Faith: Chapter III is the end of a trilogy of pixel horror games inspired by the era of MS-DOS, Apple II, Atari, and ZX Spectrum classics. It is only available as part of Faith: The Unholy Trinity which also includes the 2 previous games. Faith and Faith: Chapter II were delisted with its release.
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Making the setting of a game like Faith as convincingly rancid as it is, religiously speaking, requires one to be well-read. All the latin here is meaningful, the gnostic symbolism thematically relevant, and in 2022, fifty years deep into this corner of horror storytelling, the territory is well-trod enough that it’s difficult to do anything really original, narratively, so it’s best to synthesize from the best, and Airdorf clearly does that throughout the Faith trilogy. Chapter 3 is the most substantial entry in the series from both a textual and play standpoint, even accounting for the way Chapter 2 is split into two parts, so its influences shine really brightly, in a mostly complimentary way. From the glaringly obvious stuff like the way the entire backbone of the emotional arc is tied to The Exorcist, to the cult plot adapting Rosemary’s Baby in increasingly big ways; to subtler things like pulling thematic context and imagery from Argento’s Inferno; to the ever present haze of Catholic and Protestant Apocrypha that colors the proceedings, there’s a lot to dig into if you want to look at Faith on a meta-level and this stuff I’ve listed is only scratching the surface of overt homage. But the thing I found myself thinking of the most while I played this one was, to my surprise, the 1974 BBC tv movie Penda’s Fen.
Penda’s Fen is about Stephen, the son of a pastor in the English countryside who is struggling through his last year of finishing school, struggling with his latent homosexuality, soon struggling with his conservatism, his faith, his understanding of English history, his understanding of church history, his understanding of his own history. These things manifest themselves as nightmares and hallucinations and eventually visions of imagined conversations and confrontations as Stephen begins to finally process what he imagines to be his weaknesses as he comes to a personal understanding of the violences imposed upon him by a stifling, cruel social order. The final sequence of the film (which you can basically only watch on youtube, and you can and should even though I am going to talk extensively about it here – it’s a very vibes-based experience) is a vision of Stephen on the hill where King Penda, the last Anglo-Saxon king in England and for whom Stephen’s town of Pinvin is named, was killed. He is visited by the spirits of modern British christofascism, who beckon him for the second time in such dreams, try to convince him that he is a chosen child, that he deserves to be their heir, that he will do great work with them and for them. When he rejects them he has to be saved from their wrath (“if we can’t have him no one can,” the Sick Mother says to the Sick Father) by the spirit of King Penda, who asks Stephen to “be secret. Child, be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant. Cherish our flame.” And Stephen silently begins his trek down the hill, to the town, to live his life with his eyes open, and under his own agency.
He is not so unlike John Ward. John is a pastor whose life as we know it is defined by his weakness, his victimhood, and his immutable desire to go one in spite of these things. Over the course of the trilogy we see, via flashbacks and visions and nightmares, John’s greatest moment of weakness – failing to exorcise Amy Miller, and in revisiting this moment over and over again the depth of his cowardice comes out. He goes so far as to make a deal with a demon (in disguise but a poor one) to escape the Miller home rather than try to salvage the situation or save the girl, knowing and even swearing that this act will seal her to the worst fate of anyone in the story, to be the vessel for the ultimate evil of the setting. Despite his collar, John doesn’t have faith in his God. It wasn’t strong enough when it mattered, and then it was lost, and it’s barely powerful enough to scrape him by when he needs it today. But he is driven to correct his mistakes, even if he has to suffer for them. And slowly, over the course of all three games, and conditional on the player intuiting the right course of action for John’s wellbeing, he can do this. He can save Amy, he can save his childhood sister figure Lisa from a similar fate, he can protect Father Garcia where he failed to protect his original mentor, he can rid himself of the demonic influence that has hung over his life since he and Lisa were victims of demonic ritual in their orphanage, and he will save the world from the profane sabbath.
Faith Chapter II introduced the idea that the cult recruits and preys upon the socially vulnerable, and Chapter III elaborates upon this idea, setting itself entirely within cult-run facilities: a maternity clinic, an apartment building, and a daycare center. This is an evolution of the origins of the cult, where one of the trilogy’s main villains, Sister Miriam, began the terrible practices that have evolved into the modern leadup to the Profane Sabbath by running an orphanage where she killed and experimented upon the children living there, including John and Lisa. Now her son Gary leads the proceedings towards the end of the world, where he steals babies from pregnant women and tells them they miscarried, or uses them to spawn devil children, and uses his tenants as fodder for his true demonic guests, and teaches the children in his daycare all sorts of things about the new, profane world that is going to arrive before they’re even familiar with the current one, all while beneath their feet the true cult actively works to make that world happen in their underground network of caves and tunnels.
This plays into Satanic panic stuff that has permeated the trilogy, unfounded anxieties by America’s far right and their impressionable suburban retinue about the dangers of abortion clinics and daycare facilities and urbanization and cohabitation; some of the ironic humor from past games is still there too – an example that springs to mind is Gary’s letter to the apartment complex warning them to avoid the demon haunting the building at all costs because it WILL kill them if it finds them, which details (inaccurate) instructions on how to do so, a memo that ends with a lighthearted note about rent collection and cost increases in a faux-affable tone that anyone with a corporate landlord will be intimately familiar with. Satanic Panic wasn’t just a quirky moment of hysteria in America’s past, though, it was a calculated cultural maneuver by the political right to stoke fear that would enable them to grab power and restrict freedoms, to exercise a fascistic view of who Americans Were and what Americans Should Look And Act Like against people who were Poor, Immoral, Unchristian, Nonwhite, and Antiauthoritarian. The police are the force we see actively fighting the cult more than anyone else throughout Faith and I don’t think that’s an accident.
Where a lot of media that inspired Faith is alternately directly or incidentally right wing in social messaging, or depicts the devilish as liberatory, Faith posits a world where these panicked, manufactured fears are real, and subverted against the people they’re designed to help. Something that lots of media in these sorts of spaces neglects when it comes to addressing the ways people create spaces for the marginalized is how fragile these spaces are – how vulnerable to attacks external but also infiltration by subversive power.
The important thing to understand here is that while John may be a man of the cloth with his restored faith by the end of the series, his restored power, the thing that enables him to do all of this, is not the Church. It’s arguably not God either. He is explicitly acting outside or against the orders of the Church throughout the trilogy. His entire life has been steered by institutions, whether he knows it or not, and they have each imposed their ideology upon him violently, to their gain and his personal suffering. He is a victim as much as any of the people he saves. The cult unmade and remade John. It implanted in him doubt, and fear, and demons personal and literal. His traumas inform his personage. They impose their ideology upon all of their acolytes, willingly or unwillingly, through isolation, manipulation, carrot-dangling, coercion, and violence. But the Church is not very different from this, at least to John. His time with the Church is objectively harmful to him. It’s arguable that he was put into situations he wasn’t ready for, wasn’t prepared for, that he was meat for the grinder of the exorcist cause. He is manipulated by Father Garcia into continuing a fight he has lost, and there are versions of the events of this game where he’s forced at gunpoint to finish it. John doesn’t derive sustenance from his faith, he only derives power from it. Nearly everything he gets from the Church is violently imposed upon him, too.
The only overtly supernatural element of Penda’s Fen, the only weird thing that is absolutely 100% tangibly happening outside of the psychoscape of the main character, is that there is a government facility dug underground, underneath the beautiful hills of the pastoral countryside, where some military experiments are happening. Midway through the film some teenagers are driving around late at night, a boy gets out of the car to pee, and stumbles across the facility, and whatever is in there maims him horribly. It’s unclear whether he’ll live. It’s a short sequence, and not revisited, but this is the ultimate wound at the heart of the film: that the hills, the country, the pagan pastures that symbolize freedom from repression and the cultural violence of British modernity IS in fact hollowed out and infiltrated by those same things and there's nowhere to really and truly get away from it. But that doesn’t mean you give into it. That doesn’t mean you become it. You still have to be strange, and dark, and true, and impure, and dissonant, and cherish our flame, as King Penda tells Stephen at the end of the film.
At the end of Faith Chapter III, when all the cultists are killed, and the demons are exorcised, or banished, and Amy Martin is finally put to rest, John is given a choice. The Unspeakable, the abominable horror that caused all of these problems for all these decades, that directed Sister Miriam and dealt with Gary and possessed Amy and was the recipient of the Profane Sabbath, was not defeated, only repelled. Garcia plans to dedicate his life to hunting and killing it. He’ll do this forever. When it’s done, he’ll find another demon to hunt. He’ll do it until he dies. He wants John to come with him. He wants soldiers.
Lisa asks John to put down the cross, to come with her. She doesn’t know where they’ll go, or what they’ll do, but she knows him, and she knows their history, and that they’re both victims, survivors, people without identities who for the first time, ever, have the freedom to figure themselves out if they’re only brave enough to take the first step. And she knows John can’t take that step with that collar around his throat.
If John chooses to go with Garcia, the ending is borderline comical in its machismo. They clasp hands, John says “Let’s hunt some demons,” and they drive off together into a surely badass future. But it’s hollow. John has learned conviction but he hasn’t learned anything else except how to be the person he was raised to be. Going with Lisa feels more true to the John we’ve gotten to know – the weak, morally frail man who found himself in the people he chose to love, radically, despite himself, and despite both sides of his social conditioning telling him at various points that his various mercies would be wrong to perform. John and Lisa also drive into an uncertain future, but first they clasp hands, not in the badass bro-ey way that he does in the Garcia ending but tenderly, fingers intertwined. In both endings the Unspeakable is out there. It could do all this again. An apocalypse was averted but it very much began, and we don’t know what the world looks like, really. But in one of them John is still tied to an institution that molded him into someone who couldn’t be good to other people. In the other he and Lisa are strange, and dark, and true, and impure, and dissonant. But they carry the flame. And it’s hard to believe they won’t be able to make something out of that.
Penda’s Fen is about Stephen, the son of a pastor in the English countryside who is struggling through his last year of finishing school, struggling with his latent homosexuality, soon struggling with his conservatism, his faith, his understanding of English history, his understanding of church history, his understanding of his own history. These things manifest themselves as nightmares and hallucinations and eventually visions of imagined conversations and confrontations as Stephen begins to finally process what he imagines to be his weaknesses as he comes to a personal understanding of the violences imposed upon him by a stifling, cruel social order. The final sequence of the film (which you can basically only watch on youtube, and you can and should even though I am going to talk extensively about it here – it’s a very vibes-based experience) is a vision of Stephen on the hill where King Penda, the last Anglo-Saxon king in England and for whom Stephen’s town of Pinvin is named, was killed. He is visited by the spirits of modern British christofascism, who beckon him for the second time in such dreams, try to convince him that he is a chosen child, that he deserves to be their heir, that he will do great work with them and for them. When he rejects them he has to be saved from their wrath (“if we can’t have him no one can,” the Sick Mother says to the Sick Father) by the spirit of King Penda, who asks Stephen to “be secret. Child, be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant. Cherish our flame.” And Stephen silently begins his trek down the hill, to the town, to live his life with his eyes open, and under his own agency.
He is not so unlike John Ward. John is a pastor whose life as we know it is defined by his weakness, his victimhood, and his immutable desire to go one in spite of these things. Over the course of the trilogy we see, via flashbacks and visions and nightmares, John’s greatest moment of weakness – failing to exorcise Amy Miller, and in revisiting this moment over and over again the depth of his cowardice comes out. He goes so far as to make a deal with a demon (in disguise but a poor one) to escape the Miller home rather than try to salvage the situation or save the girl, knowing and even swearing that this act will seal her to the worst fate of anyone in the story, to be the vessel for the ultimate evil of the setting. Despite his collar, John doesn’t have faith in his God. It wasn’t strong enough when it mattered, and then it was lost, and it’s barely powerful enough to scrape him by when he needs it today. But he is driven to correct his mistakes, even if he has to suffer for them. And slowly, over the course of all three games, and conditional on the player intuiting the right course of action for John’s wellbeing, he can do this. He can save Amy, he can save his childhood sister figure Lisa from a similar fate, he can protect Father Garcia where he failed to protect his original mentor, he can rid himself of the demonic influence that has hung over his life since he and Lisa were victims of demonic ritual in their orphanage, and he will save the world from the profane sabbath.
Faith Chapter II introduced the idea that the cult recruits and preys upon the socially vulnerable, and Chapter III elaborates upon this idea, setting itself entirely within cult-run facilities: a maternity clinic, an apartment building, and a daycare center. This is an evolution of the origins of the cult, where one of the trilogy’s main villains, Sister Miriam, began the terrible practices that have evolved into the modern leadup to the Profane Sabbath by running an orphanage where she killed and experimented upon the children living there, including John and Lisa. Now her son Gary leads the proceedings towards the end of the world, where he steals babies from pregnant women and tells them they miscarried, or uses them to spawn devil children, and uses his tenants as fodder for his true demonic guests, and teaches the children in his daycare all sorts of things about the new, profane world that is going to arrive before they’re even familiar with the current one, all while beneath their feet the true cult actively works to make that world happen in their underground network of caves and tunnels.
This plays into Satanic panic stuff that has permeated the trilogy, unfounded anxieties by America’s far right and their impressionable suburban retinue about the dangers of abortion clinics and daycare facilities and urbanization and cohabitation; some of the ironic humor from past games is still there too – an example that springs to mind is Gary’s letter to the apartment complex warning them to avoid the demon haunting the building at all costs because it WILL kill them if it finds them, which details (inaccurate) instructions on how to do so, a memo that ends with a lighthearted note about rent collection and cost increases in a faux-affable tone that anyone with a corporate landlord will be intimately familiar with. Satanic Panic wasn’t just a quirky moment of hysteria in America’s past, though, it was a calculated cultural maneuver by the political right to stoke fear that would enable them to grab power and restrict freedoms, to exercise a fascistic view of who Americans Were and what Americans Should Look And Act Like against people who were Poor, Immoral, Unchristian, Nonwhite, and Antiauthoritarian. The police are the force we see actively fighting the cult more than anyone else throughout Faith and I don’t think that’s an accident.
Where a lot of media that inspired Faith is alternately directly or incidentally right wing in social messaging, or depicts the devilish as liberatory, Faith posits a world where these panicked, manufactured fears are real, and subverted against the people they’re designed to help. Something that lots of media in these sorts of spaces neglects when it comes to addressing the ways people create spaces for the marginalized is how fragile these spaces are – how vulnerable to attacks external but also infiltration by subversive power.
The important thing to understand here is that while John may be a man of the cloth with his restored faith by the end of the series, his restored power, the thing that enables him to do all of this, is not the Church. It’s arguably not God either. He is explicitly acting outside or against the orders of the Church throughout the trilogy. His entire life has been steered by institutions, whether he knows it or not, and they have each imposed their ideology upon him violently, to their gain and his personal suffering. He is a victim as much as any of the people he saves. The cult unmade and remade John. It implanted in him doubt, and fear, and demons personal and literal. His traumas inform his personage. They impose their ideology upon all of their acolytes, willingly or unwillingly, through isolation, manipulation, carrot-dangling, coercion, and violence. But the Church is not very different from this, at least to John. His time with the Church is objectively harmful to him. It’s arguable that he was put into situations he wasn’t ready for, wasn’t prepared for, that he was meat for the grinder of the exorcist cause. He is manipulated by Father Garcia into continuing a fight he has lost, and there are versions of the events of this game where he’s forced at gunpoint to finish it. John doesn’t derive sustenance from his faith, he only derives power from it. Nearly everything he gets from the Church is violently imposed upon him, too.
The only overtly supernatural element of Penda’s Fen, the only weird thing that is absolutely 100% tangibly happening outside of the psychoscape of the main character, is that there is a government facility dug underground, underneath the beautiful hills of the pastoral countryside, where some military experiments are happening. Midway through the film some teenagers are driving around late at night, a boy gets out of the car to pee, and stumbles across the facility, and whatever is in there maims him horribly. It’s unclear whether he’ll live. It’s a short sequence, and not revisited, but this is the ultimate wound at the heart of the film: that the hills, the country, the pagan pastures that symbolize freedom from repression and the cultural violence of British modernity IS in fact hollowed out and infiltrated by those same things and there's nowhere to really and truly get away from it. But that doesn’t mean you give into it. That doesn’t mean you become it. You still have to be strange, and dark, and true, and impure, and dissonant, and cherish our flame, as King Penda tells Stephen at the end of the film.
At the end of Faith Chapter III, when all the cultists are killed, and the demons are exorcised, or banished, and Amy Martin is finally put to rest, John is given a choice. The Unspeakable, the abominable horror that caused all of these problems for all these decades, that directed Sister Miriam and dealt with Gary and possessed Amy and was the recipient of the Profane Sabbath, was not defeated, only repelled. Garcia plans to dedicate his life to hunting and killing it. He’ll do this forever. When it’s done, he’ll find another demon to hunt. He’ll do it until he dies. He wants John to come with him. He wants soldiers.
Lisa asks John to put down the cross, to come with her. She doesn’t know where they’ll go, or what they’ll do, but she knows him, and she knows their history, and that they’re both victims, survivors, people without identities who for the first time, ever, have the freedom to figure themselves out if they’re only brave enough to take the first step. And she knows John can’t take that step with that collar around his throat.
If John chooses to go with Garcia, the ending is borderline comical in its machismo. They clasp hands, John says “Let’s hunt some demons,” and they drive off together into a surely badass future. But it’s hollow. John has learned conviction but he hasn’t learned anything else except how to be the person he was raised to be. Going with Lisa feels more true to the John we’ve gotten to know – the weak, morally frail man who found himself in the people he chose to love, radically, despite himself, and despite both sides of his social conditioning telling him at various points that his various mercies would be wrong to perform. John and Lisa also drive into an uncertain future, but first they clasp hands, not in the badass bro-ey way that he does in the Garcia ending but tenderly, fingers intertwined. In both endings the Unspeakable is out there. It could do all this again. An apocalypse was averted but it very much began, and we don’t know what the world looks like, really. But in one of them John is still tied to an institution that molded him into someone who couldn’t be good to other people. In the other he and Lisa are strange, and dark, and true, and impure, and dissonant. But they carry the flame. And it’s hard to believe they won’t be able to make something out of that.
Definitely the best chapter. There's more monsters, locations, animations, and more that makes it feel like a truly complete game compared to its predecessors. The story also fittingly reaches its climax.
GARY DOESN'T LOVE YOU
Really, really cool ending to the trilogy. Keeps you guessing right up until the end, but everything clicks in the most satisfying way possible
Man, if Chapter II was a major expansion on the original game, FAITH: Chapter III is on another level. Once again the scope of the game expands, and in addition to extending to a nearly three hour runtime (again, without wearing out its welcome or feeling like it’s too long), I love the way the game manages to add new mechanics and complications to the game — setpieces forcing the player to change the way they approach the game in a way that feels tense yet not unfun or antithetical to how the rest of the game is played. I also really enjoy how combat feels redefined. It plays exactly as it had in the previous two games, but enemy design feels so much more varied here — bosses each with new mechanics you have to work around, enemies with different patterns you have to remember and apply, it all really feels like there was a focus made on stepping up how the game played while still making it feel the same. I… would still knock it down a bit for some issues with signposting: while most of the game is fine on this front, some of the requirements for secret bosses require knowledge from outside the game or make you interact with things that take too long to provide different interactions and it felt kind of oblique. Otherwise… yeah, this was great. Every single advancement made here feels like it was made for the better, and also in a way that doesn’t take away from what was originally there, in a way that… honestly feels like a magnum opus for this series. It’s just kind of incredible how it kept managing to get better with each new installment. 8/10.
weeer