcomes, as they are necessary to the story), I mean to get past these scenes at all. Even on the easy setting, these situations are nearly impossible to complete, requiring numerous retries while looking at the same problems over and over, managing the same resources over and over, and reading the same text over and over (or rather because you can skip the text, rapidly clicking the mouse button to get to the next choice in the hope that things go your way just enough to get through this time). After awhile I wasn’t paying any attention to the material surrounding the numbers, and I spent my time instead just hoping that I could get on with it. The first two scenes, took several long, excruciatingly repetitive hours to pass. I wouldn’t blame anyone who gave up right then and there.
Which is odd, because the game does become more manageable and far less exacting in the scenes that follow. However, having finally managed to get through the second scene, I found myself soured on the rest of the game. I could see Gods Must Be Watching trying to salvage things, but by that point, the game had trained me only to focus on numbers and leave the rest be. It wasn’t until the final two acts that everything started to come together thematically.
I can see what Gods Will Be Watching is trying to say and even how it is trying to say it, but none of the impact reaches me, the player. It wants to be a work about sacrifice and hardship, the greater good, moral integrity, and even the Nietzschean concept of eternal recursion. However, I wish it could have reached the heights it was aiming for.
Despite that, I still appreciate the game’s efforts. In and of itself, it is a noble failure, though within the wider context of games as a medium, I see it as a noble effort to create a piece of complex interactive art. For that alone, the existence of this game makes me happy.