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
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