izigame.me

A Metroidvania with the bones of Blasphemous and the blood of...uh, Bloodborne. The Last Faith wears it's influences on it's sleeve and as such will be compared to them based on look and feel alone. But does it live up to those heights?

Honestly, I'm not really interested in questions like that. Everything is derived of something else, no one creates in a vacuum. Moreso I am interested in how much something is able to take from it's influences while providing something different or new. And even more than that, even if it's something completely derivative, is it fun? Did I like it or enjoy it? Is it a good game? The answer to that question is yes. The Last Faith is a good game. It's a fun game. It's a very enjoyable game.

Well that was an easy review.

Fine, I'll delve a bit deeper. From one look the aesthetic is executed extremely well and I can say that it's influences delivered a style and not a mirror image. While keeping a similar feeling to those worlds, Last Faith makes it's own locations, people and creatures come alive with it's own unique ideas and wonderful pixel art and animation. There is a large variety of locales with not everything having the same coloration, tone or feeling and yet it keeps the world feeling contiguous and same; i.e. not just haphazard unrelated areas thrown next to each other but mountains, swamps, cities with their own individual flavor and everything grounded in the whole overarching world. Visuals for this game are wonderful.

Gameplay is great. You have five stats to level that will govern your health and what types of weapons and damage you can use or do, and while there isn't an enormous variety there is certainly enough to make you change up your loadout when you find a new one for your build. The item variety around the damage types is generous so they expect you to regularly use the bombs and curatives they give you. Sure healing items and bullets for your gun are finite and you need to scrounge or buy them but I never found myself running out and having to grind for them like in Bloodborne. As a Metroidvania you will gradually acquire new abilities and maybe it's just my tastes but I found myself a bit overwhelmed at the choices to the extent that sometimes I'd forget I had an ability because they gave me so much to play with. Then again, people love third person character action games with weapon switching and three different modes and parries and stringing crazy stuff together so perhaps they'll adjust easier than I did. Without using a couple of them maybe I made things harder for myself but it also didn't impact my enjoyment. Combat remains fun throughout and I'd actually argue that as the game goes on the bosses become more and more enjoyable to fight. There are one or two optional ones and a couple near the end that I found really well balanced and super fun.

The music is quite good, themes humming in and out from different areas or to indicate a save room or just to have a cool accompaniment to a boss. Voice acting is similarly nice. Art and pixel work as said above is phenomenal.

My complaints are small. A couple optional fights that were re-used noticeably down to the mid fight damage switch. Bad signposting in one area of the game that made me confused where I was supposed to go. Maybe enemy health was a little too high as I always felt normal enemy fights were slightly longer than they should be? Biggest critique being that the story is not complicated or convoluted but it sure feels that way due to the way it's told. Sure sure, we're all used to the Soulslike formula of item descriptions and vague dialogue and there's something inherently charming and thrilling in figuring things out that are hinted at or laid softly at your feet. But you really need to be careful with your wording when doing things this way as there are many times in this game where an NPC or item was communicating an important story part to me and I had question marks for eyes because the way they said it was so obtuse or meandering that it completely lost me. At the end, I did understand what had transpired and the flow of events but that was in spite of the writing and not because the writing was so good at leading me. Again though, this is a small critique and the biggest one I can muster.

All in all, it's more than the sum of it's parts. It is not a reskin, it is not a copy, it is very much it's own thing and a passionate project that should be judged on it's own merits. Played over the course of a couple days because Last Faith was engaging throughout and I wanted to see where it went.