Gods Will Be Watching
Gods Will Be Watching, but it’s your job to judge.
This is a game about the fact that you’re probably not a psychopath, but that hey, sometimes shit happens.
First scenario: you’re not terrorists. Your hostages may disagree, but, as you tell them, you’re not looking to hurt anyone. They’re just there for protection while your team hacks a government server.
Then the timer starts. All you have to do is keep things quiet for your hackers, and keep the guards outside the door out of flashbang range—an instant game over. And everything would be fine, if everyone would just sit there and be quiet for a few minutes. But will they? No! Shouting at them doesn’t calm them down, but—oh, damn it! The computer feed’s been hacked again. Have the hacker fix that, then—what now? All the pussy-footing around made the hostages lose respect and openly rebel? There’s an easy way to fix that. Hope their leader learns to love hopping.
And so, slowly but surely, in a hundred tiny little steps down that road paved with good intentions, does Gods Will Be Watching make you the bad guy. Or the mad scientist. Or the pragmatic military leader, slowed by a wounded soldier. The second vignette is an immediate shift from being more or less the one in control to the victim, controlling two soldiers being tortured for information over 20 agonizing days. In each episode, the rules change.
This is a very unpleasant, very uncomfortable game to play. One that demands cold decisions in nightmare situations and then depicts the results with the heartless edge of a rusty scalpel. In a particularly beautiful little twist of that knife, the game itself stands back from moralizing, encouraging you to do it to yourself at the end of each stage, with a The Walking Dead/ Catherine style breakdown of how everyone else who played did—a reminder that you could almost certainly have done better.
For the most part, it’s extremely effective, squeezes every drop of life out of its pixels, and backs it all with a great atmospheric soundtrack. Where it struggles is that to stretch out the handful of stories into a commercial game, each vignette is designed to be challenging, even if you do opt to take the easier, often morally repugnant shortcuts like thumping hostages. The resulting repetition after things go wrong badly saps the emotional core of each story, rapidly turning characters into simple puzzle pieces.
The scenarios are also long and can’t be saved, which can be a real pain if you screw up on something minor. These points aside, Gods Will Be Watching is a clever idea well executed, avoiding the branching and overt morality of most similar games in favor of simply asking you to judge yourself as you see fit. A very clever, very different kind of adventure that will make you feel and make you feel bad, but hopefully for most of the right reasons.