FAITH

A great example of how to do so much with so little. This game literally presents itself with atari 2600 tier visuals, coupled with highly crushed 8bit sound effects and music, and despite that it still is effective at creating this deeply unsettling atmosphere.

Unfortunatly the actual gameplay isnt all that great. Its ok when exploring, but the more action focused sections feel very frustrating to play and it kinda falls apart. One hit kills are always annoying when they are unpredictable, even if the checkpoint system is very generous.

Its a very short experience, but offers multiple endings. Feels like a prototype for a full game, which kinda was in retrospective.

Spoilers Abound

This is a rather neat little horror game that oozes with style. You play as a blue priest, off to perform an unsanctioned exorcism on a teenager. Your only weapons are your cross and a single bullet in a rifle that you get for the very end. FAITH definitely employs the indie game strategy of embracing a retro aesthetic to highlight the art direction and gloss over the lack of budget. It evokes some sort of possessed 2600 with impossible specs. It ultimately works to create a pretty good and consistent atmosphere that wouldn't come close to overstaying its welcome if it weren't for the game's biggest flaw.

Holy shit: the walking speed. As far as I know and can find any supporting evidence of, there is not a sprint button or any way to increase your movement speed. If there is, it has not been discovered by the holder of the speedrun world record. At first, I really didn't mind this as a stylistic choice. Sure it was slow, but the game had a great atmosphere, and it made the combat wonderfully tense. The problem is, unless you use a walkthrough, have incredible luck, or settle for just one of the endings, the majority of this game is walking through squares of the map that are, for the most part, non-descript, while trying to map the landmarks in your head for future reference. The movement speed is much less effective when the game stops being an ominous march to the demon, and starts being a serious of educated guesses as to which direction the thing you're looking for is in. It's not that anything in this game is unreasonably difficult or cryptic, either. It just takes so long that it builds an artificial frustration.

That's...really my only complaint though, and that's saying something. It's definitely short, but the deluxe edition is only a dollar, and it's well worth the asking price, so let's get into some more specific positives. The combat is wonderfully paced. Most encounters end as abruptly as they begin. Enemies will either appear from off-screen, or make their on-screen presence known, and you have a short time to raise your cross towards them in self-defense before they one-hit-kill you. It does a lot to invoke the feeling of being a priest in an area awash with hellish forces, with only the relics of your piety by your side. The notes are pretty well-written, they bring up a lot of questions about the story, and they always feel realized and never expositional. I like that the game rewards you with information for exorcising random cursed objects in the environment.

Dialogue is rendered in this noisy, inhuman processing that brilliantly allows characters to speak without compromising the impersonal quality of the game's general aesthetic. Despite this, the game's biggest strength, by far, is the stunning fluidity of the cutscenes. The character models and objects on screen during the gameplay are relatively rigid. They're fast and unnerving enough to be effective, but they ultimately move in patterns and feel distinctly like video game enemies. FAITH transcends this, and even uses it to its advantage, by making its cutscenes play by a whole different set of physics and attention to detail. You'll encounter possessed Amy, and a short scene will play in which she climbs up on your bed with freakishly organic movements, almost like she's actually in the screen. These clips are a genius way of conveying the increased horror and shock of key moments with, once again, lots of art direction, and little budget.

I mentioned the multiple endings earlier, and I encourage you to get all 5 of them. Once you finish the game, it sends you right back to the 5 branching paths, so the tedium is minimal. Each one provides a pretty important chunk of worldbuilding, and the majority have more to them than the standard good/bad end binary. My personal favorite is the "Hunter" ending where, instead of finishing off the demon you came here to kill, the blue priest decides to use his single bullet on a random deer for its meat. I'm pretty sure the army of pissed-off deer that drag you from your car and back into the forest before murdering you is the most vicious death you can subject the protagonist to, but I could be wrong.