

Forgive Me Father is deliberately challenging, and even lowering the difficulty doesn’t feel like it makes that much difference. Later levels add ranged attackers to the list of things to not get eaten by, and the frantic strafe-shooting turns into something akin to a bullet hell. If you find yourself pushed into a corner and mobbed by zombies, you’re probably going to die. Then you’ll see a couple of boxes of shotgun shells within reach and – bam! The floor gives way or the lights go out and you’re surrounded.
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There’s no manual reload, and so it’s easy to run your ammo right down to dangerous levels and not realise. With save points spread wide, you’re often on the verge of running out of ammo. Health and ammo pickups are scattered around each level, but Forgive Me Father delights in setting traps for the desperate. Instead, it makes you take less damage while dealing more. In a world where you’re literally the only sane person left, you’d think madness would be something to avoid. This will fill as you take down enemies, but weirdly the higher it gets, the stronger you get. Unsurprisingly, Forgive Me Father has a “madness metre”.

There’s absolutely no need for this to happen other than to arbitrarily restrict your vision, but it does add tension. Frustratingly, this lowers your equipped weapon – even if you’re using a pistol. Some areas plunge you into total darkness, and you’ll need to use your lantern to see where you’re going. Enemies come at you quickly, and headshots are more effective. Shooting is best on mouse and keyboard, though I had to drop the sensitivity considerably to find a comfortable level. Across twenty-five levels, you’ll be required to navigate gloomy corridors, zombie-infested hedge mazes, gothic churches and abandoned streets. There’s a comic book style at work, rewarding you with splashes of onomatopoeic vibrancy for your trouble. The vivid art style lends itself well to the otherworldly horror theme, with dark, foreboding environments inhabited by larger than life monstrosities.
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A weapon upgrade system allows you to choose one of two paths for each of the 8 weapons you acquire, which adds a degree of strategy to the otherwise fairly straightforward shooting. Whether you choose to play as the Priest or the Journalist, you’ll be up against legions of zombies and mutated horrors. Your hard-drinking protagonist is the only sane person left in a world beset by Lovecraftian horrors. That said, Forgive Me Father does have some depth. The mechanics are simple: you point and shoot, strafing madly to avoid damage, with little in the way of character animation or complexity. That is to say it’s a first person shooter in the mould of the original Doom, Wolfenstein, or Quake. And like candyfloss, the resultant creation is both enjoyable, but ultimately fairly insubstantial.įorgive Me Father is an old school “boomer shooter”. Then like a stick plunged into a candyfloss machine, the premise slowly grew, acquiring a hodgepodge form to please the masses. Someone had an idea for a game about a Catholic priest in the Prohibition era going up against cosmic horrors like Cthulhu and Shub Niggurath, and worried about little things like genre and context later.

The important one, though, was that Forgive Me Father feels like a game constructed around a central premise that was probably conceived long before it was developed. Well, several thoughts occurred, but most of them were about chocolate. Amateurish, but shows promise, and I think that this studio can do much better in the near future.As I blasted my way through Forgive Me Father, a thought occurred. No standout bosses, no memorable fights, arenas, or levels, and a story that at the end of the day, is just about as uninteresting and generic as it could have been.

There is also an unfortunate lack of anything worth noting or remembering the game for. Everything this game attempts to do, about ten other games do much better. There won't be any desire to go back for subsequent playthroughs as nearly everything worth experiencing is done in that first playthrough. There are some issues however, and that is that overall the game does not present anything whatsoever that will stick with anyone after the credits roll. Some of the early levels are very slow and don't do much to show off the entertaining gunplay that will come later. Some of A shooter lives and dies on it's ability to entertain, and this game does a fair job of that once it gets into the meat of the game. A shooter lives and dies on it's ability to entertain, and this game does a fair job of that once it gets into the meat of the game.
