Crest is an Interesting God Game Focused on Religion
Religion is a bit of a taboo subject within games. Whether on purpose or not, developers often seem to shy away from the subject.
Admittedly, many facets of religion are difficult to focus on – praying doesn’t make for an interesting gameplay feature after all. However, developer Eat Create Sleep comes at it from a different angle in their currently-Early Access title Crest: what if you were the god?
This is of course, quite literally, the angle for every god game ever. Most however use it as a backdrop; an excuse for you being the all-powerful deity controlling every aspect of in-game life. Here, in Crest, instead of dishing out instantly-followed commands, you issue a commandment – hoping your followers have enough faith in you to follow it.
“In Crest, instead of dishing out instantly-followed commands, you issue a commandment – hoping your followers have enough faith in you to follow it.”
Commandments are created by picking a condition, an action and a target. Simply, who will do what and where? Early on, your followers are relatively compliant and not all that intelligent. You can issue out simple commands such as to produce food or offspring as well as attempting to migrate or explore. As your population grows and continues to expand outward, people, as well as becoming more wary of following commands, grow more intelligent – allowing more intricate commands to be given.
The whole system creates an interesting synergy between the narrative theme of Crest and the gameplay mechanics themselves. It does however, also create some problems. While Crest is very much a chilled-out game with a simple and colourful low-poly art style and minimalist soundtrack, the faith system can often mean the experience becomes a bit too passive.
As every individual has free will, as well as a varying level of belief in your unquestionable divinity, sometimes your populace just doesn’t do what you want – or, more often, you can’t tell if they are doing it. With no useful feedback, it’s often impossible to tell if your commandments are being followed or not. And if they aren’t, why not? It could be a lack of faith, a lack of happiness, perhaps they’re just waiting until later, or maybe they just do not want to. You end up feeling less like a god and more like a crazed man in the sky shouting vague suggestions.
This lack of valuable feedback carries on into other areas of the game. In one of my more successful runs – Crest plays much like a roguelike – my calendar alerted me that one of my villages was starving. I directed every citizen to produce food immediately and neighbouring areas to share food. They still all died. I have no idea whether it was because the desert location didn’t lend itself well to growing enough food, or whether I didn’t notice soon enough. All I could see was that the populace starved after I’d producing as much food as possible for them.
“…You end up feeling less like a god and more like a crazed man in the sky shouting vague suggestions.”
A general lack of feedback, along with relatively little content overall, is something the developers will hopefully continue to look at as their Early Access period continues. As of now, while there is no way of advancing technology or constructing buildings, Eat Create Sleep are working on a significant ‘Exploration’ module. This will allow players to migrate to foreign islands, establish an ecology system to create more consequences to certain actions, and fish – that would have saved my poor coastal desert village!
God games, like religion in video games, are certainly a rarity and Crest is hoping to provide a solution to both. It hopes to provide an experience where, as an almighty deity with a (sometimes) loyal band of followers, the stories are not just created by you, but your people as well. As of right now however, Crest feels a little too barebones with little replay value.
