Fighting in Bleak Faith is plagued with inconsistencies. Maybe you'll drop one of the game's placeable checkpoints, only for it to respawn you inside the ground, forever.Īnd of course, the jankiness extends deep into where it's most maddening: combat. Maybe you'll find an NPC with a non-functioning talk prompt, who disappears before you learn what he has to say.
Maybe your UI insists you always have two health potions-sorry, "restorative fluids"-regardless of how many you use. It's a dense tapestry of jank, woven from bugs of every scale and size. Seeking foes and some pants to cover my cyborg's terrible iron cheeks, I move my controller's analog stick, and immediately regret it.īleak Faith: Forsaken proved to be a game out of its depth dozens of times over my next few hours with it. All I have is a lead pipe and the suspicion there are guys somewhere to hit with it. There's no context, goal, or direction given. While I'm trying and failing to parse what I just watched, the game's already decided to start: I'm suddenly elsewhere, looking at a cyborg's nude ass on a rooftop in a foggy concrete void.
Another identical cyborg, who's apparently been nearby the whole time, stares with what I assume is the blank face of approval, and walks away. Suddenly, conflict! One of the bad guys from those Killzone games appears, determined to kick cyborg ass-until he's summarily stabbed through the temple when the cyborg realizes they have a very large knife. "In the depths of the Omnistructure," I'm told, "things are rarely as they seem." Which is good to know, because the ensuing intro cutscene seems mostly like a montage of a weary cyborg's daily life of sitting around in an asphalt nightmare. Maybe the trio at Cyprus indie dev Archangel Studios could pull off their own little miracle? Stranger things have happened.įiring the game up for the first time, I'm greeted with three sentences of exposition text: something about a crusade, a rogue commander, and an anomaly. And as a known lover of nouns, I have a weakness for placenames like "The Omnistructure." I was hopeful-this all fits with my palate somewhere. If you do a quick survey of Bleak Faith: Forsaken's Steam page, there's a compelling vibe there, like if Nier Automata was reduced down into a concrete, rust, and robot depression glaze and poured over a FromSoft aesthetic. I liked the idea: Soulslike combat without the occasional shame of dropping a pile of souls. Because there's no leveling up, dying just costs you progress-there's no experience currency to lose. Rather than the genre's usual RPG progression, your cyborg hero's stats are all determined by the gear you equip, customized further by slotting in additional stat upgrades. Broadly speaking, it's standard Souls dodge-hit-block combat, with a few tweaks of its own and a world that's a gloomy collision of gothic cathedrals and brutalist concrete.
Let me give you the quick Bleak Faith pitch before I start grousing. A dense tapestry of jank, woven from bugs of every scale and size
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