Bleak Faith: Forsaken PS5 Review
Summary: An interesting take on the Souls-Like genre that makes some effort to mix things up a little. It doesn't do anything especially new, but is well put together and an enjoyable entry into the genre.
3.5
Liminal
Bleak Faith: Forsaken, by the small team at Archangel Studios, is the latest in a long line of Souls-like games, seeking to capture the magic of the original Dark Souls while adding their unique twist to the genre.
Taking place in the dark and unforgiving Omnistructure. Players can explore the remnants of a lost civilisation, encounter dangerous enemies, and discover the history of the world they inhabit.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken follows the traditional model set by FromSoftware for the most part. The Omnistructure is large and open-ended, with multiple paths to take throughout. Progress is punctuated by checkpoints (taking the form of floating, mummified corpse ghosts called Homunculi) that act as fast travel points to make navigation of the huge map more manageable.
This is where Bleak Faith: Forsaken starts to differ from the norm, however. These not-bonfires primarily serve as a checkpoint and a means to get around the world quickly. Levelling up takes the form of a more traditional RPG. Defeating enemies awards experience, which in turn levels up the player. Each level grants points that can be allocated to various stats, allowing players to specialise in builds around certain combinations of weapon and stat proficiencies.
Experience points earned from enemies drop off rapidly and the amount required to progress up the ranks increases massively, even early on. Thanks to this, grinding for levels is mostly not necessary, but at the same time getting stuck on a particular boss can’t be remedied by getting stronger. It’s not that big of an issue, but on a few occasions, I would have liked to have been able to be a bit stronger to make the path forward less difficult.
Thanks to the levelling system, death has no penalty beyond lost progress. That may sound quite forgiving, and to some extent, it is, however, the distance between some of the Homunculi is substantial. Taking the first two hours or so of the game as an example, I found two—one near the start, and one just outside of the first boss arena.
So, while death itself has no immediately obvious penalty, having to traverse vast sections of the world to get back to where you died, can be harrowing enough by itself.
The world of the Omnistructure is difficult to categorise. It’s a very dark place, often both tonally and visually. Much of the architecture and areas themselves are very liminal in presentation. There’s an eerie stillness to things. It genuinely does feel abandoned and surreal in places. The opening area especially feels like an unsettling, lucid dream bordering on a nightmare, set in a distorted version of Dark Souls’ Firelink Shrine. It does feel like the original Dark Souls pushed through a light, sci-fi filter.
Enemies themselves are mostly well-designed. Attacks are telegraphed well enough, generally and patterns can be learned without too much hassle. That being said, it’s by no means an easy game. It just means that for the most part, when you fail, it feels like you failed because you didn’t read the situation correctly and act accordingly.
Some enemies, specifically bosses, do have a habit of using attacks that track the player, unrealistically following a dodge and hitting anyway. It’s used a lot in Souls-like games, but it feels just as cheap here as it does anywhere else.
Final Thoughts
So, is Bleak Faith: Forsaken worth your time? If you like Souls-likes, and somehow haven’t hit the point of fatigue with the genre yet (a point that I realised while playing Bleak Faith: Forsaken, that I had reached quite some time ago), then this is absolutely worth a look.
It’s a budget title made by a small team, and as such expectations should be tempered. If you go into it expecting something of the incredible quality of FromSoft titles, then you’re going to be disappointed. However, there’s a solid Souls-like game here with an interesting world and fun, varied combat with enough depth for different play styles to keep things fresh.
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