Some games try to look and feel like they were made decades ago. God Damn the Garden is so good at doing it that I thought I was playing the original Hexen at certain times. That’s the level of graphics and intensity the game brings. Let’s dive deeper into God Damn the Garden and see if it lives up to its retro FPS description.

I’m not going to lie, I did say God Dammit a lot during the game, along with some more colorful language that’s not fit to print because the game is challenging in places. However, that’s to be expected with this level of retro FPS mayhem. If it were easy, it would be terrible. It’s like some areas of the game are just puzzles that have to be solved in retro FPS style which is… with a LOT of bullets and a bit of luck! Oh, and tons of death. There’s some story in the game but I’ll be god damned if I can remember it. See what I did there?

OK, I lied about the story, it’s there and I remember some of it. The thing that threw me off was the broken English in the game and I kept wondering if it was meant to be like that or if it was just a poor translation because Ratalaika Games is a Spanish language company. Either way, it didn’t really impact the gameplay or enjoyment, it was just odd now and again and would cause me to pause to figure out what the character was saying.

Here’s my favorite part of the game, and it’s only a tiny spoiler. There are lots of chatty NPCs in the game. If you’re like me, you sometimes want to kill them. They sort of take offense to that and will tell you that if you don’t kill them, they have valuable info for you. Sometimes, it’s true… So, ponder carefully the info they might impart prior to wantonly killing them… it might save your life. Others are not chatty at all and will kill you first…which one could expect in an FPS, of course. But the abruptness of the instant death from some of them is confusing and off-putting at times because you’re like “What did I ever do to you!?” and then you’ve respawned and lost some progress… which sucks.

Overall, God Damn the Garden is old school FPS fun with a small dose of frustration. I’ve been stuck on the same area for some time and that does not make the most enjoyable experience when I’ve got a very limited amount of time to get my gaming in. That’s also why it took so long to get this review done, it was simply not the most fun thing I could be doing most of the time and it constantly got reprioritized lower on my to-do list.

I guess in terms of thumbs it’s like a thumbs up and a half. If I had to do a 1-10 scale maybe 7.5 or 8?

God Damn the Garden is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Microsoft Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch, for $5.00 / €5.00.