The Week I Downgraded Sleeping Gods

If you go back and read my actual published review of Sleeping Gods now, it lands at a three, and I want to be upfront that it didn’t start there. My notes from the first campaign, the ones I never posted, were closer to a four, maybe pushing higher, written in that specific glow you get right after finishing something with a group you genuinely liked playing with. The world felt open. The writing was strong. I remember texting Reyes something like this might be the best exploration game I own, which is the kind of sentence I should probably know by now to sit on for a week before I let myself believe it.

Two more campaigns changed my mind, and not because the game got worse, because I got a clearer look at what it actually was underneath that first good impression. The endings, which felt varied and consequential the first time through, turned out to funnel toward the same handful of outcomes no matter what I did differently. The unlockable rewards I’d assumed would open new story content mostly just tweaked mechanics slightly instead. I noticed the combat getting easier once I understood it rather than staying tense, which undercut exactly the thing that had impressed me most in that first campaign.

I used to think a first playthrough was basically the whole truth of a game, the purest read before you’ve learned to see past the design’s tricks. I don’t think that anymore, or at least I don’t trust it the same way. What I’ve come to believe instead is that a first campaign shows you what the designer wants you to feel, and it’s usually only the second or third pass that shows you what the game actually does once the excitement of discovery stops doing half the work for it. That’s not a knock on Sleeping Gods specifically, plenty of games hold up fine under repetition. This one just didn’t, for me, and I wouldn’t have known that if I’d published my honest excitement after campaign one and moved on.

I bring this up not to relitigate a three star review nobody’s arguing with me about, but because I think it’s worth saying plainly that the ratings on this site aren’t fixed the moment I hit publish. If a second look changes my mind, the number changes too, and I’d rather admit that in public than quietly leave an outdated four star rating up because revising it feels like admitting I got something wrong the first time. I did get it wrong the first time. That’s fine. That’s sort of the whole point of playing something more than once before you decide what it actually is.