Please The Gods Review

Game: Please The Gods
Genre: Action, Adventure, Role-Playing, Strategy
System: Nintendo Switch
Developer|Publisher: Spawn Point OSK | Ultimate Games
Age Rating: US T |
Price: US $9.99 | CA $12.59 | AU $ 12.75| UK £8.99 | EU €9.99
Release Date: 3^rd February 2020

Review code used, but all views are my own!

Gameplay

There are a few necessary elements for a good RPG: easy to understand mechanics, interesting characters, and an engaging story. Unfortunately, Please the Gods failed to impress in 2 of the three categories.

The mechanics are simple; you roll 2 dice, then choose a skill to use. This is the same regardless of whether you’re attacking or defending, with the only differences being what skills you have to choose from and what skills the enemy will use. I like the simplicity of the mechanics – they’re reminiscent of Friday Night D&D, which is my favourite part of the week – but at the same time, the reliance on RNG grates me. Your skills are capable of buffing stats or rolling extra dice etc, but at the end of the day if you roll double 1s on your first 2 dice you’ve basically failed unless your enemy also has supreme bad luck. I may not like the RNG (I have terrible luck, always have!) but I can’t fault the mechanics themselves, as they’re incredibly old-school and all the more charming for it.

However, I can’t justify the lacklustre characters and nigh non-existent story. Your introduction to the entire premise of the game is a 10-20 second cut scene, in which you learn that your character’s family is starving and you have to find a magical artefact to save them. There’s no introduction to the characters as people, no little hooks to make you actually engage with the story, just no reason to actually care about these people or what you’re trying to accomplish.

It’s a shame because the overworld is wonderfully simple to navigate while also being nostalgically interesting. Encounters are marked on the map, and you choose which one to go to; whether it be fishing to try and regain some food, camping to regain some health, or combat, the layout is simple to follow and navigation is as easy as flicking between the encounter symbols accessible from your current position.

I did notice a long initial loading time, but once you’re in the game there weren’t any noticeable performance issues, however there were a couple of spelling and grammar mistakes which stood out like a sore thumb. It wouldn’t take much to fix that though I’d imagine, so it’s more of a mild annoyance than an actual problem.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics for Please the Gods are very retro, with a nostalgic old-school vibe in the best possible sense. It’s easy to tell what everything is supposed to be without the game being nothing more than pretty pictures, and the overworld has a certain charm that reminds me somewhat of the RPGs of my childhood.

Unfortunately, the soundtrack really lets the side down; it’s barely even noticeable and doesn’t add anything to the experience. You could play it in silent mode and achieve the same atmosphere, which is a shame because an interesting soundtrack would have really helped with engagement in general.

Difficulty

I don’t generally enjoy turn-based games because of the strategy required, and RNG based combat mechanics annoy me personally, but I can’t fault the execution in this game. The tutorial is easy to follow, combat is easy to grasp, and overworld is nice to navigate. The game really lulls you into a false sense of security!

The entire game is you being at the mercy of existential forces, whether that be nature or the Gods, and that really starts to show once you start trekking over the land in search of the pieces. There’s no health regeneration between encounters, unless you stop by a camp or help out a grateful magical creature, so you have to really plan your route and battle skills to make sure you have enough health to survive the encounters you’re heading towards. There’s also your food, which is easy to lose track of but also doesn’t automatically refill, so you have to factor in stopping for foraging or hunting as you plan the journey.

Early-game combat is relatively simple, and you can normally make it out practically unscathed as long as you use your skills with some measure of intelligence, but the steep difficulty curve means strategic thinking is necessary for surviving later battles, and I have to admit I died far too many times trying to get my head around that. If you’re accustomed to turn-based games, or enjoy strategic thinking, I’m sure it’d be more of a fun challenge but for me it was just too frustrating constantly die off of the back of bad rolls that I couldn’t recover from.

Conclusion

An odd combination of outstanding graphics and mechanics, brought down by lacklustre story and sound, make this one a difficult one to judge for me.

I asked my partner to have a look too, as he and I have very different tastes in gaming. but he wasn’t enthusiastic either. His words were “boring, just a bit meh really. It’s slow and repetitive with no attachment to the characters and a very generic, uninteresting storyline”.

So unfortunately I’ll have to give it a nay from the nerd household, the turn-based RNG-reliant combat was too frustrating for the game to be enjoyable. But for someone who enjoys that type of game and is capable of looking past the lacking story elements I’m sure it’d be good fun.

Final Verdict: I’m not sure