The latest version of Faith makes its way to the Switch, and it’s just as glorious and frightening as ever.
Faith is not a new game. Its original chapter has been available on PC since 2017, with subsequent chapters dropping in the years since and being repackaged as the Unholy Trinity. The horror game has been lauded for its retro 8-bit visuals while at the same time managing to have a dark story with actual moments of terror. And while it was landlocked to PCs for the entire time it’s finally made it to a new platform, Nintendo’s Switch, and we don’t know how but it makes for great company to Mario.
Faith has the feel of the Commodore 64 and Atari games that I grew up playing in the 80s, where black backgrounds and fast moving dots and pale stick figures somehow made us unintentionally antsy. While Faith captures that aesthetic, it’s managed to make that anxiousness intentional, utilizing the colors and contrasts and blockiness and bizarreness of the era to its advantage. There are so few details in the game’s world that the starkness makes us even more uneasy. In modern games a forest is filled with trees, birds, wind, fog, dirt, but in Faith it’s just black with one tree in the middle and our character making his way across. That’s it, nothing else, just loneliness that forces us to focus. Did we just see something move off screen? Did that shadow shift? The emptiness is thick.
Tied to a story about a priest, an exorcism, and all of the stuff that goes wrong, this starkness sets the stage for one of the most unearthly horror gaming experiences of the last decade. Even after multiple playthroughs (to get different endings) I still find myself getting a little afraid as I try to survive. It leaves us with feels, man. The tension is palpable from the onset, and never, ever lets up. It’s an adventure game more than it is an action game; while there are some small action sequences they’re fully tied to our choices. Who do we chose to kill? What order do we do something in? How we approach every situation is integral to how the story unfolds, as minimal as it may seem, and that puts weight on everything we do.
Or perhaps everything we control the priest to do.
I think the biggest draw to a horror game like this is the realization that the game understands we’re playing it, rather than playing a character in it. Think of it almost as if a demon is trapped inside, watching us, speaking to us through a pre-sound card synthesized voice that jars when it screams “mortis!” whenever we meet our doom.
And, really, it’s just a freaking good game. A REALLY good game. It’s perfect on the Switch, especially on the handheld’s OLED screen. Spitting it out to the TV and playing it in a dark room especially sets a mood. It’s only around an hour or so in length total, and with this being the SPOOKY season it’s definitely a top choice for anyone interested in a horror game on the Switch.
This review is based on a Switch eShop code send to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest for October 13, 2024. Images and video courtesy Airdorf and New Blood Interactive.
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