Amazing. I have never played anything like it. While it´s not an easy game, it is also not overly difficult. Yes, you probably die a bunch of times before you know how to get the hang of a scenario, and then once you figure it out and do everything right, you probably die a bunch more because of RNG....but once you get it, it feels great and rewarding. The story is just fantastic and that DLC ending *chefs kiss*! I sincerely hope they release a sequel. Can fully recommend this!

A lot of reviews will tell you that the experience of playing this on Normal is crucial to the story, and honestly, while I understand where they're coming from, I disagree. I think it's important to know that the intended experience is very grueling and cruel and annoying, but if you go in with that knowledge and play it on easy, you're going to understand the point just as well. Personally, I'm really glad there's a Weenie Hut Junior mode, because I wouldn't have finished this game otherwise. It's intentionally infuriating, which I don't mind considering what the format conveys, but I do think having a mode for people who can understand your intentions without experiencing the slog is a good choice. Anyway, it's a great game. Give it a go on Normal if you want, but don't feel like you have to suffer to Get It.

Why did the player keep retrying Gods Will Be Watching?

Because they heard the game was so challenging, it felt like the gods themselves were saying, "Thou shalt not pass... until you beat this level"! 🎮⚡👑

I had an amazing experience with this game. I really loved every minute of it. I can see it wouldn't be for everyone but bloody magic for this older gamer.

I've had a lot of trouble in my time with a level where I had to dismantle a rubble pile.....

Gods Will Be Watching offers a unique and challenging narrative-driven experience, focusing on tough moral choices and survival in extreme situations. While its thought-provoking story and minimalist design may intrigue some players, others may find its difficulty and trial-and-error gameplay to be frustrating or inaccessible.

I will be honest: I played this game till the end and don't remember almost anything. Very incoherent story. But cool style. It feels like a distant dream now, many years since completion.

Great story and hard choices.

Gods Will Be Watching is a brilliant game whose core appeal is a set of mechanics that don't work well together.

On the one hand, Gods Will Be Watching presents a compelling narrative about the nature of sacrifice, tyranny and morality. The choices you make are the polar opposite of mainstream 'choices matter' games like Fallout 3. You aren't given a 'good guy' option and 'bad guy' option, you're given twelve options that involve distributing suffering and risk to a variety of good people who don't deserve what's happening to them, where some of the best options which guarantee the success of a greater cause involve condemning an individual to death. Every day brings new unpredictable challenges, and you find your careful preparation topples underneath something you could've never known was coming. The characters who surround you have dispositions and traits which aren't explicitly explained to you, but have tangible impacts on gameplay that make them feel real and nuanced. And, of course, that makes choosing to put them at risk even harder to do. And to top it all off making uber-pragmatic decisions might lead characters to doubt your judgement or go insane, meaning that those tantalising risks which seem like objectively good choices still hold the risk of traumatising those around you.

On the other hand, Gods Will Be Watching is a management game about making pragmatic decisions in the face of impossible odds. The game doesn't always give you exact numbers to work with, or tell you how your actions will affect them, but situations are modelled with enough nuance to make the world feel alive and comprehensible. Remember how I said individual characters have nuanced differences with a tangible impact on gameplay? Understanding and taking advantage of those is key to surpassing the game's more difficult challenges. It might feel nice to keep the cripple slowing you down alive as an act of mercy, but what if that leads to the death of your entire unit? Or with them being forced to make the horrific decision to take their own life for the good of the group? Or perhaps you let them live, knowing that your unit won't respect you if you kill them, but with the knowledge that their guilt will overwhelm them and make the decision for you soon enough. Everything gets reduced down to numbers and odds, and the apparent moral weight of your decisions fades into the background. The game reduces down to solitaire, not always possible to win, but nonetheless possible to improve at. This idea gets hammered home in the free DLC chapter, which makes it clear that easy, virtuous moral choices don't exist.

Unfortunately, everything the game includes to do one of these things hurts the other. Meaningful in-character dialogue? Great for narrative, but forms an unskippable bog you have to wade through when you try to seriously beat a level. Dehumanising moral dilemmas? Great for turning you into a pragmatic robot, but robs characters of their moral weight. Unpredictable hazards that end your run? Scintillating and paranoia-inducing, but turn your first playthrough into a monotonous slog of guess-and-check (Chapter 2 is particularly egregious here, demanding you make decisions long before you have any way of knowing they were good ones to make).

There are reasons for this. This was seemingly done intentionally, and a great deal of it is explicitly acknowledged in-game. The ending and DLC make that much clear. But as much as this makes the game a unique experience, one can't help but wonder if there were a better way of exploring these things without everything which holds this game back.

Ultimately, I still recommend this game, especially since it provides you with easier difficulty modes if you need them. But you should know that even the 'easy' difficult does not pull all its punches.

If you like the 'alive' feeling the game's cast gets through being driven by consistent but complex factors you can't directly observe, I highly recommend Gnosia - a game where you play Mafia/Werewolf with a bunch of AIs that all feel even more alive than anyone in Gods Will Be Watching.

It took me a while to get into it, but once I did I was gripped. A brave and engaging game. Sometimes shocking, but never repulsive, cheap or small-minded. Also, for a game that could have otherwise been a dry, hard puzzle game, the story is surprisingly worthwhile.

It may not be for everyone, it certainly isn't a point and click adventure such as it has sometimes been advertized as. But two thirds of its seven or eight scenarios would make a highlight of a larger RPG and a sequence that could make a conventional game legendary and widely remembered for its inclusion.

Honestly, I would have never guessed that I'd walk away from a somewhat gruesome experience that is the torture chamber scenario thinking "I'm so glad I got to experience this", but there you go. Whatever the games faults may be, it is difficult not to appreciate, and if you're the right sort of dedicated nerd, difficult to put down until I've got all the achievements, too.