Game Review: Forgive Me Father

[dorchadas]

It's a tradition to play spooky games during October--well, for some definitions of traditions, since I skipped it for a few years when Laila was pretty young. But last year I got back into it with Darkside Detective, and way back in 2018 I played Stasis. This year, I was looking for another game that I could do in the course of October, which meant that it had to be relatively short and probably not so spooky that I couldn't play it around sashagee, because she already makes me play Cataclysm with my headphones in since she doesn't like the zombie noises. Well, that was going to be true of basically anything that counted as a horror game, but the few times I've been jumpscared playing non-horror games she mentions that I'm giving her a heart attack by suddenly jumping, so maybe something more psychological horror would be better?

Well, I didn't pick that. I saw that a retro-styled old FPS game with Lovecraftian themes was on sale for 66% off, less than $10, and I bought it. It's been years since the last time I played an FPS, back when I played Project Warlock, and while I thought that game was a fun mishmash in the way that some 90s games were it still never really cohered and I ended with thinking that maybe I should have played Hexen or Heretic instead. So how does Forgive Me Father match that, or the games of yore?

All around me are familiar faces...

Forgive Me Father begins with the option to play a priest or a journalist--just need an antiquarian and a detective to get a full Call of Cthulhu group of investigators--with a note that the priest is more focused on defensive play and the journalist on offensive play. The priest is also a man and the journalist is a woman, though this really only affects the voice over quotes you get since you don't ever find another character to talk to during the game. I picked the priest, mostly because I saw mention that the journalist's voice lines were mostly MCU-style quips that would sound extremely out of place in the implied 1920s Lovecraftian setting--and that mention was right, since during one chase sequence the journalist says, "Oh noooo, it's the giant flesh wall of dooooooooooooooooooooom"--and the priest's voice acting is also not stellar, because nearly everything is done with minimal emotion even though the game involves a descent into madness. This isn't Deus Ex where that just becomes part of the game's charm.

Once you start, you're playing an FPS. You have a pistol and fight some slow-moving enemies, and then you get a shotgun and fight some enemies with ranged attacks, and so on. You've played Doom, you know how this goes. In the classic old FPS tradition, levels have secrets to discover which thankfully do not require you to hump all the walls spamming the open key. Most secrets just required looking a bit off the beaten path, maybe turning your view a particular way, though in later levels they get more creative--the one I'm thinking of requires you to stand in some farmer's targeting range and shoot a target to open a door. Makes no sense in the context of the level but it's nice to actually have to do something different than run and gun, which is most of what you do.

It's an old-styled FPS, so there's no waist-high walls. Enemies jump out at you, you shoot them, every once in a while you get to a big room and the exits lock and heavy metal starts playing and enemies start teleporting in and you circle-strafe them until they're all dead, you get a nice satisfying chord, and then you go back to walking through corridors. It's the gameplay you know and love and it works just fine. The only issue I had is that I wish there were some more diagetic way that enemies appeared rather than just poofing in with a flash of light. It works fine in the later levels of the game but when you're just in someone's house and zombies appear out of nowhere it harms my immersion, or at least such immersion as I have when playing a refrigerator box holding a gun.

This is my BOOMSTICK.

The real draw of the game is the visuals and design. The levels and monsters all have a brightly-colored, distinct art style that really looks great in motion even while they're still sticking to the everything-is-2D-sprites Doom aesthetic. Even sashagee mentioned how she liked the look of the game, which is something considering she hates horror media and would never play even something as horror-lite as this.

The levels begin as mostly real places, albeit still video game levels--the first level is a mansion and no mansion in the world has hallways that long with no doors in them. You visit city streets, city rooftops, a canning plant, a graveyard, the nearby swamp, a hospital, all pretty standard Lovecraftian locations. And then around halfway through the game, things get...weirder. You go into a secret science lab, and then underwater, and then into a magical cave filled with glowing crystals, and then into a city built by prehuman aliens, and jump through portals to weird worlds--the game loses any sense of grounding in the real world. I get the sense that this is intentional, that the way the levels go from "real places" to "obviously video game setpieces" is supposed to mirror the protagonist's gradual detachment from reality, but if so this is pretty subtle because it's not like there's anything other than the setting to gauge yourself against. There is a "sanity" mechanic, but it's nothing like the great sanity effects from Eternal Darkness, it's more like a Limit Break that gives you super combat powers when it fills up. I mostly only noticed it during the arena setpiece battles, when the heavy metal would start to play and the screen would get a greyish filter over the top.

Monster variety was generally pretty good. You have your standard zombies; your early ranged guys, here done as Innsmouth Look-ing porty gentlemen who shoot energy beams at you or as actual fishermen who throw fishing spears; and your enemies that rush into melee, done as possessed and mutated asylum patients. From here, though, it gets more interesting. One of the enemy types disguises themselves as one of the explosive barrels that of course litter the levels, there's a ranged enemy that looks like they're wearing World War I chemical gear and which you can turn into a melee enemy if you shoot the tank on their backs, ghouls that do tremendous damage if they hit you with the tombstones they're carrying, teleporting cultist wizards, what are effectively small shoggoths, summoning altars that run on auto-pilot, and new enemies are still being introduced right up through the last couple levels of the game. The loading screens showed one of the final enemies from the very first levels, and I kept waiting to see when I would run into them while I was playing. When I did, they caught me by surprise by immediately shooting lasers at me. I don't remember that part of "The Call of Cthulhu."

It's like some kind of...king. Wearing yellow.

The more divisive part of the battle system are the boss battles, of which there are five and every one of them is different.

The first boss is a classic DPS check, pretty similar to the Icon of Sin from Doom II. It's a giant flesh monster that shoots projectiles at you and the only question is whether you have enough ammo to beat it before you run out of health. There's even health and ammo powerups helpfully scattered across the arena like this is some kind of first-person shooter, so you really shouldn't have any trouble at all unless you're completely new to the genre.

The second boss, pictured above, is where actual mechanics start to come into play. It's surrounded by a force field, and you need to travel around the arena and destroy the focusing crystals--helpfully placed outside the force field, as demanded by the Protagonist/Boss Accords of 1993--to let the shield drop and then open up on the boss. Of course, then the shield comes back, the boss starts summoning enemies, the boss summons giant lasers that spin around the arena that you need to dodge behind walls to avoid (just like Hildred Castaigne did in "The Repairer of Reputations"), and you repeat this two or three times until the boss dies.

The third boss is where I ragequit at least once. It's a big giant fish that submerges and re-emerges (always behind you), summons minions, and then when phase one ends, it summons a big flood of water and you die. At least, that's what I assumed happened the first few times I played until I looked up what I was doing wrong. The answer is that an island raises out of the water on the complete opposite end of the arena and you're supposed to run and jump from island to island to avoid the rising water, and I'm sure I would have spent at least a few more attempts--maybe many more--before I figured that out. Even once I did figure that out it was still extremely annoying because the same thing happens again after phase two and you have to jump all the way back. When I finally made it to phase three, I just burned invincibility (about which see below) and unloaded on the boss to kill it.

The fourth boss made up for all this annoyance, though. You enter a serene graveyard, if such a thing is possible in the horror genre, and wander around looking at the gravestones and the grass and the trees. And there's no boss, and you keep looking around until you realize it's right behind you and then the boss battle begins. This boss's main gimmick is that it's basically an ascended normal enemy--it has one attack and relatively low health, but it replicates itself dozens of times so it's all the fun parts of a first person shooter. When I think of "phases" like in the third boss, I think of JRPG or MMO boss battles, not retro FPSes. You run around blasting and dodging as the bosses shoot you and it's a great arena battle. This was by far the most fun I had fighting a boss.

The last boss is pretty dumb and it's almost entirely because of fake difficulty, by which I mean "camera angles." You get to fight Cthulhu, and at first I was like "Wait, why I am shooting rockets at Cthulhu, I should be crashing a boat into it" but I ran with it. Cthulhu towers above you, behind some rocks because you're supposed to be on the arisen-R'lyeh, so there are crazily-angled rocks and masonry all around you, but most of the actual attacks come horizontally across the arena. The main tension in the fight is having to look up to shoot Cthulhu, but every time you do that, you're completely unable to see all of the ground attacks it does. Here's an example, where Cthulhu shoots some fireballs and then the very next attack is patterns on the floor that you have to avoid standing in. There's some magma-looking slime blobs to dodge, a little bullet hell portion where you have to dance between light orbs, all kinds of things like that. I get that this is the actual point of the fight, that you need to find the time to shoot the boss while avoiding all of its attacks, but it continues the trend of trying to be clever in ways that I don't think serve the game.

I'm not playing a retro-styled FPS because I want to do DDR. I'm playing it because I don't want regenerating health, I don't want a two-weapon limit, and I don't want endless expanses of grey and brown corridors with waist-high walls. I want heavy metal while I circle-strafe firing an energy weapon that shoots projectiles the size of a large child. Know your audience.

Every game is now an RPG.

The main distinction between the priest and the journalist other than the aforementioned voice acting is each character has different skills available and thus different upgrades in their skill tree. The term is a big misleading--a big portion of the skill tree is actually weapon upgrade, most of which have profound changes in the way that the weapon works. That FPS classic mainstay, the shotgun, can be upgraded to the power shotgun, which is basically Doom II's super shotgun with more pellets, better damage, and a satisfying KA-CLICK when it reloads; or it can be upgraded to the spitter, where bullets bounce off walls, and then to the abyssal shotgun, which basically works like Unreal Tournament's flak cannon. The MP28 can be turned into some kind of super-science grenade launcher or just a better machine gun, the single pistol can become dual pistols or an automatic pistol, and so on. Some of the upgrades drastically change the way the base gun works, like the above-mentioned grenade launcher or the drum machine gun turning into a laser rifle. You can also get the ability to respect when you beat one of the bosses, so you're not locked in once you pick your guns. This is good, because I picked a bunch of explosive guns with area effects and had some real trouble in later areas until I used a respect to be a bit more balanced.

The other traits are split. Some of them increase your health and armor caps, and these usually come behind other traits. Sometimes one of the possible upgrades to a weapon, so you need to decide if you really want that automatic pistol if it'll lock you out of later taking the health upgrade. The other ones improve the profession traits you get depending on whether you picked priest or journalist. If you're a priest, for example, you can improve the crucifix, which heals you and thus improves increase the amount of health you restore; the necromonicon, which makes you invincible for a short period of time; the medallion, which gives you infinite ammo; or the aspergillium, which freezes monsters in place when it hits them--not a very Lovecraftian concept, but a nice powerup. The journalist gets a sword of light, which heals when you hit enemies with it in close range; a camera, which unleashes a bright flash and stuns nearby enemies; the voodoo doll, which causes an on-demand explosion that you're immune to; and the "cigarette," which slows down time. These skills and the voiceovers are the only difference in the classes, everything else is the same, so you could just as well decide whether you want to play a man or a woman when you pick your class.

That said, basically every single video I looked up about the game, they were playing the journalist, so take that as you will.

Just needs red string connecting the notes.

I was tempted to put in another section and talk about the story, but it honestly doesn't matter? Not even in the usual sense of how a retro FPS's story is generally just a skeleton around which to hang why you're killing like a thousand guys with only a shotgun and pure rage as your weapons. I mean that there are a ton of clues in game about the mayor of the town being a cultist, a ship called the Blue Squid arriving in town after a mutiny caused by most of the crew apparently being driven mad, a citizen of the town who is found after having disappeared and starts speaking in an unknown language upon waking, your character's cousin looking into the situation in the town, and so on. The pause screen shows you a running tally of how many story items you've found as you play and as you can see in the first screen shot, they pop up with big "STORY" text to make them stand out.

But, spoilers, they never actually go anywhere. There is never any resolution, never any real explanation for why you suddenly invade an ice palace or just leaping through dimensional portals, other than the very end where the game tries to pull the it was all dreamyour character went insane and killed a bunch of innocent townspeople because they thought there were Lovecraftian abominations threatening the stability of the world. And this is a well-trodden path in Lovecraftian fiction, but the thing is, we generally get enough of the story to know that when the good citizens of &TOWN_NAME imprison our protagonist in an asylum it's because they actually did face Lovecraftian threats to life and sanity. In Forgive Me Father, we're told that the protagonist went crazy and basically nothing we learned about the setting or the story actually happened. Which, okay, that's a very pat ending, but why put all that effort into a story that doesn't add up and goes nowhere? There's an explanation here that helps tie the lore notes into the characters you play, but assuming that's correct, then the end result is as I stated above--your character is an insane serial killer and none of the Lovecraftian stuff happened. Except that still doesn't account for the crew of the Blue Squid or the mayoral candidate's disappearance.

What I'm saying is that, basically, it's a retro FPS. Gun go boom, enemies go splat, score go up.

Oops. I guess I did put in a story section.

Title drop.

So should you play Forgive Me Father? Well, I'm going to say that...it's okay.

The art style and visuals are really the best part. If you look at the screenshots above and think huh, that looks pretty cool, then I'd get it if it's on sale. That said, there is a Forgive Me Father II out, and everything I've heard about it is that the dev took most of the criticism about the game to heart and improved basically every aspect of it. And it keeps the art style. It's a fine shooter, but having played it through once and gotten some achievements, I'm definitely not going to go back to it to try to play through it again as a journalist or anything like that. I'd be much better served playing Dusk, Ion Fury, or one of the other retro FPSes that fans think are the best examples of new takes on the genre.

Maybe I would have been better served doing that anyway, but Forgive Me Father has some really nice art.