Devolver Digital has announced that Kickstarter success and indie darling Gods Will Be Watching will be released on PC, Mac and Linux on July 24.
Gods Will Be Watching is a post-apocalyptic point-and-click adventure where your choices count the most. Every choice you make affects future events, how characters react to you, and how long you survive. Your goal is to guide a rag-tag group of survivors through 6 chapters, each presenting a different scenario. With a large number of different factors to be considered and only a limited number of actions to take each day, the game requires some careful thought and balancing of needs. Send a party member out hunting to gather food, and you could be left without sufficient defenses to protect yourself against nocturnal predators. Fail to keep track of your party’s health, and they could fall ill from radiation sickness.
We played the game at EGX Rezzed earlier this year, and came away thoroughly impressed. Tasked with surviving long enough to repair a radio and call for help, we found ourselves needing to keep up the morale of party members by delivering pep talks, hunting for food, creating medicine and ensuring that our fire stayed lit, lest we die from exposure overnight.
In one particularly harrowing moment, our beloved dog died from disease because we’d forgotten to give him medicine. The result was that one of our group members had a full-on mental breakdown as result, quietly rocking on the floor for days before eventually snapping and running off. Death is only ever one day away in Gods Will Be Watching, and a single wrong choice or oversight can have drastic consequences further down the line. With so many possibilities depending on how you approach each situation, there’s tremendous replay value on offer despite the initially slender-sounding number of scenarios.
The game’s written dialogue is sparse but well-scripted, while a moody soundtrack keeps things feeling appropriately doom-laden. Visually, as you can see from the trailer and screenshots below, we’re in retro pixel art territory, but the art design is certainly distinctive and doesn’t detract from the atmosphere. If anything, it enhances it and while the graphics are certainly lo-fi, the environments are detailed with some subtle lighting effects and good use of color, and character animations are expressive.
Gods Will Be Watching is now available for pre-order via Humble, GOG.com and Steam as a standard edition for $9.99/£6.99, with a collector’s edition on offer for $19.99/£14.99. The collector’s edition includes the game’s soundtrack and art book, and a digital comic that serves as a prologue to the main game.
Find out more details on the game’s official website, and watch the latest trailer below.
