I played this game, or a version of it, way back when it first came out in like 2017, and remembered liking it quite a bit, and didn’t really think about it again until just last week when I saw some friends on here playing Faith THREE. So I have some revisiting to do and I was quite excited to do it because I do recall this game making a pretty big splash in its original release.
If video games are a medium overly concerned with the frantic, masturbatory exercise of pastiche writ large, Faith is a game whose pastiche is focused and intentional. A schlocky story evoking aesthetics of the real fearmongering of the American satanic panic in the early 80s and 90s, its small bits of explicit text evoke not books like Michelle Remembers or McMartin documents, but the industry of exploitation media that sprang up underfoot of the media blitz surrounding this stuff.
Faith’s visual style homages the systems of the day and in mimicking Atari 2600-era graphics, developer Airdorf gets away with two really cool things: first he absolutely shows off his talent as a sprite artist, able to stake out this incredible sense of atmosphere MOSTLY through visuals that push how evocative you can be with the most minimalist sprites possible to represent at turns complex and esoteric shit. The second cool thing is the one this game is famous for and that’s the way it punctuates the big moments with these shotgun blasts of beautiful, intense, frightening, explicit fully animated rotoscoped cutaway shots, breaking the established graphical style to REALLY sell those ah fuck oh jesus oh piss moments. It works! It’s fucking sick bro!
It’s not just the graphics either, music sets a good tone but Airdorf is wise with when to cut it out entirely in the second phase of the game, or when you’re coming up on an important moment in selecting one of your five endings (all of which are some shade of funny or clever, and which immediately reload you to the decision point again, painlessly encouraging a full sweep of the game’s content). Sound effects are sparse but explosive, an unearthly hum reverberates through the most haunted moments, and all of the speech, be it human or uhhh less so, comes from the iconic SAM voice synthesizer so that when you blast a demon in the face with a prayer to buy yourself one more panicked screen of respite and he screeches “I GO UNWILLINGLY” in a computerized howl it is as unnerving as it is often unintelligible.
If there’s one complaint I have with the game, and it really is just one complaint, it’s that it has like, a Boss Fight at the end of it lol. Well actually it has two boss fights if you pay enough attention to ferret out a secret one towards the end but they are both pretty awful, and in a game where you always die in one hit no matter what I think it’s a really enormous mistake to suddenly incorporate a long, long fight that relies heavily on learned patterns and twitch reflexes. The really excellent and scary animation that plays before it repeats every time you have to start over, so not only does the tension completely go out of the actual game but those fantastic explosions of climactic terror that those animations represent are also cheapened when I had to sit through one of them like ten times.
That one moment isn’t great but it is ultimately one moment that took up maybe ten minutes of the hour or so it took to get through this bad boy? So certainly not a deal breaker on the experience. Given how much of a specific skill set goes into these it’s no wonder it took so long for sequels to come out, and given the nature of the indie space it’s no wonder they slipped right by me, but I’m glad I’ve found them again. I can only hope that the next two follow the better instincts of a game that is ultimately pretty restrained for the space it’s playing at. I think there are versions of this that open themselves more fully to schlock and bombast but if that comes along with more TERRIBLE FIGHTS, well, lol I’ll find out won’t I.
If video games are a medium overly concerned with the frantic, masturbatory exercise of pastiche writ large, Faith is a game whose pastiche is focused and intentional. A schlocky story evoking aesthetics of the real fearmongering of the American satanic panic in the early 80s and 90s, its small bits of explicit text evoke not books like Michelle Remembers or McMartin documents, but the industry of exploitation media that sprang up underfoot of the media blitz surrounding this stuff.
Faith’s visual style homages the systems of the day and in mimicking Atari 2600-era graphics, developer Airdorf gets away with two really cool things: first he absolutely shows off his talent as a sprite artist, able to stake out this incredible sense of atmosphere MOSTLY through visuals that push how evocative you can be with the most minimalist sprites possible to represent at turns complex and esoteric shit. The second cool thing is the one this game is famous for and that’s the way it punctuates the big moments with these shotgun blasts of beautiful, intense, frightening, explicit fully animated rotoscoped cutaway shots, breaking the established graphical style to REALLY sell those ah fuck oh jesus oh piss moments. It works! It’s fucking sick bro!
It’s not just the graphics either, music sets a good tone but Airdorf is wise with when to cut it out entirely in the second phase of the game, or when you’re coming up on an important moment in selecting one of your five endings (all of which are some shade of funny or clever, and which immediately reload you to the decision point again, painlessly encouraging a full sweep of the game’s content). Sound effects are sparse but explosive, an unearthly hum reverberates through the most haunted moments, and all of the speech, be it human or uhhh less so, comes from the iconic SAM voice synthesizer so that when you blast a demon in the face with a prayer to buy yourself one more panicked screen of respite and he screeches “I GO UNWILLINGLY” in a computerized howl it is as unnerving as it is often unintelligible.
If there’s one complaint I have with the game, and it really is just one complaint, it’s that it has like, a Boss Fight at the end of it lol. Well actually it has two boss fights if you pay enough attention to ferret out a secret one towards the end but they are both pretty awful, and in a game where you always die in one hit no matter what I think it’s a really enormous mistake to suddenly incorporate a long, long fight that relies heavily on learned patterns and twitch reflexes. The really excellent and scary animation that plays before it repeats every time you have to start over, so not only does the tension completely go out of the actual game but those fantastic explosions of climactic terror that those animations represent are also cheapened when I had to sit through one of them like ten times.
That one moment isn’t great but it is ultimately one moment that took up maybe ten minutes of the hour or so it took to get through this bad boy? So certainly not a deal breaker on the experience. Given how much of a specific skill set goes into these it’s no wonder it took so long for sequels to come out, and given the nature of the indie space it’s no wonder they slipped right by me, but I’m glad I’ve found them again. I can only hope that the next two follow the better instincts of a game that is ultimately pretty restrained for the space it’s playing at. I think there are versions of this that open themselves more fully to schlock and bombast but if that comes along with more TERRIBLE FIGHTS, well, lol I’ll find out won’t I.