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Gods Will Be Watching |OT| A Point-and-Click Thriller

S

Seanspeed

Banned
Everyone saying this game is hard.

Ok, that's fine. But is it 'punishing'? What is the penalty for death and how frustrating is it as a result?
 
AHA-Lambda

AHA-Lambda

Member
Seanspeed said:
Everyone saying this game is hard.

Ok, that's fine. But is it 'punishing'? What is the penalty for death and how frustrating is it as a result?
Click to expand...

No, it's just frustrating, penalty for death means a complete restart and these chapters ain't short.
 
M

mhanna49

Neo Member
I regret buying it. I saw the Giant Bomb QL and thought it looked awesome. Even on easy, it is very difficult. I am stuck on the second chapter on easy and am currently on my fifth attempt. If you get really far and fail, it will still just pop you back to the beginning of the chapter which is VERY frustrating considering how monotonous the chapter is.
 
AHA-Lambda

AHA-Lambda

Member
mhanna49 said:
I regret buying it. I saw the Giant Bomb QL and thought it looked awesome. Even on easy, it is very difficult. I am stuck on the second chapter on easy and am currently on my fifth attempt. If you get really far and fail, it will still just pop you back to the beginning of the chapter which is VERY frustrating considering how monotonous the chapter is.
Click to expand...

Same position here, ridicuous a chapter as long as that has no checkpoints, when a roll of the dice on certain scenes could end it all.
 
D

daydream

Banned
Ouch, these initial impressions are not good. They kinda mirror the problems I had with the prototype. Bummer. Will have to think twice on this.

Maybe the story will be worth the trial-and-error?
 
K

kubus

Member
Man, seeing this thread bumped made me all excited because I forgot about this and I was really looking forward to it too. But these impressions don't sound too good :(.
 
K

Krakn3Dfx

Member
eravulgaris said:
Man, this game is fucking hard. Can't even get past the first level.
Click to expand...

mpPEynk.jpg


I'm laughing way harder than I should be right now.

I still want to play this tho. Going to be home alone for the next 6 days, probably not going to be a better time for long, drawn out, repetitive gaming.
 
L

Lan Dong Mik

And why would I want them?
This looks weird but pretty cool! I don't really like getting my ass handed to me though. Will wait for more impressions.

Cool to see dat GTAV Chop cameo tho haha
 
C

Corronchilejano

Member
First indie game I buy without looking at reviews... now I DEFINETLY need to play it and find out if it was pure hype :S

EDIT: This game is weird. I get what they're going for, but the micromanagement is tough. I'm still a fan though, I love a challenge.
 
H

Hakkesshu

Member
Morat said:
Rock Paper Shotgun Wot I Think: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/07/24/wot-i-think-gods-will-be-watching/

Walker is not a fan
Click to expand...

I've played it for a couple of hours, and I agree with him. It's not fun to play at all, but not in a good way like, for instance, Papers Please. It's a fantastic atmosphere and beautiful art style that is just wasted on a game that is all about managing endless invisible statistics and percentages. I don't like the actual game part one bit.
 
Zomba13

Zomba13

Member
I bought this after watching the GB quick look. I'm enjoying it. The difficulty can be frustrating but then once you complete a chapter it feels rewarding.

I do have a pretty major problem (chapter 2 and very start of 3 spoilers)
So Jack died during the torture while Burden lived. Burden kept talking to Jack's ghost during the night time. I thought this would play into later chapters with Burden still seeing and talking to Jack but no one else seeing him but at the end of Chapter 2 Jack was carried away too and he is fine in the next chapter even having other characters talk directly to him. This kinda takes me out of it as he was dead, they stopped torturing him and even said he was dead.
 
C

CheesecakeRecipe

Stormy Grey
Crossposting impressions from the Steam thread.

Two hours in with Gods Will Be Watching: (will continue to update as progress occurs)


There's been some kind of misunderstanding I feel, and it lies completely with the developers. For a game sold on choice, you get very little of it. This is not a game about freedom to approach a situation how you please as one may expect. It's a resource management game about finding the golden path forged by developer logic which we chastise old adventure games for.

The first scenario is a hostage mission in which the player is forced to shoulder the weight of every role at once. You have to manage the security to hack the computers and steal the data, calm or disturb the hostages so they don't get complacent or too scared, hold off the incoming anti-terrorism unit, manage health with limited supplies and so on. There are a lot of different ways to approach each situation but there seems to be a random chance that something won't go your way.

The computer can be counter-hacked with even 75% security running, which costs you an action plus another action to correct. Each action either calms or upsets the hostages, and trying to counter-balance that ends up costing you an action. I'm fine with not being able to keep everyone alive without a bit of work but there's almost too much working against the player. That's on normal difficulty.

On easy difficulty we see how the developers don't have much understanding of balance. It's either "Get fucked in the face, Payday 2-on-Death-Wish style" on normal or "okay you baby, here comes the choo-choo train of storyspoon" on easy. It feels like they could have just met somewhere in the middle and avoided some of the frustrations on players while not practically insulting them for not wanting to deal with your sadism.

On that note, what's the point in sadistic and brutal violence if they happen so often and you're forced to repeat the scenarios so frequently that seeing a hostage's head get blown off loses pretty much all meaning? I don't feel conflicted when a life is lost, I just want to sigh and throw my hands up. Perhaps that's what the developer wanted but it makes for an utterly awful game.

It's not that I don't like difficulty either, I dug Dark Souls' jib, I rock Call of Pripyat with Misery Mod, Teleglitch was my personal number one last year. There's just a difference between difficulty and bad game design and this team doesn't seem to know the difference.
Click to expand...
 
brickarts295

brickarts295

Member
This game makes Dark Souls look like a Joke when it comes to difficulty. I'm not giving up but man I am getting frustrated as hell.
 
I

InaudibleWhispa

Member
After reading the impressions, fuck it I just put it on easy. I don't mind a challenge, but I have to be enjoying it, or else it's just frustrating and mundane. I'm two missions in, and I really wouldn't want to have to replay that second chapter if I'd failed (I didn't). It was testing my patience the first time through, if I failed I would have just quit the game.

The first mission I can see myself going back to, trying to get a perfect run. I'm still looking forward to seeing what's coming next; I enjoy the art and scenarios (though the writing is sometimes just plain weird) but it does seem like the gameplay could do with quite a bit of tweaking.
 
T

TheBaronOfNA

Banned
The hostage situation is not that bad when you realize that
you should liberate the ones that are going to break and the leader mood affects everyone.
 
H

Hakkesshu

Member
CheesecakeRecipe said:
Crossposting impressions from the Steam thread.
Click to expand...

This is all true. There are some neat ideas going on here, but the tedious nature of the mechanics get in the way of everything that's good. It's a bad game.

Comparing the difficulty to Dark Souls is an insult to that game. There is thought and balance and depth to Dark Souls. This is like navigating one of those fast food restaurant table mat mazes only you aren't allowed to look at the exit. Making a choice in this game feels like you're changing a variable in a spreadsheet somewhere, not influencing the world around you.

Edit: I can just keep going on like this. Not only is it a bad game, the more I think about it the more I actively loathe it and everything it stands for. It was made by people who have no idea why difficult games can be fun.
 
N

Night_Trekker

Member
I played the demo/prototype/whatever of this a while back... I respect the creativity that's gone into the game, and conceptually I think it's kind of brilliant, but it was just too much for me.

You're forced to make life or death decisions in a game. Fine. But it would be helpful for all the choices to make sense. Because this is a game, your choices are limited, so it feels like you're being forced to make artificially difficult, terrible decisions.

Like, look. If I've got a group of people starving, no matter their training, I could get them all equipped with crude spears and hunting together. But not in this game. Why not? Game says so. Oh, okay...

And I get that the "no saving within chapters" thing is supposed to get people to stick with their decisions instead of save-crawling, but I wonder if the devs miscalculated. Most gamers will probably restart when things don't go their way. Especially when they're responsible for such harrowing outcomes.

I dunno, I may grab it on sale later. It just doesn't seem like all that much fun. The demo stressed me out and left me feeling kinda terrible.
 
K

kiyomi

Member
The game is gorgeous. The music is great.

I can't make it out of the first scene, and I'm playing on Easy. I'm not enjoying the challenge, I'm annoyed and frustrated that I spent my money on this. I really, badly, wanted to like this game, but if this continues, it's going to be impossible for me to carry on playing this game.
 
Strazyplus

Strazyplus

Member
Monosukoi said:
The game is gorgeous. The music is great.

I can't make it out of the first scene, and I'm playing on Easy. I'm not enjoying the challenge, I'm annoyed and frustrated that I spent my money on this. I really, badly, wanted to like this game, but if this continues, it's going to be impossible for me to carry on playing this game.
Click to expand...

I was hyped but I held off to wait for reviews... I still want to play but I know what to expect now...

Pre-orderers or people who didn't wait for reviews = lose
Those who waited / got reviews = Win!
 
K

kiyomi

Member
Strazyplus said:
I was hyped but I held off to wait for reviews... I still want to play but I know what to expect now...

Pre-orderers or people who didn't wait for reviews = lose
Those who waited / got reviews = Win!
Click to expand...

I'm just super glad I only paid £6 for it. Anything more and I'd be genuinely gutted. As it is, I'm just kinda disappointed.

I'll keep playing though and see where it goes..
 
A

Archurro

Member
Anyone else having problems running this on Mac? Granted, my macbook is a old pos, but I thought this game would be runnable on anything.

Also, suprised by the amount of people having trouble with the difficulty. The flash game was brutal as hell, almost impossible to win, so I suspected the full game would be nearly the same way.
 
I

Intheflorsh

Banned
This game is broken as shit. Twice I've gotten late into the
torture
scenario and twice it has crashed on me. The best part is since the game has no check points I'll be sitting through all that unskippable dialogue and lengthy animations once again. Hooray.
 
yurinka

yurinka

Member
I'm a backer of this game. Really loved the original game and the beta. Can't wait to get the final game and the extra stuff. ^_^
 
AHA-Lambda

AHA-Lambda

Member
Finally got past the bullshit that is
russian roulette
on Chapter 2, and on to Chapter 3.

Hmm, this chapter seems really simple actually, it's going really well,
we've digged our way out plus managed to find a cure with a few hours to spare
hurrah!

NOPE!
oh did I not mention to you sergeant? The cure has 2 phases.

Fuck you Sarah. Fuck you.
 
C

Cymbal Head

Banned
Wow. After reading John Walker's review at RPS I was hoping he was an outlier, but I'm seeing a lot of lukewarm-to-cold first impressions.

I'm thinking this one is coming off the Steam wishlist.
 
K

kiyomi

Member
I lucked through chapter 2, first time, no problems, on easy. I feel very very fortunate.

Turns out that when the game isn't punishing you on random chance over and over again, it's kinda cool. The music + art are top tier.
 
B

BinaryPork2737

Unconfirmed Member
Monosukoi said:
I lucked through chapter 2, first time, no problems, on easy. I feel very very fortunate.

Turns out that when the game isn't punishing you on random chance over and over again, it's kinda cool. The music + art are top tier.
Click to expand...

Same here, made it through on one go.

And yeah, the music and art are great, but the random luck based elements kinda kill the game for me. The problem isn't the luck based elements themselves, but how pervasive they are and the lack of checkpoints.
 
C

CheesecakeRecipe

Stormy Grey
Third chapter of GWBW is perhaps the most enjoyable yet. Instead of fucking you with an RNG, the management portion makes a lot of sense. I still feel quite under the gun with different pressures mounting but what the game wants you to do is far more understandable and there's tangible elements to everything that isn't hunting for context that might take you two or three fuckups to notice.

I will probably take a break here for a bit before digging back into it.
 
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