As you can probably tell from the various screenshots and video adorning this review, there are no sprawling 3D worlds filled with umpteen polygons all glazed by numerous inscrutable technologies and nary is there a traced ray to be found in New Blood Interactive’s latest PlayStation joint. Nope, instead, Faith: The Unholy Trinity aesthetically winds the clock all the way back to the 8-bit home computer era to fashion a resolutely terrifying horror outing out of the chunkiest, meatiest pixels you’ve probably seen in quite some time.
Faith: The Unholy Trinity PS5 Review
Unfolding during the ‘Satanic Panic’ which gripped North America during the 1980s. Faith: The Unholy Trinity puts the players in the dog collared, shiny shoes of one John Ward, a young priest looking to pick up the pieces of his life after an exorcism of a young girl went tragically wrong with mentor just years before. Obsessed with righting this wrong from his past, Ward sets out to visit the house where this exorcism went so wrong without the backing of the Vatican – only to discover that a much deeper, more insidious evil sits at the heart of the tragedy that will upend his existence entirely in ways that will take his faith to its absolute breaking point.
Split into a trio interconnected chapters or episodes, Faith: The Unholy Trinity plays out from an overhead, birds-eye view style perspective and tasks players with exploring a range of different environments, ranging from forests to abandoned huts, apartment complexes, caverns and more as they attempt to get the bottom of the evil which troubles our humble clergyman. Moment to moment gameplay in Faith: The Unholy Trinity broadly involves exploring, collecting clues, running away from something really quite massively evil and/or using your crucifix to repel said evil as quickly as possible.
The controls couldn’t be simpler either. You move Father Ward around the various locales (which are interconnected screens rather than one single scrollable environment), hit the options button to evaluate the various notes and items you’ve collected, and hit the X button to raise your crucifix. And… that’s it. Simples. It’s also certainly worth mentioning at this point that Father Ward moves slow, like ploddingly slow. That makes sense though, not least because our chap in the collar isn’t a man of war, or is able to lay claim to some other macho pursuit, he’s just a regular dude that believes in God and, well, that’s enough for him. Plenty enough, as it turns out.
And on that note, for the devout, Faith: The Unholy Trinity also does something that very few other video games do, it weaponises its titular theme through a belief in God and Christ that will resonate with those which ascribe to the Christian faith. For the overwhelming duration of Faith: The Unholy Trinity, you’ll have just a single means of defending yourself – your trusty cross – the physical conduit through which your faith exercises itself and is weaponised in a very real sense against the myriad evils that you’ll come across.
There is a level of finesse to this too. You can’t just stand there with your crucifix out in the expectation that you won’t die. You will. Frequently and often. The key to survival is to make sure you’re facing the enemy with the crucifix raised, do some damage to them, evade and attempt to repeat the process, not least because a single hit from basically anything will immediately send you to the shadow realm. As such, the various boss fights can initially feel like multi-stage exercises in trial and error (luckily respawns tend to happen both quickly and close to the point of your untimely demise) but ultimately, they’re just about enemy pattern recognition and knowing when and how to avoid your foe and when is the best time to slap the ol’ crucifix on them.
In an industry landscape where had Faith: The Unholy Trinity been pitched by some layoff prone AAA studio with swelling eight or nine figure budget and a cadre of artistically disinterested shareholders to appease, it’s not hard to imagine our dear cleric going to town on the various evils within the game with some firearms from the heart of Americana, rather than the sense of belief and piousness which arguably comes from a far more spiritual place. Airdorf clearly then deserves credit for having faith in, well, Faith.
Back to the movement side of things, the almost painfully measured gait of the central protagonist in Faith: The Unholy Trinity also has another side-effect that is absolutely by design, which is to say that it ratchets up the tension and stress consummately. Without wanting to veer into spoiler territory (Faith has some truly diabolical scares that shouldn’t be spoiled), developer Airdorf absolutely knows how to make the most out of this, with all manner of seen and unseen horrors that can appear at any time to trip your nerves and put you on the path to being a quivering wreck.
Of course, when you’re not using divine punishment to rout the various lieutenants of evil, you’ll be spending a decent wad of time picking up notes and using the power of your crucifix to remove cursed spirits from items which can also provide handy notes too. Much more than some rote storytelling device, these notes are well-written passages of text which not only flesh out the background of Ward’s plight, but also provide a deeper understanding into the events of the past and the motivations of those who still live in the present.
At its budget price of just $15, Faith: The Unholy Trinity also provides a surprising amount of longevity into the bargain. Though all three chapters can be cleared from between three and five hours the first time through, the many collectibles and multiple endings that exist in each episode all ensure that there are many reasons for pushing through its nightmare scenarios time and again. There’s a degree of mastery in regards to Faith’s audiovisual presentation that needs to be called out, also. In addition to the 8-bit chunky pixels and single colour designs that permeate the game throughout, Faith: The Unholy Trinity also employs rotoscoped animations for its various, blood freezing cutscenes and though sometimes the technique can look a bit shonky in other games, when combined with the eerie 8-bit visuals, it looks positively horrifying here in the best way.
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Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this offering is that Developer Airdorf does so much with so relatively little, that Faith: The Unholy Trinity acts as a potent reminder of the fact that terror cannot simply be conjured out of just more progressively impressive technologies – it needs to get under your skin, like an invading parasite and in this sense Airdorf absolutely pulls this off in Faith: The Unholy Trinity with aplomb.
One great example of this is the use of abandonware speech synthesisers to create both the speech and the sound effects of the various demons lends Faith a deeply unsettling and darkly unnatural aural quality that quite literally stood the hair on the back of my neck on end. It’s such a unique way of conveying speech beyond just having standard VA performances, that it lends Faith a wholly bespoke aura of foreboding that no other game can really match. Another more subtle example is how you’ll notice when backtracking through certain areas how things, both obvious and not quite so obvious, seem different compared to the last time you were there, while little touches such as the menus being in translated Latin all add up to make Faith: The Unholy Trinity feel like the sort of singularly original horror outing that the genre has needed for a while.
A not insignificant part of me actually wishes that Faith: The Unholy Trinity released forty years ago on the 8-bit ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 home computers of the day, not least because the audiovisual presentation is absolutely a fit for that era and, well, I’m pretty sure an entire generation of young gamers would have been utterly traumatised by what developer Airdorf has wrought here. Of course, Faith: The Unholy Trinity won’t be for everybody and neither should it be. No doubt some will take issue with the visual presentation, the slow-marching movement of the main character, the satanic panic setting itself or even just the fact that there’s no real combat in the game at all beyond just raising your crucifix at things. All of those criticisms are fine to varying extents, but for horror fans who have more than a dash of The Exorcist in their fandom, or simply have a hankering for a horror game that does a lot of things really quite differently from the status quo, Faith: The Unholy Trinity arguably begins to venture into essential territory.
Proving that effective, heart-stopping horror can emerge from even the chonkiest pixels and cobwebbed 8-bit audiovisual presentation, Faith: The Unholy Trinity is a disturbing, skin-bumping terror that embraces its technical limitations and plodding pace to deliver the kind of genre offering that many larger studios wish they had the gumption, imagination and freedom to pull off.
Faith: The Unholy Trinity is out now on PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.