Gord Review – A Horror-Filled City Builder

For those unaware, Gord is a common condition where stomach acid leaks into the oesophagus, commonly known as “acid reflux”. Gord is also the word for a medieval Slavic fortified settlement. Playing this game, it was a great surprise to me that both meanings of the word were quite fitting when I was almost sure I would be playing a game about stomach acid. Polish developers Covenant (former CD Projekt Red) come to us with a mix of city-builder, survival, strategy, and action-RPG packed full of mythology, leaving us questioning if it all works.

The first thing you’ll notice about Gord is that it is a very dark game. I don’t mean dark as in “let’s turn up the lighting a bit”, though it is visually dark; I’m talking thematically. Then again, it’s also dark regarding certain aspects of building your settlement. Specifically, I am talking about expanding your palisade. When you build a settlement, you drag and drop points on the map, highlighting where the ends of your walls will go, and there are a few requirements. Perplexingly, the game has a tick box highlighting which requirements you have met for only some of these. So, when trying to expand your Gord, it’s just trial and error for you to figure out what the game’s problem is. Sometimes, they’re all ticked, and it won’t let you build.

Well, I suppose it’s not entirely accurate that it’s always trial and error; the game has a lovely tendency to say “wrong length for wall section” without telling me what in the bloody hell I should do or which section. So, it does give you a clue; it’s just that the damn thing is more challenging to decipher than the enigma. We now have a problem with a game that puts you in a situation where you need to expand your settlement, and it won’t let you a good portion of the time. Why? You’ve broken one of the hidden rules, or the bloody wall is the wrong length, not that I was aware walls had to be of a certain length to function. There are also a few issues with placing structures, as sometimes there’s more than enough space for one, but again, the game won’t let you place it.

Continuing the subject of building, Gord won’t come across as the biggest of games, but it does most of it well. There are only a handful of structures to build, and this isn’t a game where you must build houses for settlers. Build a lumber camp and task somebody to cut down trees. You’ll also want to start cutting up reeds for… reeds. Multiple structures help with gathering food. You get the picture, there’s resource management, and you must task one of your people into the building for it to function.

There are a few military structures for training and defence purposes, as well as ones to help with healing, regaining sanity (more on that later), and others for gaining faith (and more on that later). It creates a delicate balance, particularly as you cap out at 16 people. How many will you set on food, wood, and reeds? Granted, once you’ve built everything, wood and reeds are less critical, and then how many will be set to Clay, Iron and Gold? You’ll still need a few scouts as they carry torches (more on these later) and others trained as axe warriors, spear warriors, or archers.

All in all, the village management is serviceable. I can’t say it’s special; it does the job better than others I’ve played, but not as good as others. During playing, my mind kept going to Dawn of Man which I now don’t rate as high as I did then – and there’s a reason for that. Once you leave that, the game wants to show off its more unique aspects. As you play through the campaign of Gord, you’ll follow the story of a contingent sent from one kingdom into the northlands to try and steal some wealth. There are friendly folks whom the kingdom has essentially enslaved into doing their bidding, wild folks, and unspeakable horrors.

I’ll not go into the names because they were thrown at me with all the subtlety and nuance of a Rings of Power episode; that is to say, I don’t know who they are, what they are, how they’re linked to anything, and I frankly don’t give a monkey’s left testicle. I played the campaign; it moved from map to map, introducing new aspects and features, and most important, it introduced new horrors. The horrors are what the name implies. Each monster has unique abilities, and you must either meet their demand for them to let you pass or kill them.

Killing them will not be easy (I’ve managed to kill one, the rest, they got what they wanted), so you may be better meeting their demands, and Gord tricks you because I managed to kill the first horror with just a handful of trained soldiers, meaning I didn’t have to sacrifice a small child. Outside of these, the world is full of other smaller creatures to kill, so you’ll always want to have a scout and at least two warriors trained. Though warriors absorb far too much gold, maintaining them and their sanity (they lose sanity if not being paid) becomes a general challenge of racing around the map, picking up loose piles of gold from corpses.

Let’s talk sanity. I’ve mentioned already that the game is dark. Whenever your characters go into the dark, their sanity drops. If it drops far enough, they will get a permanent mental illness that follows them through the game; the most amusing is the one where a character will randomly stop what they are doing and punch a nearby settler. That’s it. You can recover sanity by having them stay in the light, but all the resources are not in the light, or pop to the meadery for a pint – which sounds reasonable. The problem is that it’s a fiddly system; it only sometimes allows you to enjoy the exploration elements. You’re too busy telling Greg to stop gathering wood and have a pint, only to remember you need to tell him to return to the gathering.

You can also assign a scout to be a torchbearer and follow your workers around, but with a pop cap of 16, there is no way you can afford that. One scout per Gord, and that scout is with your few military units. Changing the topic, you must also balance characters and their inventories. You’ll find items in treasure chests when wandering around the maps, and there are many items. We hit yet another problem now; the inventory management system is crap. You can’t just drag an item from one character onto the portrait of another; you must fiddle around opening it, dropping the item, and then selecting the other character to pick it up.

Honestly, the more I write this, the less I even know what I think about Gord. There are parts I’ve enjoyed; I like the building, even if it has issues around expansion and even with the placement of buildings. I also like the exploration of maps, even the proc-gen ones, in what is essentially a skirmish, but there are balance issues that come from this. I like the atmosphere and the horrors, even if some of the horrors have game-breaking abilities that you can seemingly never beat. Thanks to some story beats, I also am okay with the campaign, even if the mythology is impenetrable (unless you read the collectable notes), and it can get very repetitive.

Long story short, it has a negative for almost every good aspect. While you can and will get some fun and decent gameplay, and the atmosphere is always excellent, there’s one major downside, if you play too long, the repetition will lead you to one harsh realisation: You’re getting a little Gord of bored.

PC version reviewed. Copy provided by the publisher.

Gord

Gord is an interesting and, at times, good, albeit flawed, survival city-builder mixed with action RPG and strategy elements. The atmosphere is excellently done, but this is countered by the sanity mechanics taking too much from the rest of the game. Almost every positive has a negative. The character development mechanics bring a fundamentally broken inventory system. The excellent monster development introduces a few that are just outright broken. The (sometimes) interesting campaign brings a near-opaque element of worldbuilding, requiring much side-reading as names are unceremoniously thrown at you. All in all, Gord isn’t a bad game, and while I can have a decent time of it, there are too many flaws to recommend it universally; hardcore strategy fans may apply.