Quick Review: God Game: The Odyssey

That’s the title in my Steam library and on the thumbnail, yet the store page says The Odyssey: Winds of Athena. …Make up your mind dammit!

A game developed by Liquid Dragon Studios, published by Senpai Studios and released on November 6th, 2015, this is the story of Odysseus, guiding his fleet of ships back home from the Trojan Wars. The world seems intent on not letting him go home, though; and as a result, the goddess Athena has decided to step in and control the waves and winds to help.

Reefs bad. Sand beaches bad.

The Greek Antiquity has statues that open
blockades when touched? They're more
advanced than us or what?

Everything is done with the mouse: To create stronger winds, you spin over the dial on the top right of the screen. The winds always guide the ships towards the exit on the other side of the screen, but you have to indirectly maneuver the ships to avoid obstacles and dangers. To move the boats, you create waves on the sea. Careful, though, as waves can create blowback and cause the ships to float around aimlessly. You have to prevent shipwrecks by directing the boats away from reefs and sand beaches. Later down the line, the mouse is used for other stuff as well. As an example, in the second chapter, the boats are targeted by cyclops throwing boulders; you grab the boulders and can throw them back at the cyclops to incapacitate them shortly.

Woooo, spinny current.

I think the best way to describe this game is to call it “Seafaring Lemmings”. Since you can’t properly control the ships, you can just hope to move them in the correct direction or take the right actions to do so. The game sort of functions similarly to the Lemmings genre as well, as you have a set number of ships that come into the screen, and must manage to get a certain number of them to pass through in order to beat a level, with a higher requirement to receive an Expert ranking on that same level. New obstacles or mechanics appear later in the game, such as doors that open by hitting statues, tornadoes that send ships flying around, and combinations of these. Sometimes, you can

The Passage of Six Cyclops. Good luck getting
more than half of your ships to pass through.

That’s about all I have to say for this one. It doesn’t really tickle my fancy. An interesting idea, but not developed enough to be engaging. It suffers from the same issue that any Lemmings-like title has: Your window of action is limited, and there’s a lot going on in the screen once the number of things to rescue increases (in this case: Ships), with more and more things showing up in the way. Unlike a Lemmings game, though, the ships don’t follow a set path and are a lot less predictable as a result. Even conjuring waves is tricky as it can send the ships wildly off-track. It’s a somewhat fine idea for a game, with a nice backdrop involving Greek mythology, but the product fails on the side of execution.

Still, if you wish to try it, God Game: The Odyssey: er… Winds of Athena is available on Steam for 4.99$.