The Last Faith is the debut title from developer Kumi Souls, a new action-adventure game that wears its influences proudly on its pixelated sleeve. This macabre Metroidvania channels the DNA of FromSoftware’s gothic masterpiece Bloodborne, blending those familiar gameplay elements into a fresh haunted world.
In the brooding, cursed land of The Last Faith, religious zealots drunk on dark magic have plunged the realm into bloody chaos. As Eryk, a long-haired swordsman shrouded in mystery, you’ll hack, slash and shoot your way through this melancholic hellscape on a quest to unravel its secrets. The Last Faith lifts the basic premise straight from Bloodborne’s playbook – an otherworldly scourge transforming men into beasts, with only a few survivors clinging to their faith.
Fans of the “Soulsborne” genre will immediately recognize The Last Faith’s gothic architecture, deranged enemies, and intricate combat built on precise dodging and punishing melee weapons. Frequent checkpoints offer respite from hair-pulling difficulty while still retaining the tension. The compelling sense of exploration as you backtrack across a rich 2D world collecting spells and new traversal gear will be familiar territory for Metroidvania devotees.
While The Last Faith proudly pays homage to its influences through mechanics and themes, it carves its own bloody path through a striking vision of darkness. Lush pixel art saturates decrepit manors, witch-filled bogs and unholy cathedrals with an unsettling beauty. Behind its familiar façade lies a nightmare all its own.
So if you’re craving another dance with death set in a world gone mad, The Last Faith offers a haunting tribute to the games it reveres. Let’s step further into the shadows and see what nightmares await.
A Haunting Pixelated Realm
The moment you set foot in The Last Faith’s cursed realm, its stunning gothic pixel art casts a spell of melancholy. Kumi Souls’ gifted art team has crafted a 2D world that feels tangibly real, transcending the constraints of resolution through their meticulous eye for detail.
Lush background illustrations are drenched with supernatural dread – derelict castles crumble as thorny brambles retake the land, eerie forests glow with wisps of mist, and gargoyle statues leer menacingly from dizzying cathedral spires. The pixel art oozes so much atmosphere you can almost smell the wax from flickering candles and the dampness of the bogs.
Certain locations stand out for their twisted beauty. A sprawling manor lined with mirrors creates a dizzying optical illusion as reflections fracture and multiply. Stepping into a region shrouded in perpetual darkness is chilling, with only a ball ofguiding light to pierce the veil. The sheer sense of presence within these haunted halls and caverns truly brings The Last Faith’s world to life.
That hand-crafted care extends to the creatures skulking the realms. While some familiar gothic archetypes like crazed cultists and lycanthropes appear, most foes have been clearly designed for this world. Misshapen flesh golems, occult witches and wraith-like banshees all feel like they belong. The art instills even basic enemies with personality through uncanny movement and design.
Boss creatures also exhibit impressively grotesque art and fluid animation. A two-faced undead monstrosity and gigantic sewer beast feel ripped straight from your darkest nightmares. That said, a few environments like the underground tunnels blend together into repetitive backdrops.
Just as much creativity has been poured into the intricate detail on weapons, items and characters. Intricate textures on guns and blades, bizarre trinkets, and Eryk’s elaborate garb sell the lived-in, gothic flavor.
By breathing life into its haunted pixel world through four decades of game art wisdom, The Last Faith leverages its technical limitations as strengths. The visualization underscores the melancholic themes, making this a realm you won’t soon forget.
Moody Ambience with Repetitive Tunes
While its visuals may take center stage, The Last Faith’s audio plays an integral supporting role in bringing its unsettling realm to life. The sound design convincingly sells the creepy atmosphere through subtle environmental touches and visceral combat feedback. Growling beasts and crying ghouls lend a sense of foreboding, while the satisfying crunch of your blade meeting flesh keeps the action satisfying.
The ambient background audio maintains the tension as you explore dimly lit corridors and the distant howls of some unseen evil echo. Jarring stings and unearthly wails are used judiciously to maximize their spine-tingling impact. Clinking chains, crackling fires and rusty gears ground you in the supernatural setting.
Unfortunately, The Last Faith’s soundtrack fails to bolster the experience quite like the audio design. While the organs, ghostly vocals and strings aptly convey the gothic dread in most tracks, the music loops quickly become repetitive. During long sessions, I often found the constant repetition dampening the intended impact.
I’d frequently mute the music to better appreciate the ambient audio while exploring. The soundtrack excels at setting the tone, but has a limited number of listenable tracks compared to the length of the adventure. Taking cues from Bloodborne’s sparse but memorable music would have served The Last Faith better.
Still, the audio design alone generates sufficient unease and excitement without musical accompaniment. Sounds effects lend visceral crunch to weapons, ecology to environments, and emphasize important story moments. Just don’t expect the soundtrack to stick with you after the credits roll – the ambient audio proves far more effective at selling The Last Faith’s nightmarish realm.
Refined Metroidvania and Soulslike Fusion
At its core, The Last Faith meshes the interconnected worlds of Metroidvanias with the tense combat and progression of a Soulslike to create a cohesive and compelling gameplay fusion. Both genres complement each other beautifully. Unlocking new traversal abilities opens up more of the entwined maps to explore and plunder, while death means carefully retrieving your dropped experience points before progressing.
Combat will be instantly familiar to Bloodborne fans, with a similar dodge-and-punish style relying on split-second reflexes and stamina management. As Eryk, you’ll roll and quickstep through enemies’ attacks before countering with transformable melee weapons or well-timed parries. Though the parry timing is frustratingly narrow, pulling off a perfect riposte and visceral follow-up attack is intensely satisfying.
An array of firearms, throwing knives, and magical spells provide ranged options to thin enemy mobs or draw individuals away from the pack. The varied movesets between blunt, flaming, or extended weapons make combat feel fresh, and discovering new armaments is exciting. However, scaling issues mean sticking to a few favorites is often the wisest path.
Approaching as a stealthy spellcaster, an agile parry master, or an unga bungalow strength build are all viable. This flexibility combined with tight responsive controls makes combat a joy once you find your preferred playstyle.
Death also brings one clever compromise between Soulslike tension and Metroidvania accessibility – respawning next to handy blood vials to reclaim lost health. It retains the danger while lowering frustration.
Like its influences, light RPG mechanics govern your potency in battle. Applying points into attributes like Strength, Dexterity and more affects weapon damage, health, stamina and equip load. Obscure stats like Fate and Instinct could use more transparency though.
Regrettably no respec option means you’re locked into your starting build. Finding exciting new weapons that don’t align with your spec is a letdown. However, the unique ability to throw environmental objects helps mitigate this issue.
Exploring the winding, intertwining maze of unlockable areas and hidden paths proves addictive. Grapple points, breakable walls, weighted switches and more creative gates encourage revisiting previous sites with new powers in tow. Piercing the veil of a seemingly unreachable place or stumbling upon bonus loot rewards your curiosity.
Discovering nifty relics that grant abilities like a forward dash or ethereal wings feels genuinely impactful. The backtracking is paced well – not too much to be tedious, but enough to feel like you’re uncovering an organic, hidden world.
Save points doubles as fast travel hubs, letting you quickly get around and cash in your hard-earned experience points. While the map could use more tracking features, attentive players are able to chart their own progress well enough. By fusing precise combat, customizable builds, and explorer’s spirit within its haunted realm, The Last Faith succeeds at merging two compatible genres into a cohesive whole – if not an entirely fresh experience.
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Vague Lore in a Familiar Land
Like the Soulsborne games it emulates, The Last Faith opts for cryptic minimalist storytelling that requires reading between the lines. The plot and backstory are drip-fed through flavor text and dialogue with NPCs as you explore. This intentionally obscured approach rewards observation, but risks leaving players detached.
In typical gothic fashion, religious fanaticism has brought calamity to the land. Your road to unraveling how zealots unleashed this hellish fate is paved with poetic utterings from peculiar characters. Their flowery soliloquies about faith, sin and redemption echo Bloodborne’s esoteric style.
Yet the verbose pontificating tends to obscure more than illustrate. I gleaned that a dark miracle gone awry has warped the bodies and minds of men into monstrosities – but the specifics remain veiled. By leaving much unsaid, the narrative creates atmosphere at the cost of investment.
The setting finds firmer footing in familiar gothic horror tropes. This decaying realm of witch covens, demonic rituals, and crazed holy orders pulls directly from the genre playbook. While glimmers of subversive creativity occasionally shine through in side tales, the core backdrop feels overly derivative.
As you battle banshees in boggy cemeteries and loot decrepit manors, a sense of “been there, done that” is hard to shake. The curse controlling enemies even turns them into literal beasts, telegraphing the plot twist sharply. This reliance on genre cliches makes the world seem more superficial.
However, for games prioritizing thrilling gameplay over narrative, an abundance of lore and originality aren’t prerequisites for enjoyment. The Last Faith follows in the footsteps of its predecessors by keeping story low-key and archetypal.
Still, brushing up short textual descriptions or sprinkling in more distinct characters could have helped its mythology feel more vibrant and intrinsic to its identity. As it stands, the zig-zagging metafiction woven through flavor text doesn’t compel me to piece together the fragments. There simply isn’t enough there to warrant the effort.
While not narratively ambitious, The Last Faith’s vaguely Lovecraftian gothic setting gets the job done as a backdrop for its excellent combat and exploration. Just don’t expect the storytelling to leave a lasting mark. For this genre, immersive gameplay trumps opaque mythos.
Surmountable Challenges with Mixed Boss Fights
While no walk in the park, The Last Faith presents a more forgiving test of skill than notoriously punishing games like Blasphemous. The curved difficulty eases you in before introducing stiffer obstacles in later zones. Save points are frequent and health vials spawn nearby after major boss defeats, minimizing frustration.
Standard enemies offer enough bite to keep you alert but won’t overwhelm seasoned action fans. Their attack patterns are learnable, and the excellent mobility tools allow you to avoid crushing defeats. The thoughtful scaling also prevents early foes from becoming insignificant. Finding the right balance between skill and stats keeps each victory satisfying.
Boss battles represent significant spikes in difficulty, though their quality varies wildly. Some larger-than-life foes can be toppled through simple pattern recognition, lacking dynamic mechanics to test your adaptability. However, others provide white-knuckle trials where only perfect timing and positioning will see you through.
A grotesque amalgam of body parts that weaponizes its own viscera provided a standout challenge. Memorizing when to parry its projectiles, dodge the charge ups, and weave through bullet hell barrages made finally besting this beast intensely rewarding.
Puzzles also deliver delightful “eureka” moments that require deduction rather than reflexes. One series of riddles cryptically hints at its solutions to circumvent progression barriers. I found pondering the clues and discovering the answers highly satisfying.
Weaker bosses like a giant yet easily kited dragon felt more like bumps in the road than walls. Still, the diversity of approaches needed for various bosses keeps the naunce-based combat engaging.
A smooth ebb and flow between atmospheric exploration, mob battles and dramatic boss encounters defines your journey through the plagued realm. While the spikes in difficulty could be better balanced, The Last Faith finds a commendable middle ground between rewarding challenge and punishing tribulation.
A Worthy Genre Entry Despite Familiarity
When the credits rolled on The Last Faith, I was left with the satisfying fatigue that comes from completing a memorable game – albeit one content to operate within the confines of its genres. This brooding Metroidvania action-RPG confidently executes the established formulas without significantly innovating upon them. Yet talented execution alone is often enough to recommend a game, and The Last Faith nails the fundamentals.
Fans of Bloodborne and Blasphemous craving more gothic realms to explore and dark beasts to slay will find plenty to enjoy. The combat gracefully dances between flowing melee, parrying, spells and firearms with responsive controls. RPG progression gives you ownership over your build. Exploration rewards curiosity down twisting, interlinked passages. The spectacular art direction transports you to a melancholy realm dripping with macabre beauty.
It certainly deserves recognition for achieving an atmospheric and challenging experience, even if it rarely ventures far off the beaten trail.
However, those seeking memorable narratives or standout locations may come away disappointed. The storytelling relies too heavily on vague exposition and generic gothic tropes without enough substance behind the style. And some environments blend together due to an overuse of familiar creepy settings.
Yet in the end, The Last Faith accomplishes what it sets out to do – provide an immersive and demanding adventure refined from clear inspirations. This may not be the genre’s next huge leap forward, but it proudly continues the traditions and highlights of its predecessors. Fans of the core gameplay will find plenty to sink their teeth into during the 15+ hour quest through darkness. While it likely won’t linger long after the credits, The Last Faith offers an enjoyable tribute that reminded me why I love games like this in the first place.
The Review
The Last Faith
The Last Faith is an impressive debut that expertly fuses Metroidvania exploration and Soulsborne combat into an immersive gothic realm, even if it rarely diverges from the well-trodden path. Fans of challenging action-RPGs will find a meaty experience that respects the genres it emulates. Just don't expect substantial innovations. While not everything is memorable, it nails the fundamentals to deliver an enjoyable journey.
PROS
- Satisfying combat with responsive controls and a variety of weapons/spells
- Excellent Metroidvania style exploration rewards curiosity
- Interconnected maps offer rewarding backtracking as abilities expand
- Stunning gothic pixel art visuals dripping with atmosphere
- Most boss fights provide an enjoyable challenge
- RPG mechanics allow for different builds and playstyles
- Sound design heightens the creepy, haunted vibe
CONS
- Storytelling is vague and leans heavily on cryptic Soulsborne style
- Narrative and dialog fail to engage or feel substantive
- Some environments blend together due to overused themes
- Lack of respec option locks you into initial build
- New weapon scaling doesn't align with leveling choices
