FAITH: The Unholy Trinity Review
FAITH: The Unholy Trinity story is comprised of three chapters, the first of which was released back in 2017. The first thing you will notice about FAITH is its graphical style inspired heavily by the likes of the Apple II or the Atari 2600 even down to the limited number of colours on screen at any time.
I won’t touch on the story much due to spoilers, but as a brief summary FAITH takes place in the late 80s and you play as a Priest, John Ward. In the first chapter, John is attempting to right a botched exorcism, while being pursued by other demons and Chupacabras. The Second game has John investigating a cemetery and sewers, and Chapter III has John coming to blows with the cult that follows their enigmatic leader Gary.
Gameplay can be summarized as exploration with problem-solving. Our character John has a very limited move set. You can either move around or use your cross, but not at the same time. There’s no sprint feature or stamina to worry about here, John moves at a constant, albeit somewhat slow speed.
The cross is used to damage enemies from afar but can only be used in one of four directions and has a narrow yet long range of effect so you will constantly find yourself shifting position to keep a demon within range. This adds to the tension, and it feels very satisfying when you get yourself in a good position and deal a lot of damage, although I must admit, it does get a little annoying when your enemy is just very slightly outside of the cross’s range.
John doesn’t have a traditional health bar; it’s a one-hit kill so get used to seeing the ‘Mortis’ screen often.
Thankfully, the game has a fair number of checkpoints which allow you to continue from a few screens back keeping lost progress to a minimum.
There are a few boss fights in the collection, and each is well thought out, I won’t spoil anything here, but they tend to have multiple phases and are quite challenging usually relying on pattern recognition and I found myself dying a lot on a couple of them until I adapted my playstyle.
Each Chapter of FAITH increases in both length and difficulty, the first chapter can be completed relatively quickly (within 1 hour), although numerous multiple endings can bring this number up. It took me about 2 hours to unlock every ending in the first chapter, whereas the second chapter took around 2 – 3 hours to beat. The third chapter is by far the longest taking me 3 hours to beat, not factoring in secrets and multiple endings.
I’m currently sitting at 18/30 steam achievements for FAITH: The Unholy Trinity and this took me 8 hours of playtime in total to give you an idea. FAITH has a few additional modes and including marathon mode, turbo mode and a couple of challenge modes such as navigating the game using only a flashlight or lantern, thus making the game a lot more difficult.
Music throughout the chapters is great, if you know your classical music you will recognize tracks from Beethoven, Chopin and even pianist Erik Satie which all translate very well to their minimal 8-bit rendition here. It’s not all classical music however and there’s a nice progression of music as you reach the last chapter with many more tracks available, there’s even an OST which is worth checking out.
Character dialogue is also fully voiced and sounds like it comes directly from an old text-to-speech voice synthesizer from the 80s and it’s perfect.
FAITH makes good use of its limited colour palette with rarely more than 5 colours on screen at any time, this is all on top of a pitch-back background, which I am sure must look stunning on an OLED screen. Sadly, I did not get to test out FAITH on an OLED screen, but I did play through the bulk of the game on Steam Deck and the game still looked great. You’ll be pleased to know that the game runs at a buttery smooth 15FPS, yes, 15 FPS.
The limited framerate works very well here, John only has a few frames of animation after all, as do most of the enemies. An added bonus of this hard cap on the frame rate is the battery life on Steam Deck, you could get many additional hours of play in comparison to say a more modern-style AAA FPS game.
By default, FAITH has a couple of filters applied to its graphics namely a customizable scanline feature, personally, it’s not for me, so I turned it off but your mileage may vary and completing certain tasks in-game can reward you with additional filters and features for all you completionists out there.
Throughout all of FAITH’s chapters, rotoscoped cutscenes appear and often depict John’s untimely demise, these are fantastic although generally made me chuckle a little instead of instilling terror. I bet the reference actors had a good laugh while capturing footage for these scenes as some come across as quite comical. That said, some scenes are pretty bloody and graphic, you have been warned!
Conclusion
In conclusion, FAITH: The Unholy Trinity is well worth picking up. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with each chapter and the small team at Airdorf Games has managed to make 8-bit scary which is quite an accomplishment. For your money, you’ll get at least 8 hours of playtime, although, with the various multiple endings, hidden hard-as-hell bosses and notes to collect you could easily triple that.
I really do hope we see another Faith game and I look forward to seeing what Airdorf comes up with in their next title.
9
Steam review code kindly provided by New Blood Interactive.
You can purchase FAITH: The Unholy Trinity directly from Steam