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The Gods Will Be Watching You Go Back to School

By on August 16, 2013

The Gods Will Be Watching You Go back to School

Nothing quite spells “back to school” like a desperate struggle for survival through resource management.  And that is why I am happy to introduce Gods Will Be Watching, a simple game with simple mechanics that can help any school-bound person.

In the Gods Will Be Watching, the year is 2257 AD, and you are Sgt. Burden.  You and crew work for the Everdusk Company, but are currently stranded on the planet Sineicos.  With precious little resources, you must survive the elements, stay sane, and repair the radio over the course of 40 days.  Oh, and you must also be on the lookout for signs of the Medusa Virus. With your full crew consisting of Marvin the dog, the Soldier, the Doctor, the Psychiatrist, the Engineer, and the robot, BR4ND-ON, you have five actions in a given game day to try to stay fed, warm, sane, and fix the radio.

As members of your team suffer mental breaks and nightly attacks from the local wildlife, the number of five actions per day drops.  In order to stave off failure, which at these stakes means death for you and the crew, you must make tough decisions. For instance, you cannot survive one night without a lit fire, which means that everything else, like hunting for food and giving one-on-one motivational talks, comes second to keeping that fire going.

That said, talking to your team or spending an entire day’s worth of actions on getting the psychiatrist to talk to everyone is the only way to keep everyone sane and contributing to the objective.  The soldier can’t hunt if he loses his mind, just like the doctor can’t treat the Medusa Virus if he’s lost the will to continue.  Of course, if the engineer is lost, the robot can still repair the radio but at a lower efficiency.  On the other hand, since the engineer and psychiatrist are an item, losing the engineer might cost you the psychiatrist as well.

So there you go—the finite time in a day is quantified into a finite number of actions, and those actions are dictated by getting help from the right people and avoiding time thieves, just like in school.

Gods Will Be Watching in its current game jam form is available to play free online.  The game’s developer, Deconstructeam, is working on a much more expanded version.

Here’s the trailer:

No word yet as to whether one of the new scenarios takes place in a classroom, but you can be sure that playing the Gods Will Be Watching is like being taken to school.

About Brian Hoss

As a video game designer, I have worked for years with companies like Activision, Electronic Arts and Zenimax. Naturally, my fascination with technology, the internet, and the age-old social sharing of storytelling has prompted me to indulge writing for The CheckOut. Google BMH

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