Gods Will Be Watching: The Last Chapter Review: The Gods Have a Cold Sense of Humor

Even after multiple patches that significantly tone the difficulty down, calling Gods Will Be Watching is far from a forgiving game. It's nihilistic, cynical, and oftentimes infuriating, but that's all part of its supposed charm. As charming as a trip through hell can be. The main game puts players in the role of Burden, a man who must make all the hard decisions in seven horrific scenarios, where he has to balance sacrifice against survival.

The newest DLC, plainly called The Last Chapter, doesn't lighten matters up. However, instead of trudging through several scenes, players are faced with just one. Set 20 years after the events of the main game, Liam (the story's main antagonist) decides to find Burden, who is lost in time and space. To do this, he must trek up a mountain alongside four companions comprised of returning characters.

But there's always a trick to any task God Will Be Watching puts before you. Your team could freeze to death during the snowy climb. Or you could be attacked by unknown threats on this alien world. Your primary resource is your ship's power core, which has to be carried. It serves as both a heat source and as your only means of reloading your laser weapons.

Similar to the main campaign, The Last Chapter deals with a sort of sinister mathematics, where players have to balance between stamina and warmth. The team walks in a line. Those at the front tire faster because they're walking through snow, while the ones at the end do better by following in a wake. At the same time, those closest to the power core will be warmer than the ones at the end. Characters will also grow tired if they have to carry heavy objects like the power core, or if they're tasked with dragging the sled your guide is laying on (the ship's crash landing broke his legs).

Turn by turn, you have to rearrange the characters and pass around the objects they carry. The moral aspects of the game are downplayed a bit in The Last Chapter, and the climb up the mountain feels more like a strategy game, but that's not to say that you don't get to make critical decisions. Shrines are placed at certain intervals that provide you with choices that benefit your team, but at a cost. The first shrine, for example, gives you a statue to carry over to the next one. Assigning someone to carry the object burns up stamina, but there's a big reward in store if you can get it up the mountain.

In many respects, the shrine choices don't amount to all that much morally. They could make your trip up the mountain a little easier, depending on what burdens you're willing to take on. However, none carry the same kind of weight as some of the main campaign's scenarios, like when you had to decide which person to test an experimental drug on. Or when you have to endure a lengthy torture sequence. There's no sense of having a lose/die situation when these shrine decisions.

But there's no judgment, even if you decide that the best course of action is to abandon one of your teammates to the cold to preserve the rest of the team. Unless you're playing on one of the lower difficulties, the add-on maintains the game's signature brutality and random events that can suddenly bring the game to an unceremonious end, forcing you to start back from the beginning.

The Last Chapter supposedly completes the Gods Will Be Watching story by providing closure for the final decision you made in the main campaign. It's very dialogue heavy, and reading through it provides players with more insight into the characters than they ever got from the primary story. But it concludes with in a way that makes it seem like the gods (aka the developers), might be having a big joke at the player's expense. Then again, like the nihilistic attitude and the soul crushing random events, it's all part of the Gods Will Be Watching Charm.