Thank You New Blood Interactive for providing us with a review code!

Originally released in 2017 and 2019 as Faith Chapter I and Chapter II through itch.io, Faith is an entry into the survival horror genre created by Airdolf Games. Faith in 2022 is released as a trilogy known as “The Unholy Trinity” and is the only modern way to play this series (and by extension Faith Chapter III) as of writing this review as the separate itch.io versions of Faith I and Faith II are no longer available.

John Ward, a Catholic priest from Palmyra, New York, finds himself back in a familiar place in 1987. He is coming back to the residence of The Martins to finish what he has started. A failed exorcism exactly one year ago has led to a young teenager named Amy Martin being possessed by an otherworldly spirit. Even though this task has not been approved by the Vatican, he feels he owes it to Amy, her parents, and himself. But this rather “simple” objective soon tests John’s faith and takes him through a journey he is completely unprepared for. 

Heavily inspired by old-school 8-bit classics from the Atari and Intellivision era, the visuals, sound design, and gameplay are all reminiscent of that era. Faith commits so much to the aesthetic that the game runs at a locked 15 FPS. The backgrounds are a solid black and most character models use one or two primary colors with clever usage of multiple colors to give off the effect of shadows or lighting. During certain scenes, the view changes, and the characters become rotoscoped. In comparison to the gameplay, the cutscenes are so smooth because they are rotoscoped, that the stylistic choice ends up being pretty unsettling as it’s “unnatural” for the world.  The music does take some slight liberties as the fidelity of some sound effects and the music is clearly more capable than any hardware of that time could handle. Most characters are voiced by SAM (Software Automatic Mouth), a program that was commonly used for the Commodore C64 platform. And whenever demons speak, they have a distorted filter layered on top of their speech program. 

Like the classic games, Faith has a very simple control scheme, and using either a controller or keyboard is fine. All John can do is move around and hold up his crucifix/cross to ward away spirits and demons. John moves pretty slowly, which is excused in canon by having asthma and a knee injury during his childhood. He can’t outrun most demons so he’ll have to rely on the cross. The cross’s area-of-effect is shaped more like an invisible cone shape instead of a straight line so it has a wider width than one realizes. Most demons will chase after him in a linear fashion so many of them aren’t too tough to deal with or even avoid. They are still dangerous as they will kill John in one hit.

Bosses are where the concept gets a bit more imaginative. You’re still going to be using the cross to fend them off, but these fights take place in an enclosed area and introduce gimmicks to keep you on your toes. They can be pretty tough as they all have aggressive patterns and it’s easy to die during these encounters. Fortunately, the checkpoint system is pretty gracious and happens during each phase. For most people, deaths will be pretty common. 

There is a lot of story contained within Faith besides the main narrative. You’ll find various notes scattered through the three chapters. Some are on the direct path while for others, you’ll need to purify numerous objects all over the place. A lot of the notes are simple flavor text for worldbuilding, but others give plenty of insight into the main cast. Although, one aspect of the note collecting that annoyed me is that it’s tied to the autosave feature.  Faith only saves at specific points throughout, and sometimes long stretches can happen before a save is enabled. If you happen to die between note collecting and a save, you’ll need to collect all those notes again, which I found highly annoying. I feel a soft-autosave feature for notes could have gone a long way.

I don’t think it will come as a shock to many that a game that has demons and spirit possession as its primary antagonists will have a lot of Satanic imagery in it. Faith is filled with it from inverted pentagrams, ritualistic runes, and symbols painted in blood, and even talks about aspects such as the Second Death and “profaning the Sabbath.” Names such as Lucifer, Malphas, Bael, Ordog, Andras, and the Antichrist are mentioned. Each chapter gets considerably more violent and bloody to the point where the penultimate room before the final bosses is just a bloody mess with dead bodies and their entrails strewn all over. It almost looks like the aftermath of a ritualistic sacrifice. The rotoscope scenes get graphic with the imagery as well as blood and the melting/rotting of the skin. The Lord’s name is used in vain a couple of times, but other than that, language is pretty mild with a few usages of “d*mn” and “h*ll”. While John is a priest himself, the trials and tribulations he is put through can potentially waiver his faith, leading to bad ends such as murder or joining the Satanic cult that John is meant to eliminate. In terms of sexual content, there is one scene of a demon representing the "second death" in possession of a partially naked body showing small instances of side boob and butt.

I had Faith: The Unholy Trinity on my radar for quite some time so I was glad that I was given the opportunity to review it. While not every aspect is amazing such as John sometimes being too slow for his own good, the usage of the 8-bit era and the horror setting manage to complement each other greatly. I found myself quite scared at many moments. The experience is compelling and I wanted to stick to it all the way to see how John would get out of it all. The religious aspects were well-researched and as a New Blood-published game, there are numerous references to other titles in their library. It took me about 5 hours to see all the endings with the majority of time spent in chapter III. I understand if the gruesome violence and tons of Satanic imagery will turn many away from this type of game, but I can say for certain that the narrative doesn’t paint it in a positive light whatsoever. Just like John, you’ll need a lot of faith to get through this one.