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Bleak Faith: Forsaken is one of the most awe-inspiring games I have ever played. In many regards, it's a janky mess, and the story is even more cryptic than any FromSoftware game. When a certain NPC told me that she had no idea what was going on, all I could think was "Me too, girl."
But the sheer ambition and scale behind it more than makes up for its flaws. I have played hundreds, if not thousands of games in my life. Countless mods for various games - Doom, Quake, Thief levels. My Steam library contains over 5000 games. And yet I have never experienced anything like Bleak Faith: Forsaken before. It intrigued me with its mysteries, pulled me in with its immense world, and will certainly stick with me for a long time.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is what happens when Dark Souls and BLAME! meet on a trip to the Balkans and have a baby there.
The game's most impressive feature is the world design. I'd describe it as Byzantine Brutalism, mixing elements of gothic medieval and mediterranean architecture with brutalist concrete. The game takes place in what is referred to as the Omnistructure, a huge ever-expanding structure of disparate elements that connect into a convoluted maze of half-finished buildings that don't seem to serve any practical purpose. If you ever read the manga BLAME!, you can clearly see the inspiration this game took from it. Other than the game NaissanceE, which is also available here on Steam, Bleak Faith: Forsaken is the closest thing to replicating the vibe of that manga in computer game form. I often found myself staring in awe at the impossibly huge structures the game presents. It truly is a visually impressive spectacle, and when it comes to sheer scale, I don't think there's anything else like it.
Towers rise many kilometers into the sky, connected by impossibly long bridges. Objects that look like they're just backdrops on the horizon turn out to be places you can actually walk to. The downside of the world design is that sometimes, it can take quite a while to traverse these huge distances, but the sheer awe this sense of scale inspires more than makes up for it. There are many games that are larger than this - your average Ubisoft open world, for example, or a proper open world RPG like Morrowind. Yet even the largest game worlds out there don't hold a candle to the sheer scale of a single structure that Bleak Faith: Forsaken conveys. It truly feels like you're exploring a cutout of the megastructure in BLAME!, and I absolutely love it for that. If you like exploration, this game is for you. You're going to fall in love with its strange, complex, convoluted, unexplained world and the many nooks and crannies you can crawl into.
Gameplay-wise, it's a janky but solid Souls-like. There are a handful of boss fights, but they're not particularly hard (I died about a dozen times in the hardest ones, but usually in Dark Souls and its clones it takes me 20+ attempts to get through a boss so this one is clearly easier). Combat is very responsive, to the point that you can dodge-roll out of an attack animation, so you have to pay less attention to timing than in other games of this genre. Character building is pretty straightforward: there are 4 attributes to spend your skillpoints on, and killing bosses grants you perk essence which you can invest into up to 4 perks which give your character a passive buff. My favorite of these is vampirism, which makes you regenerate health in proportion to damage you deal. Every perk can be upgraded once to make it even more powerful and versatile. It's a cool system that allows for a variety of builds while also forcing you to specialize. Additionally, you can enhance your equipment with stones that add certain bonuses; the amount of these stones you can slot into an item depends on item level, and items are upgraded by a character just like how blacksmiths do it in Dark Souls. This allows for even more customization, and makes armor useful even for players who go for an agile dodge playstyle, as your armor can be enhanced with several passive effects.
The controls are very fluid and responsive. Initially, movement felt a little too slippery for me, as if my character had soap on his boots, but once I got used to it I really liked how fluid it was. The game plays perfectly on mouse & keyboard, and was indeed designed with those in mind, unlike other Souls-likes which were designed for controllers and then sloppily ported to PC. The keyboard layout is quite reasonable, with one exception - why the hell did they make caps lock the button to open your inventory?! Other than that, the default layout is great, and you get 4 quick-use slots for potions, which can be used with the 1-4 number keys.
The enemy variety is pretty cool. Most of them are humanoid, but there's a few interesting monsters and robots to fight, too. Some of them hit quite hard and require you to stay on your toes. Giant enemies are particularly interesting: you first have to cripple their legs, then climb on their back and stab them with a knife until they die, reminiscent of the enemy climbing in Dragon's Dogma. Combat itself is combo-focused, if you chain attacks together properly, you can deal a lot more damage and it costs less stamina to attack.
The story is told through some journal entries you can find while exploring, as well as NPC dialog. And most of it is even more cryptic than your average Souls game, so you have to do a lot of figuring out on your own. Or just explore, enjoy the vibe, and accept that you're only going to understand half of it. All you need to know is that there's an anomaly which everyone is trying to get to, and so do you.
The main selling point of the game is the world design and exploration. And for me, this is the most important aspect of any game, especially a Souls-like. Bleak Faith: Forsaken has a fascinating and unique world that will pull you in and make you want to explore more of it until you reach the end. A truly fascinating visual spectacle unlike any other. Trust me, you'll never see anything of this sheer gigantic scale in any other computer game. And for that alone, I can fully, thoroughly recommend it.
There's no other game in this genre that reminded me as much of the original Dark Souls as this. Bleak Faith: Forsaken *gets it*. The devs - only three people, by the way! - understand how to build a fascinating and interconnected world.