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This probably isn't the best way to start, but I'm not sure I'm ready to review Gods Will Be Watching. The trouble is, I don't think I'll ever be ready to review Gods Will Be Watching. It's a game that I find simultaneously fascinating and infuriating. I love the ideas, but kind of hate the execution. I don't think it achieves what it set out to do, but then I'm not entirely confident that I know what that was in the first place.Some context: Gods Will Be Watching began life as a Ludum Dare game jam entry, on the theme of minimalism. Deconstructeam, the development group responsible, turned in a claustrophobic and nail-biting single location survival simulator in which you had to keep a group of people alive. In terms of mechanics, it was a resource management game. In practice, as the name suggests, it was more about the horrible rock and a hard place decisions you had to make along the way. Who was expendable? Who should suffer most and why? Whose well-being can be sacrificed for the greater good?
These are big questions to ask, and it's wonderful that games are increasingly finding new ways to ask them. Gods Will Be Watching belongs to a small but valuable strand of design that includes Papers, Please and Telltale's Walking Dead; games that are more interested in making the player wrestle with ethical dilemmas than having them 'beat' the underlying systems. In expanding its small but perfectly formed creation into a six chapter adventure game, however, Deconstructeam seems to have lost the vital balance needed.
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