Gods Will Be Watching is the Best Game

          Stress is packaged into an extraordinary amount of media. Horror, Thrillers, Drama. Even The Office or Spiderman has its share of controlled terror. Of gut wrenches and headaches. Science argues over inherently good or bad levels of stress (eustress or distress) and others say it's quality not quantity that makes stress good. Improves your hypothalamus they say. Tougher reactions to the next stressor, adaptability, increased learning capacity are all on the table. Furthermore the only working theory behind nightmares is Threat Simulation Theory. The idea that dreams exist as preparation for the worst case while keeping you in a safe environment. Welcome to nightmares in video game form.

When the Going Gets Tough

Gods Will Be Watching throws you headfirst into a tail of espionage, cyberpunk morals, nihilism, and the fate of the universe. It starts with a hostage situation. You are the villain. Of course the story is more complex than that but as you start executing hostages its hard to feel like you're not in the wrong here. Form meets function as the gameplay and the story both revolve entirely around making aggressive decisions. Have you made the right decisions? The game will never tell you. The story moves on while rubbing your crummy mistakes in your face. In fact, the original ending was so dissatisfying that a DLC epilogue chapter was released in 2015.

The game constructs a beautiful narrative about how these situations should be hard. Surviving in the wilderness, curing a plague, or withstanding torture for a week to name a few. As you play you’ll lost teammates, arms, and your sanity only to start anew. This time you’ll get through it with everyone intact. Chasing that perfect run as if you were keeping all the side characters alive in Fire Emblem or Mass Effect. You care more for these characters because you’ve failed them time and time again.

Your reward for completing a level? More grey in your moral soup and a new hotter frying pan to work with. It is the seven levels of hell and breaking through to the other side does not make you happy. It makes you relieved.

At release GWBW had one difficulty level and it was hard. It took many players dozens of attempts at each level to move forward with checkpoints left behind 20 minutes away. The average gamer wasn’t satisfied with this and Jordi de Paco, lead designer, made an easy mode and a story mode. But I’d stick with the original difficulty as long as you can.

Blake Snyder writes in Save the Cat! about the essential plot beats for a good story. GWBW starts halfway through at the critical "Whiff of Death" stage and stays there for the whole game. Any high points are taken away by cutscenes and you are left to do the heavy lifting only when the story is at its worst.

GWBW paints with a masterful brush dipped in anxiety and the end result is spectacular.

But What is It?

Gods Will Be Watching is officially a point and click thriller. I’d instead call it a story driven resource management sim. Each choice has an impact not only within each level (which has no checkpoints) but for the larger story as well. At its heart its a number crunching probability gamble but it sure puts a pit in your stomach each time you strategically kill a hostage.

Sometimes thats your best option.

Gods Will Be Watching grew out of the Ludum Dare game Jam #26 with just the survival level you see above. It reached 255% of its kickstarter goal after that and became the full game you see below with 6 levels. It was released in 2014. The DLC added one last level set 20 years later.

Deconstructeam is known for their penchant for the queasy and has other games you should check out full of tough decisions. Their newest one, The Red Strings Club, features corporate espionage and bartending. Available on Steam now.