Godly Corp Review

A few years back gaming saw a brief surge in a new subgenre consisting of goofy, intentionally clumsy physics-based controls and gameplay. Two lead titles emerged from that time, Surgeon Simulator and Goat Simulator, both with lasting adoration. Launching on the Nintendo Switch now is another entry to this subgenre, entitled Godly Corp, where Cthulhu has taken a day job in an office, and instead of being all-powerful and mastering that task, he’s limited to one clumsy tentacle, and some seriously mundane tasks to accomplish.

As you sit down at your desk for the very first time, a female robotic voice gives you a brief introduction to your new office life, and tells you to press a big red button with the text “Start” on it when you’re ready to begin your first shift. At this point you’re given control of your tentacle, in which movement is controlled by the analog stick. You’re allowed movement on basically all axes and for the most part you’ll be sweeping left and right across your desk frequently.

Before your first day, you’re given the option to select the difficulty. In my case, I started with normal, but found things to be a bit too challenging, and then attempted again at easy, continually failing at even passing the first level. These physics games also derive their core gameplay from forcing the user to multitask to make their experience purposefully even more chaotic and weird. On your first day in Godly Corp you’re tasked with warding off red bugs that crawl onto the desk with your tentacle, while using the d-pad to rotate a hologram globe around and align three buildings to give them better temperatures (yes this was just as confusing to me for a first mission). On your display that’s mounted on the wall in front of you are bar indicators that outline how well you’re doing, and regrettably, despite my difficulty settings, they still depleted too rapidly, forcing me to lose. Furthermore, if a bug reaches the proximity of your hologram globe, it’ll leap on top, and you’ll also immediately lose.

My frustration with this first mission is that this holo-globe and heat lamp that you’re supposed to line up the structures with doesn’t seem to be accurate, and even when I thought I had everything aligned, a bar would not increase. This to me felt more of a design problem than the “meant-to-be-funny” gameplay that these titles tend to provoke.

With over a dozen attempts to no success, I’ve had to call it a day with this game. I’m sure others will fair better at succeeding, but for me I find this level of difficulty just too much for an introductory level for new players. Having spent a reasonable amount of time with Surgeon Simulator in the past, I found it onboarded players much better, and was just more finely tuned even when utilizing completely physics-based things. I’d love to see more of Godly Corp, but I just don’t think it’ll be possible at this point.

From my very brief time with it, it’s worth mentioning a few other points about the game. Visually it’s quite neat seeing my floppy tentacle move around on the screen, and within the game’s options menu you’re able to customize your appendage to any color you want. The same color selection is allowed for the wallpaper seen behind your desk too. The various radio stations that play some tunes are a nice added touch to the overall theme, but did feel a bit random at times.

Lastly, I did encounter some seriously long load times throughout the game that were so extended and lacked any animated elements, such as an icon, that it felt as though the game had crashed. When you boot the game, there’s 33 seconds of just a black screen, which I had initially thought was the game unable to boot up. It’s abnormal to not view any company or game logos when you first load up a game, so it would be nice to see this addressed in an update.

Godly Corp has some potential I feel, but with an impeccably difficult first mission, the game has regrettably bested me. I’d have loved to at least try the other 14 levels, but I do fear they’re just as clunky and challenging as the first. The premise and use of a tentacle is a nifty concept, but I did also feel a bit let down that my other controller was being used to spin a globe around. I think it would have been far wackier and more unique to manage two tentacle arms ultimately. Here’s hoping Cthulhu enjoys his new desk job, because I could not.

Alex Knight

Alex has been actively gaming since the release of the Nintendo. Turning passion into profession, he’s spent just over a decade in game development, and is currently the Creative Director at a studio.