29OctOctober 29, 2024
We are currently living in a golden age of indie horror games. The last five years have seen an explosion in a genre that used to get one game a year back in the 1990s and one every three years during the double Os. Those AAA titles were good games, certainly better than what we get now from major studios but good horror?
Well… Not so much really.
They all had their moments to be sure. Clive Barker’s Undying was very atmospheric but more macabre than scary. FEAR was a fantastic shooter, truthfully the last of the great ones before the FPS revival in the late 2010s, but aside from some jump scares by “Japanese Little Girl In A Red Dress Early 00s Horror Cliché”, it wasn’t really scary. Dead Space? Yeah, that was horror in every way available to it. Sadly, the sequel lost the thread. It turned the horror franchise into a third-person zombie shooter franchise. That was it for Dead Space.
In 2014, modern Indie horror made itself felt for the first time with Five Nights at Freddie’s. This game redefined the genre and indie gaming. This was also about the time that GamerGate kicked off. MSM still has its own cherished narrative of GamerGate being about harassing women players, it was really more of a rebellion against how the Woke was trying to take over the gaming industry. Gaming journalism was backing this play and the big studios started ruining their own franchises in the name of Progressivism.
It turns out it wasn’t all that hard to walk away from games that weren’t all that good anymore.
One of the best-known of the new breed of studios is New Blood. Although I’m not entirely sure that it qualifies as an actual studio, they don’t appear to be that organized.
Regardless New Blood has leaned heavily into the “lesser genre.” Its most famous title is probably Dusk, which is admittedly more macabre dark fantasy than actual horror.
Gloomwood does qualify as horror, and if it was finished I would have been reviewing it, but it’s not. Here’s hoping it will be finished someday but I’m getting some very worrying vibes from the lead developer. During an interview I saw with him, he kept going on and on about all of the things he wanted to put into Gloomwood. Dillon Rogers wants to revive the technical work that the late and much lamented Looking Glass created for Thief and no one ever worked with after that studio folded. Good for him if he can do it but he seems so excited about the stuff he wants to put in the game that I’m afraid that out-of-control scope creep will kill the project.
New Blood is becoming a retro legend. Not just for shooters but also a vertical shooter named Super Galaxy Squadron. As well as terrifying 8-bit horror game named – Faith: The Unholy Trinity.
Faith isn’t just a retro game, it’s total throwback to the earliest days of console gaming. It’s built around Atari 2600 graphics and gameplay. You have to go into this game knowing that, it was built with this kind of controller in mind.
You have four directions and a fire button to work with and that’s it. Sound design and cut scenes are also throwbacks to the early eighties. And I may as well get the downsides out of the way now. The action is fundamentally limited by the graphics and controller. You drive off demons by lifting your cross to them, if you miss that window, you will be one-shotted and see the MORTIS screen. Like other games from that era enemies will charge you from off-screen, you are given a brief environmental hint and then must act before the game does. Sometimes an enemy sprite will be RNG teleported into the screen since it’s pure chance you might end up cornered with no chance at all to evade and then you’re MORTISed. There are checkpoints but NO save function other than that, when you die (and you will) you’ll automatically lose progression. Anybody who played 8-bit games knows the drill but younger players may simply find the RNG too frustrating to deal with.
Okay, that’s the downside. The upside is the story. No Atari era game ever and I do mean ever had a story this deeply layered or this terrifying. Faith is a three-act story with the first act introducing the protagonist, John Martin is a Catholic Priest returning to the scene of a failed exorcism in rural Connecticut a year after 17-year-old Amy Martin killed her parents and Ward’s superior Father Allred. Amy was captured and sent to a psychiatric ward but escaped nine days before the story opens.
The simplicity of the 8-bit graphics forces your own imagination to fill in the blanks that these days an artist would do for you. I remember my brother giving me hell for closing my eyes during the scary parts of horror movies. “Look at the details retard, you’ll see it’s bullshit if you just look at it.” But you can’t “just look at it” when the graphics are this primitive. The jerkiness of the graphics in the cut scenes adds to the surrealism of the environment.
The limitations of the audio are fundamentally unsettling in this setting. The voices aren’t human and can’t even try to sound that way. it all adds to the general energy of knowing “these are not right things.”
The narrative is what drives this game. It is both complex and deeply unsettling. The first chapter can function as a self-contained if narratively unsatisfying story. The first chapter was an early release and it mostly functioned as a proof of concept for the undecided. A much more complex narrative takes shape in chapter two which raises the tension of the story as you learn more about the cult that summoned the demon who now infests Amy Martin. Father Ward is having a crisis of faith following the events in Chapter One, yet he keeps answering the calls for help he receives. Eventually finding out why Amy was chosen and who chose her for what unholy purpose. Each chapter requires the defeat of one of the major unholy principalities, the Daughter, the Mother, and the Unholy Ghost.
Each chapter has multiple endings depending on your actions. It takes a lot of work to get the good one. This does give the Faith a great deal of replay value for the money. It is also creepy as hell and I don’t recommend playing it alone and at night unless you have a night light.
Okay, I’m done here.
English (US) · 