Forgive Me Father steals the shows with its Lovecraftian style and unique art direction that oozes investigation. The creepy atmosphere and enemy design coupled with the unique weapon upgrades and animations ask for you to spend some quality time playing through what Forgive Me Father has to offer. Regrettably, due to a handful of issues and game design choices this is a hard one to recommend from a gameplay perspective.

As mentioned prior the game itself is gorgeous and you follow the story of 1 of 2 playable characters through a noire quest to unfold the mysteries that lie before you. The character selection itself does little to differentiate the story apart from the initial motivation and the one liner’s your character spits out while you slay hordes of monster. The experience is separated into 5 distinct chapters that start relatively based in reality before going all out gangbusters with the cosmic horror. As you progress you unlock additional abilities and get limited upgrades to specific weapons or perks that will vastly change how your weapons function and look. The arsenal itself is quite varied and there is never really a point that you will not be unlocking new stuff which is greatly appreciated.
However, it is important to mention that Forgive Me Father comes with a myriad of issues that hold it back from being truly fantastic. Firstly, the games performance plummets in the final 2 chapters stuttering whenever there is combat making it almost impossible to play even on the lowest graphical settings. Secondly, the story set up and execution is great but gets absolutely ruined by a lackluster out of nowhere ending that flops harder than a fat kid at a pool party. My last main issue is the difficulty and level design. I’m not sure if it was forgotten or if they were under the pump to release but the last 2 chapters although gorgeous suck to play in. There are no save points in most of the final levels and for some unknown reason multiple platforming sections that mean if you don’t make a jump near the end of a level you will need to restart the entire thing again. To be honest there are many other issues I could list but these felt like some of the most egregious to me.

To be brief I personally was quite excited to play Father Forgive Me but was glad to be finished with it. If the art style intrigues you and you enjoy a relatively fun boomer shooter I would definitely recommend but take that with a grain of salt.

This game is so painfully almost good. The artstyle and the gameplay is smooth and beautiful, and it meshes together really well. The enemy designs are fun and the guns are incredible. However, there are endless problems with the game that on their own aren't that bad, but together they create a massive roadblock for me in terms of coming back to this game. My strongest criticism is that most of the game's functions outside of the core gameplay feel half-baked, especially the ending. It is a horrible ending, truly, and that holds it back from being anything greater than 3/5 stars

The game is not bad. It's also nothing exceptional. Ultimately, it's nu-Doom with Lovecraftian themes. Similar to Boltgun where it doesn't really do anything exceptional, but it just does what it does competently. Unfortunately, there's so much quality in the 'boomer shooter' subgenre that I do feel this is beneath a lot of other games.

The game never does anything interesting with its themes or stories. And when I say it's nu-doom, I don't just mean the gameplay. I mean it's just being a one man army but the game throws Lovecraft monsters at you instead. Modern Boomer Shooters pull from Lovecraftian themes A LOT. Games like CULTIC, DUSK, Amid Evil and even the classic BLOOD slowly build to it. There's a level of atmosphere and tension that you know what it's leading to.

Forgive Me Father throws fishmen at you from the start. And a lot of corridors. And butt rock that doesn't really fit the theming of the game. All the guns feel good enough but there's no standout. Even Boltgun, a game that felt around this same quality, had some guns like the Heavy Bolter and the Caliver that really stood out.

Still. Decent enough that I'll try the sequel as I heard it improves a lot.

There is nothing to forgive father, this game is great. Forgive Me Father is a 2D retro first person shooter set to the back drop world of HP Lovecraft. It is a fast paced twitch style single player experiance reminisent of classic Doom or Hexen. The artstyle is flat 2D characters and models against a 3D world. All of them have a rather nice drawn aesthetic with limited animation make this feel like it was straight up ripped out of the 90's. I say that as a good thing mind you.

Gameplay can become quite frantic and fast on the normal difficulty and I found myself dying quite a few times but it's intense nature and seemingly endless enemies kept me interested the entire way through. The game does a nice job of slowly releasing new enemy types every couple of levels to help out the tedium, but I will admit it does feel like you kill literal hundreds of the same enemy in slightly different make up. I always felt like I had just enough health pickups or just enough ammo drops at my disposal but at the same time never enough to really main one specific gun. The variety of using all the guns and ammo types was really well balanced.

The character and character progression was also done especially well. There are two different characters that have their own unique skills that are very different from each other. The skill progression was a great balancing act of making careful descions that would really affect the rest of the campaign. Each gun and skills has two seperate paths that permanetly change the guns functions and or lead to different upgrades. For example you could beef up the standard shotgun and turn it into a super shotgun and has a path of a permenant health upgrade or you can morph the shotgun using dark arts into this monstrous alien creature that shoots shots that ricochet around the room and has a longer range. Do you sacrifice strenghts for health or increase your armor and skip the upgrades. It's a rather nice balancing act and I was always eager to get my next level up. I feel like one player could play and have a completely different load out than another person's and vice versa. It also helps with replayability to play the campaign again with all different weapons.

The levels are moderatley sized to big. Some take about 10-15 min and some can take about 30 min. Five chapters with about five or six stages inbetween for about a 15-20 hour campaign the first time through. Most levels are about grabbing the red blue and yellow keys as you backtrack through open areas and enemies spawning and respawning in. It's design is retro FPS by nature. I also appreciated that most bosses were simply not stand in one spot and simply unload all of your ammo at it until it dies. The glitch boss is actually one of my favorite FPS bosses ever I think, I loved that one. The only real negaitves I have for this game is that the story is rather weak and it would have been nice if they put some more effort into it, that and the loading times even on PS5 are really bad. Everytime you die or complete a level is really annoying looking at those same 5 art stills over and over again. There is also some slowdown stutter here and there when exiting menus and especially when you save your game. There is a good bit of replayability afterwards. There is another character to try out, simple achievments with a handy level select option upon completion, a horde style side mode and a neat customizable new game plus where you can tweak settings like difficulty, enemy health and damage, auto level, player health and damage, infinite ammo, invincibility and customize mix and match character loadouts. So you can make the game really challenging or just a fun kill fest. Overall with Forgive Me Father if your looking for a retro FPS that focuses on gameplay first and not much else you could do much worse and its at a fairly cheap price point of around 20 bucks. I'd say give it a go!

Platinum #204