Gods Will Be Watching

Eh game will give you headaches

I am not into torture.

Great story

This game made me question whether or not I was evil or not. 10/10 would sacrifice my partner to survive again.

After playing about 90 minutes of this game i have a hard time reccomending it to anyone unless they are masochist.

To be more specific, this micromanagement at an extreme level at chapter 1 makes me want to give up immediately. It is punishing and boring. I cannot understand if the developers simply were too lazy to make an adventure game rich in many chapters or if they just expected the players to just "git gud" on a slog fest of repetitiveness.

The graphics are appealing and the soundtrack seems quite interesting... even the dialogue and some interactions are polished but it lacks the "accomplishing" effect which balances the game and makes this game enjoyable.

I have played other punishing games before but ifor and adventure game i believe this title hits all the negative aspects of its genre.

2/10 - will not reccomend - (especially at its full price. I dare to say its not worth 1 single euro.)

This game makes me wish i could endure the pain of being run over by a semi truck over and over again until death
10/10 will play again (someday)

This game was a joy for me to play, as someone who greatly enjoys a challenge to overcome. And that's what this game is going to give you. A challenge. Every Mission is going to be fought tooth and nail to make it through, and this is especially true if you want to keep everyone alive, which I managed to do save for 1 chapter. The game play is rather simplistic(along with the art) but despite its simplicity is elegant in its execution with regard to how you can manage the situation.

On the surface of this game all it presents is a sci-fi setting with resource management, but as you play longer the narrative begins to rear its head and ensnare you. its subtle but appealing in its own way. While the ending of the story on its own was satisfying, it's elevated to the next level with The epilogue(free DLC). The DLC follows the story of the characters 20 years after the ending of the original game. Here more so than anywhere else we get a background into the various characters in an epic culmination of the story.

Overall if you're a fan of resource management games and a challenge, then I would definitely say to give it a try. It might be hard In the beginning(as it likely will be in every mission) but you might just end up finding a game you love in the end.

6/10
Epic puzzle game with a real challenge. I played this years ago and raged quit off the first level. I'm happy to have come back to this because the satisfaction from passing a level is so great! I stopped on level 5 the desert level... that level sucks. A lot of the issues of this game is how tedious it is. This game is basically learning the patterns of the level and when you do the same thing 800,000 times in a row watching the guy walk and pick up a stick to walk back is really annoying. same with having to press like 4 buttons to get the status screen to see how far insane my party has become and each button has like a second long animation. its just a little annoying.
BUT OVERALL its a great game

I first played the original browser game “Gods will be watching” over a decade ago when I was still in high school. I discovered on the pc gaming news site “rock paper shotgun” where it was described as a difficult and gruelling strategy pixel art game where you had to optimize a stranded crews resources on a deserted planet to survive.

I still have memories of many of Burdens men resorting to cannibalism and eating the groups dog to survive or destroying the robot for spare parts. Many hours in the schools computer lab were spent trying to come up with the perfect solution. I only survived a few times with some of the crew not being able to make it.

I remember being delighted to hear that a full game not just a single scenario was being developed to expand on the story of those survivors. It was going to be one of the first games I ever bought on steam. However when it first released reviews were mixed so I held up on playing and buying it. Now over a decade later were those mixed reviews right?

I can understand peoples distaste for the difficulty of the puzzles and I only was able to finish the game of original light which is a little easier then the original difficulty setting. However I enjoyed how the game challenges the player to find the solution when all things look hopeless and nothing is more satisfying then winning against what at first seemed a hopeless situation.

The story itself was engaging science fiction with a fun setting, very show don’t tell. The ending was a little bit predictable with time travel being involved but the epilogue (which I believe was post launch free dlc) helped improve what would have been an ok ending into a great ending.

In the epilogue we get to see the repercussions of our final choice in the main game in a 20 year timeskip and I must say I actually wish the main game was more like the epilogue. Almost every turn of the puzzle (climbing a steep mountain) has all the characters talk to each other about what had happened in the 20 years since the last mission. You really get to see a lot of depth and humanity with all the characters and I wish in the previous missions you got more character banter as in previous missions some characters felt a little one note.

All in all as long as your ready for a difficult puzzle with resource management and some si fi shinanigans I highly recommend this game. It may not be for everyone but it’s a true gem.

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This game is a puzzle game that is very poorly disguised as a resource management game. I honestly believe that all point-and-click games have to be puzzle games, since there isn't any time restriction, movement, or other mechanics at play that give them any other kind of challenge. All games are objectives that have obstacles, and since point and click games only allow the player to interact them in the most simplistic way possible, they have to be puzzle games. There's a door in the way, click on the right thing to get the key, then click on the door, now the door is open. This isn't a dig on point-and-click games, simplicity is not bad. I like point-and-click games. However, the way that you beat this game is by keeping invisible numbers above 0 for a set duration of time by clicking on a prompt instead of clicking on another prompt. There's no time limit, there's no hoop to jump through, it's just making a decision to appeal to one thing instead of another. In a shooter, for example, you might fight instead of running away, but once you make that decision, you still have to aim properly, move properly, and successfully take down the target to accomplish that task - that's what makes it interesting. All games are like that. There's a goal, but there's some kind of challenge in the way that you need to complete to accomplish that goal. Here, the gameplay is "click on option 1 instead of option 3." Now if the game was upfront about this, it'd be unplayable - basically just pixelated Simon Says Torture now. So it opts to obfuscate these resources and how they react to the player, and the game becomes learning how each number will go up or down depending on an action. That's it. It's just learning what will allow you to survive, and what won't, and once you know that, the game is over. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but it's not a traditional puzzle game, so it isn't finding the key and opening the door, it's dying a few times to understand the key, using the key for 30 minutes, and then moving on. I don't even feel like it's a "game," it's just learning the rules, being punished for not knowing them, and then fixing it - and this process takes ages. The writing is pretty good, but there some pretty funny issues - in Chapter 2, there's a challenge that behaves wildly differently to the other ones with no indication that it will do what it does (which happens too often), so a character died, and then they came back as a force ghost, which is fine, but a majority of the dialogue didn't reflect the change, so it made no sense, and then they just came back in the next chapter. They were having conservations with other characters. If their death doesn't affect the story moving forward in any way, and create glaring plotholes, why would you allow them to die? Wild. Much like the gameplay, the story is far too linear for its own good.

Not my usual type of game at all. I picked it up for the sci-fi pixel art point and click, but I got so much more. I usually find resource management and survival mechanics to be tedious, and was instantly put off in chapter one. But after sticking with it, and learning how the game works, I found it to be incredibly rewarding. I did have to put the difficulty down to "original light" but found a good balance of challenge without breaking my soul into a million pieces. Chapter three was where things really picked up for me, and I found myself invested in the plot and characters, and learning what each scenario wanted from me by trial and error, and perseverance. A wonderfully satisfying narrative, with a stunning soundtrack and gorgeous visuals. I think this will stay in my brain for a long while. Definitely recommend if you're willing to stick with it and keep trying again after the inevitable multiple failures. The difficulty is an intended part of the experience and feeds into the story very cleverly. A definite recommend

Just play it in story mode.

If the game mechanics were a bit more clear, this would have been a great game. It is like playing a turn-based game, but without knowing the turn numbers or limits. In the end, the game is frustratingly hard and confusing, which makes me want to ALT-F4 the game.

The solution to play on narrative mode isn't satisfying, because you can't earn Steam achievements during the narrative mode. Nonetheless, I appreciate the vision of the game, and hope that future releases (or a re-release of this game) will improve on visual cues to help make the game more playable.

I am still looking foward to Essays on Empathy, willing to give the development team another chance.

is hard :(

If I had to describe this game in one word it would be:

Boring. boring boring boring. This game is just boring. The game play was the same 3+ options over and over again. Every slight task could instantly throw your run into shit or completely set you back by 20+ minutes for nothing. I got to the third chapter and was not only confused on story and timeline, but was also doing the same task over and over and over again just to find out that I misclicked one option during one scene and had to start THE ENTIRE 30+ MINUTE SEGMENT OVER AGAIN!

If you enjoy repetitive and monotonous game play with no rewarding factor besides a sigh of relief you don't have to do it again, you'll love this game. Other than that, this game is not good. Sorry Deconstructeam, this is a stinker even 10 years later. K thx love you bye

Everybody saying this game is too hard either sucks at it, doesn't get the point of the game, or both. I don't consider myself an expert at video games, but I beat it on the hardest difficulty in a couple days. A couple missions took me a great deal of tries (especially the first), but trying, failing, and restarting with new insight is the point of most retro-style video games, and, without wishing to get into spoilers, it diegetically makes a lot of sense for this game in particular.

Don't play it expecting to beat each chapter on the first try, play expecting to learn something for the next try.

Probably not for everyone, but I enjoyed it thoroughly and its got my recommendation.

This game's story is genuiely great.
You and crew were operating a spaceship in a war-torn galaxy. However you crashed on a seemingly desertted planet. It's up to you to decide what you will all do to try to survive. Through this, you be forging bonds with each of them, hoping against hope that you will all make it out of here. But those endings only happen in feel-good stories, which this clearly isn't.

And then there's the gameplay. Jesus Christ, the gameplay.
I don't think the term "insane micro-management" does it justice. You have to watch over so many things that drain so fast its almost unplayable. You will fail so many times and have to restart a sequence because of a minor mistake it will kill any enjoyement you had for this game.
It's a rage-inducing mess.

I can't recommend this to anyone. Unless you're a fan of watching over an absurd amount of barely-predictable stuff that is. But at this point, just try to get into shareholding. You'll have more fun with this.