Just spent about 2 hours banging my head against the first mission. Normal difficulty. Game is tough. Consistently interesting.

I wound up switching down to easy after failing a ~50% coin flip four times in a row. Semi-rage difficulty decrease. Beat mission on easy first attempt. Kinda feel like there's too much of a gap between easy and normal difficulty at this point. That's just based on the first mission though. Normal brought back certain negative memories I have of the L.A. Noire suspect questionings, in terms of somewhat impenetrable game logic.

Onwards and upwards...

played an hour, made it through the first mission and feel like im pretty close on the second. dunno if there needs to be a seperate tips thread if people want to figure it out on their own. obviously its hard but i dont think its unfair.

pretty excited to play more, and show other people it

Russian Roulette can go fuck itself

Okay the second mission sucks. It has none of the good about the game and all of the bad. And it's long. And russian roulette can go fuck itself indeed. And holy shit I just lose 25 minutes of progress and have to do that whole thing over again? And suddenly the hold right mouse button to skip dialogue scenes doesn't work anymore so i'm manically clicking to get to the next interact bit.

Forget it. I'm not playing this anymore. Too much is at stake -meaning my free time- to lose on some bullshit random nonsense that I had no way to know about or account for. There needs to be more flexibility and yes I am playing on easy. Game puts you in to fail state without warning constantly in that second mission.

2/10. Nice idea. Bad execution. First mission was semi-fun. I like the music.

@mikaelboogart: I wanted to play that game a lot but then I saw the rockpapershotgun review. Your opinion seems to be in line with it and I don't know anymore. That is hard is fine, but it seems totally unfair.

(Nice Triplettes de Belleville avatar by the way :P ).

@fear_the_booboo: Just read that review. Yeah that's pretty much my takeaway based on missions 1 and 2.

Thanks. I love the Triplets of Belleville. :)

I just managed to have a conversation with a dead guy in mission 2. Whoops.

Or that's on purpose and the still living dude is going crazy.

I thought it was a bug. But then it looks like it happens for everyone. Steam forum suggests this brings up massive continuity errors in later missions. But then it is argued the developer is not trying for continuity between missions?

That seems pretty crappy. Oh well.

I've finished the first 3 missions and am now on the 4th, which is the remake of the game jam level. I really like it so far. I've cleared each scenario on my second attempt, but I'm not sure if that's because I found the best way or just got lucky. Russian Roulette was indeed what killed me in the 2nd scenario, but knowing it was coming, I was able to somewhat prepare for it the 2nd time around.

The random elements can be annoying, and some scenarios fluctuate in regards to that randomness, but up until the 4th mission I thought it was relatively in check. The fourth mission isn't as bad as the game jam version for being extremely luck based (or extremely bullshit, if I'm being colloquial), but it is a heavy increase over the previous 3 scenarios.

MitchyD tweeted that he lost 25 minutes of progress due to complete randomness in the Russian Roulette part. This game is becoming less appealing to me the more I see/hear about it.

This game is crushingly hard, even on easy. I know that's intended but it doesn't make me want to play it.

the russian roulette part is the only bit that has felt cheap so far, and each level has only felt hard at first, until you learn what systems are in place. after that you might die to a bad roll, but if you're completely stuck you're doing something wrong

really enjoying it, up to the fourth stage now

@mikaelboogart: Ah, yeah, I just got to the third part, and it definitely doesn't care about the specifics of what happened in the second part. That's weird, but okay.

It doesn't feel as good as the demo I played. I can't quite put my finger on why, but I feel like they tried to stretch an idea too far. Still a good game, and well worth the money.

I'm going to go back on my opinion on the 4th mission now. It actually seems more random than the game jam version. You have more options available to you to help manage things, but they seemed to have made the morale system infuriatingly inconsistent. In the game jam version, you could always count on someone you had just talked to being ok for a day, and if you did a group therapy session everyone would gain a good amount of morale. The most a person could lose under normal circumstances was 2 moral in a night. In the full release version, you can also give people cooked meat which I presume helps their morale better than raw meat. On 4 occasions now (I was counting), a character lost about 5 morale in one night, even though I talked to him, he enjoyed the pep talk, and ate cooked meat.

To make things worse, the big way you could get RNG screwed in the gamejam version was unsuccessful hunts. Well that problem has been exacerbated, because now much less meat is retrieved in each hunt, meaning you have to do more hunts, with more chances of failure and more ammo consumption.

I realize that I could just magically succeed on my next attempt, and that the game is supposed to be hard, but unlike the first 3 scenarios where I was at least able to learn from my mistakes and plan ahead, I have no idea what else I could have done here.

I'm honestly loving it, but I guess this game definitely wasn't made for everyone. I really enjoyed the art, music, and cyrsis management gameplay, the fact that it is often almost unfairly hard, enhances the very brutal and uncompromising tone of the game for me. Its just really different and refreshing, which makes it that much more appealing to me even though its partially flawed in its execution. I'm only bothered by the weird possible glitch/ strange design choice to contain each chapter as a separate scenario allowing a certain character who just died to come back as if nothing happened. Also the typos kind of irked me, but hopefully they'll patch those fairly soon. Most people I've seen talking about this game seem to dislike it pretty heavily (there's nothing but negative user reviews on the steam page) but for me personally I can say It will probably get a spot on my top 10 list because it hit enough of the right notes with some amazing accuracy, that I didn't care about the wrong notes.

Holy shit guys, this second scene...

I haven't had much time to play it, so i haven't beaten the first mission, but I absolutely love what i've seen so far. I love the brutal difficulty, I love the fact that the game isn't afraid to shit all over a players' hopes, which is reflected in the steam forums comments. I commend them for trying something different and enjoy playing something that's a far cry from hand-holding game difficulty that we've come to see everywhere.

This game really needed some QA passes or something. Having to click through tons of dialogue every time you restart (which you have to, as the game is almost entirely trial-and-error) is pretty grating, and there are tons of typos. I like the idea of it but I can't say it's very good.

@zggurat yeah that is intentional, as you can see his ghost near the left wall. What wasn't intentional was when Jack died and then he kept sitting up and slumping down for the rest of that attempt.

I can't get past the first damn level, but I love this. Getting to 75% completion as my hands are sweating is such a tense experience. I accidentally clicked the wrong thing and the doctor tried to strangle me. It was all down hill from there. Gonna go for a run and come back to it later today. I love it, to be clear.

I've been playing Xcom recently so I've been reading the title to myself like the Council leader.

I really liked the game jam version even though it was brutally unfair and luck-based (you need basically everything to succeed to actually save everyone). From the sounds of it, I should hold off on this until at least a few patches in, given that I guess some of the translation is wonky, and also I wouldn't be surprised if they tweak some things given how much people are complaining about the repeated dialogue and or the bugginess of the guy who dies or something?

I....I can probably wait until the December Steam sale for this. Which I was hoping I was going to have to say :(

Gods Will Be Watching (at least the prototype game jam version) reminds me a lot of Island Rescue, a C64/DOS game where you're shipwrecked on an island, and you basically have to balance your 30 days (a hurricane obliterates the island after 30 days) collecting water or fishing, while occasionally going to try to find planks to build a raft, and also spending some days resting so you don't exhaust yourself. Also you can put a message in a bottle, and there is a small chance you'll be rescued that way, or I think pirates could find it instead and come for you and that's not a good ending. It was on our school computers in the early-to-mid 90s.

Okay, I beat the first mission. No deaths, and no data loss! Normal difficulty. I'm proud. But... now I'm on mission 2... *shudders*

I got to the Russian Roulette part and Burden took a bullet to the face on the 2nd 1-out-of-6 shot. Really thought I'd survive that. On one hand... the checkpoints are rough... but on the other hand... they lend to the intensity of the situation. If I could just load up a recent save it would create a totally different mood. Ultimately, I'm glad it's the way it is. Just be glad it's not a rogue-like-like-like.

@sethphotopoulos said:

"Gods Will Be Watching, Commander."

It weirds me out how similar that guy sounds to the voice of Optimus Prime.

"We will be watching, Comman-I'LL KILL YOU!" - Optimus Prime, Trans5mers

@sethphotopoulos said:

So true to character.

"Til all are one, OR TIL I RIP YOUR MOTHERFUCKING HEAD OFF!"

Playing this last sequence is a terrifying reminder of how I optimize use of time and resources in my own life. I have to find enough time in life to go to work, to exercise, to socialize, to teach myself new skills, to eat, to sleep, and sometimes I will also play video games.

This game has reminded me that I really should stop playing it and do something else.

Just finished it.

What a strange, grim, beautiful and potent little game that was.

I'm so glad GBEAST quick-looked this or I never would have purchased it. It made me feel like I got kicked in the chest at the end, and the last game to accomplish that was Journey. Also like journey, this game really does have a killer soundtrack.

GODS WILL BE WATCHING

I thought russian roulette was going to be "I'm going to put a gun to one guy's head while the other takes a beating." The chance values are too skewed. I just got shot on the first of 7. theres no way to know what you're going to get and you can only prepare one lie. You can only confess so many times before you get a game over. i get that the segment is meant to force you to confess, but you dont even have enough for that, so your'e still forced to gamble, since provoke, beg, and think dont get you any delay. theres no mechanic to that situation like the other bits of the game. The hostage situation is legit fun now that i know how to keep them under control. the torture came too early in the game. it should have been 3rd or 4th, since i want to see what the other, probably more fun, scenarios are.

it does alot to stimulate the mind on how to turn dialogue based scenarios into actual gameplay loops like combat would be, and there are lessons here for other games, but the roulette needs a patch. it should come up more often, but it should end after one confession. the entire point is "You're pressing your luck" not "You're rolling the dice".