Video Game / Godville

The game's icon.

"Greetings, fellow stranger!
Remember those times when someone you know was telling you something like "I need to harvest these crops..." or "We need to kill 65,340,285 boars..."? Well, forget it! You are the god here, and those things are not worth your divine attention! Leave all the dirty work to your pawn and enjoy the only thing that matters in any game - fun."

— The game's introduction and premise

Godville is a parody of most RPG games out there, combining internet memes, popular culture and Biting-the-Hand Humor to create a text adventure ZPG (Zero Player Game) which plays itself. The concept is simple, you create an Idiot Hero who writes in his/her 'diary' (-er, Twitt-) about all the Random Encounters they have with silly monsters in order to build a temple with golden bricks at 100%. Impossible?

Not impossible, although very difficult and time-consuming once you find out one golden brick is 0.1% of the whole temple. Your hero will need 1000 of those to finish the structure. After the temple's construction, the hero will attempt to build an additional ark with wood and save retirement money. Further updates have increased the lifespan of your hero(ine)s tasks. Following 1000 logs to build an ark, you must fill that ark with 1000 manimals - not Manimal - and 1000 feminals. With an ark built and filled you can build a boss monster from parts you accumulate from other monsters, and once this is done your little one will gradually write a holy book. With the holy book written, another 1000 words, they can start gathering souls for an, as yet (Dec 2022) unknown reason. All the while saving the 30 million gold necessary to retire and open a shop of their own.

This game was developed by Dmitry Kosinov and Mikhail Platov. The original was a Web Game, released in 2007 entirely in Russian. However, the version most people are familiar with is an English-language game, which was first released in 2010, and can be found on your iPhone/Android or right here.

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Tropes featured:

• Alliance Meter: If your hero is part of a guild and is currently in a city, you can spend godpower towards increasing the guild's popularity in that place. Apparently, the higher the influence in a certain town, the more benefits a member of the guild will have access to in there.
• Blood Knight: A character that doesn't visit the arena for 3 days would once become this, getting into random fights with other heroes while traveling. This feature was removed after user complaints.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: The "Punish" command. It may or may not hit the intended target.
• Boring Return Journey: After finishing a quest, your hero will not find random monsters on their way back to Godville.
• Boss Battle: When digging, a hero can find underground monsters which are much more tougher than the usual Random Encounter and require at least one other hero to fight. Bosses can also be found at the end of Mini-Quests or by using a certain kind of item.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: It's possible to buy Godpower charges with real money. Otherwise, said charges can be obtained by using certain items, leveling up or winning arena matches. Or from the temple once it's complete.
• Catchphrase: Your hero's motto, which you can set yourself, and may be used as a Battle Cry.
• Character Blog: The entire game.
• Continuing is Painful: It's kind of a mixed bag. Dying will make your hero lose gold and items, which depending on your current situation could mean losing tons of potential progress on your temple, or being unable to revive a dead pet (which usually costs a hefty sum). Not to mention losing your place in the pantheon of survival. However, your hero might have a pitiable amount of money or no useful/expensive items, and resurrecting costs nothing, so it really depends. It used to be worse, however, as dying also emptied your quest progress bar, potentially wasting hours.
• Critical Existence Failure: Lampshaded. One of the things a monster can say upon death is "What? I thought I was winning!".
• Deadpan Snarker: Your hero will always find a witty or lame remark to anything that happens, including your own message.
• Death Is Cheap: Zigzagged. You have to manually revive your hero, or he'll have to wait 24 hours. He'll also lose all the gold he's carrying, risk damage to his equipment and complain insufferably until he's brought back.
• Department of Redundancy Department: "Today's Ideabox dupes brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department."
• Disproportionate Retribution: You can punish your hero for whatever motive you deem worthy of your intervention, from dilli-dallying in town instead of progressing on his quest, to talking back to you, to just for the heck of it.
• Divine Intervention: Your main form of communication.
• Fallen Hero: It's possible for the hero to give up their heroic deeds if you stop checking on them. Godless heroes are also regular Random Encounters.
• Fantasy Pantheon: The entire ZPG hinges on this.
• Fishing Minigame: Your hero will sometimes go fishing. Although the "minigame" has about the same level of interaction that the rest of the game offers, a few rules make it somewhat different than just walking and fighting monsters, as sending a godvoice or influence will drive the fishes away and cancel fishing immediately, and allowing it to progress is the only way to get "container" items which usually produce a large amount of artifacts when used.
• Gameplay Automation
• A God Is You: The entire premise of the game is that you are a god who barely even intervenes in the world, and is mainly a passive observer of the proceedings.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The player can inflict this on the hero.
• Heal It with Booze: Your hero may decide to cure their wounds with alcohol... from the inside out.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Both for the god and the hero.
• Hurricane of Puns: The majority of monster and item names are puns.
• Idiot Hero: The fact that your hero is an idiot is basically the central joke of the game, from which all the other jokes spring.
• Incredibly Inconvenient Deity: It's one option to continually bother your hero with commands, and probably the only way to actually get them to consistently do things you want them to. Still, being your only follower in a world where miracles run on prayer, they either know they has the privilege to sass you back and abuses it, or is too dumb to be aware they shouldn't be talking back to their deity and does so. Your hero will even get mad if you send messages too quickly one after another.
• It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Reality always seems to bend in favor of a pun.
  Hero spotted an open window of opportunity and quickly slammed it shut in Boss Monster's face.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Fills your health, godpower and gives you an accumulator charge (worth 50% GP).
• Life Meter: In the website interface, it's a bar that goes from green to yellow to red depending on sustained damage. On Android and iOS, it's a heart icon with a small counter that only goes red when near death, which can make it a bit confusing when your hero and enemies constantly talk about manipulating the bar when there is none in sight.
• Loading Screen: Were added after an update, and, like pretty much everything else, have user generated content in the form of a single line.
• Mad Libs Dialogue: Every message that references your name or your hero's, their current quest, their motto, their guild, their friends (or sometimes a random hero), their pet, their skills, their current opponent (also sometimes a random monster) or a town is made in such a way that fits regardless of its contents.
• Mana Meter: Your Godpower, which goes from 0 to 100% and must be used to influence the game. It goes up when your hero prays to you.
• Monsters Everywhere: Except when you're going back to town, in which case your hero encounters no monsters to fight on the way.
• Musical Spoiler:
  • The hero will sometimes "search for the right path guided by the sound of foreboding music". No actual music exists in the game.
  • There's also an artifact called "Background music generator". Although it, of course, has no effect on the music, it is marked bold.
• Nasal Weapon: The "Powerful Sneeze" combat skill.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: We might just as well call it "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Game".
• No Points for Neutrality: "Encouraging" your hero will make them good, getting bonuses to health regeneration. "Punishing" them will make them more evil, gaining attack damage. Being neutral gives no benefits.
• Player Versus Player: The Godville Arena, to which your hero can be teleported to participate in duels to the (near) death. Also, it's possible to challenge a friend to a sparring duel, which happens within the heroes' minds and only gives experience to the participants. At one point heroes would get into skirmishes on their own if they weren't sent to the Arena often enough, but that feature was eventually removed.
• Point of No Return: Your hero will always return to Godville, no matter how far they go. However, it's still referenced in some diary entries.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: For both god and hero, the only difference between genders is a few changes in received messages ("my lord" to "my lady", finding a "handsome prince" instead of a "beautiful princess", etc.).
• Random Event: A hero may suddenly get items, lose or gain health, meet friends or whatever, by pure chance.
• Random Number God: Invoked in some diary entries.
• Reference Overdosed: Almost everything, particularly enemy names, is a Shout-Out of some sort, at least when it's not part of the Hurricane of Puns.
• Religious Bruiser: Your hero. Sometimes.
• Running Gag: Moles. They are apparently always mad at heroes because of their constant digging.
• Slapstick: Characters are often subject to goofy misfortune.
• Socialization Bonus: A fairly minor one. You get a small bonus to experience for sparring with a friend. You get an achievement after sparring with enough people. Also, the fastest way to get logs for your hero's ark is to send them to dungeons with other players' heroes.
• Text Adventure
• The Alcoholic: Your hero has an extreme fondness for beer, and will frequently comment about ways to get more of the beverage.
• To Be a Master: Your hero aspires to build a temple out of gold bricks. After finishing the temple, heroes will try to build an ark.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Dungeons, unlocked after finishing the temple, play on an entirely different set of rules, requiring team play between three to five gods and constant supervision of your hero. They even use iconography reminiscent of old Roguelikes instead of just text like the rest of the game.
• Waxing Lyrical: The hero hits [enemy name] with their best shot.
• When All Else Fails, Go Right: Sometimes, your hero will go through the left path for a change.
• World of Pun

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