The Name Of God is a 2--4 player narrative cardgame. It comes with a thorough 13 page instruction booklet, and 30 game-specific cards with cool location-based art.

In Name, you play as an American Gods style divinity---your power eroded and forgotten. You work to recover it by performing rituals in places of significance within your city.

The cards give you prompts for what to do, but most of the gameplay is storytelling. However, the GM role rotates around the table, and players are absorbed into the GM role as their characters die. This is a nice way of handling PC attrition---although it does require people to be comfortable managing the GM spotlight, rather than the player spotlight.

The GM role is also very tightly shaped by specific directions and requirements. During certain points in gameplay, the GM is told to do a thing, or explicitly avoid a thing, and overall they're less of an adjunct to the game that adjudicates disagreements over what happens next, and more a cog in the game's engine. I don't think this is bad, as it ensures the GM isn't likely to accidentally break anything, but depending on GMing style some folks might object to the constraint.

Another element of the game that's going to feel weird to people is the way action resolution happens. If a player wants to do something tough, they have to pay a cost. If a player wants to do something dangerous, they do it, but the danger happens. If a player wants to do something that's both, they automatically fail.

So, wrestling a gun away from someone? Kicking down a door in a burning building? Sneaking past a killer? All autofails with terrible consequences.

Moreover, the game urges GMs to kill characters when they can, and this feels like it incentivizes a game that's about laying low and avoiding trouble. Except then the GMs have to work twice as hard to introduce things that will threaten / challenge PCs, and ultimately if they don't want to put a PC into a death-spiral of tough + dangerous checks, they have to back way off after introducing each threat in order to give the PC a chance to back way off too.

GMs can avoid this by taking situations that are both dangerous and tough and only treating them as dangerous or tough (for example, my "sneaking past a killer" example above, could be treated as only tough in order to avoid having hostile enemies autocatch and kill PCs.) But in that case, why not just make the mechanics Polaris: PCs succeed, provided they're willing to pay the cost the GM names?

Overall, Name Of God is an atmospheric game that evokes a lot of the same energy as Unknown Armies, Condemned, or Manhunt. If your group is very comfortable GMing, I think it'll make for a phenomenal oneshot. If you're not comfortable GMing, or if the premise doesn't grab you, it's still a cool game, but may not be what you're looking for.

Minor Issues:

-Deeper PDF, Page 13, The End, "first playtesys" first playtest