Bleak Faith: Forsaken Review – Fog on the Barrow Downs

Bleak Faith: Forsaken was not a great game when it came out. Staggering in its incredible and sprawling vision and ambition (especially given the three person development team that made it), the game nonetheless buckled under the weight of its own scope juxtaposed against the scarce resources its development received. While the game had a lot of great stuff going in its favour – a very intriguing setting, combined with some incredible art design and breathtaking locales, as well as some really compelling exploration relying on the player’s observational prowess were chief among its merits – it was buggy, barely functioning, frustrating to actually play, and obtuse to the point of veering on unplayable plenty of times.

The development team were dedicated to their vision, however, and continued to release several updates and patches for the game, addressing a lot of the earlier feedback and criticism, and polishing up a lot of jank. Don’t get me wrong – this is still an extremely janky game, with floaty controls, a terrible lock on, a poor camera, framerate drops with alarming frequency, and confusing tutorials and UI that can often be counterintuitive in how they convey information to the player. Weird compromises are evident all across the board – for example, the way the game handles ladders now is baffling, asking you to hold down a button to cut to black and putting you at the bottom (or top). You don’t get any actual animations of you going up or down the ladder. Worse still, there is no actual feedback when you are holding down the button (triangle on PS5) to use a ladder. You get a prompt to lower the ladder, but you never get one when you go up or down it.

Weirdness like this is evident across the board, and it is unclear how much of the obtuseness is an attempt at the minimalist storytelling and exposition FromSoft’s seminal Dark Souls series employs, and how much of it is simply down to budget and resource constraints. Take, for instance, the narrative.The incredible aesthetic for the world – a fusion of steampunk, gothic, and some cyberpunk – hints at a greater story here, while making the world itself compelling to explore based purely on how things might look. But the game never quite gets there. The things said by NPCs and bosses, or lore drops in the game, remains inscrutable to me. What I can tell you is that the world and aesthetic certainly seem to suggest it might be very cool.

"The world design and the resultant atmosphere really does do most of the heavy lifting here."

The world design and the resultant atmosphere really does do most of the heavy lifting here. The aesthetic and art for the locales is legitimately inspired, evoking a blend of the kind of feelings that Bloodborne, and Shadow of the Colossus might have, and the actual design within the world is great too, with multiple offshoots and branches and tributaries all twisting into and upon themselves and the main path. Stumbling upon a location that opens a gate or drops a ladder down to an area you were in earlier is always a great feeling in Souls-like games, and that is an area Bleak Faith is decidedly satisfying at. Indeed, if that is all the game was doing, I think it would have been much better off, because this is the part the game is actually good at, and whatever jank and rough edges exist do not undermine or detract from the game’s strengths on this front.

The problem comes with the insistence on combat. Bleak Faith does not do well here. The actual combat is reasonably well thought out, relying on stamina as the main resource for players to manage in combat, much like pretty much every other game of this ilk. However, the problem is that pretty much everything else in the game is at odds with what the combat expects from the player. The controls are sluggish, the lock-on is perplexing (every single time on the first boss fight, it locked on to some enemy who was very far away and not even reachable instead of the actual boss who is right there, for example), the camera is always a struggle, and the character movement is just far too floaty and heavy to be able to keep up with what the game obviously wants its player character to do. None of this is a problem in the trash mobs, which are so easy that they barely register, really. It is a problem in the bosses, who hit far harder and move way quicker than the camera or controls can keep up with, typically.

It’s a shame because the combat, again, seems to hint at some interesting ideas with the combat as well. The combo system with its accompanying buffs and penalties is an interesting spin on how stamina based combat is typically handled in FromSoft’s games (and their derivatives), and the perks and abilities systems also allow for interesting progression and build opportunities than the average game in this genre typically does. But none of it matters as much when in the actual heat of the moment, the game mechanically lets down all of your planning and all of those intriguing systems and ideas.

Bleak Faith: Forsaken came out a few years ago on PC, and this release marks its debut on consoles. To be perfectly honest, nothing Bleak Faith does seems like it would not have worked on PS4 and Xbox One, although of course, seeing the struggle that the game has on existing consoles with keeping it together, I understand that the smaller development team did not want to take on more than they needed to. With that said, nothing here is particularly taking advantage of the new consoles. I do like the really fine haptic feedback on the DualSense that the game provides but other than that, you don’t get to select between different graphical modes, the load times are fine but near the middle of the pack for a game of this nature, and the other technical issues such as the frame rate drops and pop in have been mentioned several times already.

The game all comes down to a few core strengths then – the art, the aesthetic, the atmosphere, and the exploration. All of that is great. Pretty much everything else has caveats, or stumbles greatly in its execution, from the story being entirely obtuse, the combat being either completely trivialized or undermined by the poor camera and controls, and the game’s jank constantly getting in the way and generating friction for the player. If you are a fan of the genre, and love the atmosphere and satisfaction of exploring these worlds, and have already run through the several other alternatives available, then it’s worth looking into this game. It’s not full price, which does make it a slightly easier pill to swallow than it otherwise would have been with the sheer number of caveats and issues it has. But if you are not a fan of the genre, or have yet to play other entrants into the genre, most of which are better rounded titles than this is, then I would recommend those before this one for now.

As for the developers, I do hope they stick to their vision, and keep at it. There is a lot of talent here, very clearly – and I hope they are able to build on their strengths, and work on addressing their weaknesses. They could put out something truly special at some point in the future.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.