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Returning once more Bleak Faith: Forsaken now brings its hidden gem statues to consoles, is it truly deserving of this small cult following? Or is it simply people viewing the product through rose tinted goggles? Find out as I go over the ups and down in this latest Soul-bourne console port.

Bleak Faith Mechanics and Story

General Story

Bleak Faith takes a unique stance when it comes to storytelling by letting the player discover and explore the environment slowly putting things together, the opening cinematic paints a bleak (hah see what I did there) environment regarding the Omnistrucutre and the various players included, Bleak Faith approach to story  and lore is that there is none, you may piece together portions of what’s going on but a lot of it is up to interpretation. You play as the Forsaken and that’s about it. Are you simply a robot trapped in a bleak dystopia? Is this all a simulation? Is the Handler (a pivotal character to the player) simply an AI assigned to help the player? The only way to know is to push forward deeper and deeper into the almost lovecraftian horror fest until you find your own truth.

Combat and Exploration

The main meat and potatoes of every game in this genre, if the combat isn’t solid then these games tend to fall by the wayside. Combat in Bleak Faith takes a much slower approach than say for example Dark Souls, in the sense that it is literally as slow as watching the grass grow, swings feel like they have a lot of weight behind them and you’re not just zipping around at light speed which really helps push the narrative experience that Bleak Faith is working with. That being said the speed of combat also presents several issues, you’re free to dodge/block and even now perfect block and parry with this console rendition and even jump, jumping while an integral part of both combat (as you can jump over attacks) as well as exploration in general is incredibly floaty and feels disjointed from the experience, the same can be said for the dashing and dodge mechanic during combat as it can sometimes have a mind of its own, simply dashing forward can sometimes cause your character to shift to the side for no reason.

The variety of armour and weapons are sure to please any fan of the genre as it has something for everything, the biggest feature is that much like games such as Nioh and its ki pulse system, each swing is based on how well you time it, correctly timing each swing in a combo reduce the overall stamina consumption and leads to increased damage overall which really brings a new spin to a genre that’s been stagnant and similar in its execution for decades now.

Bleak Faith is all about exploration as mentioned, there is little lore or story involved throughout the experience as you’re left to piece things together of your own free will, exploration is the main feature here as each zone is linked together in interesting and unique ways, you have no way of knowing if you’re about to walk into a  zone meant for endgame or simply going onto the next rung of the ladder, while incredibly expansive and visually pleasing, the lack of an in game map or other similar easy ways of returning to some areas as well as other problems I’ll mention in my conclusion leaves a rather mixed option of the state of this game. This is not a game that will handhold you when it comes to direction, you’re free to go about things as you wish and stumble into dangers at every turn. You will more than likely end of missing out of several zones simply due to not finding a well-covered up pathway or you may find yourself walking for ages to a boss room or simply being unsure of how to progress for a good while which as mentioned left me with mixed feelings, while the aesthetic and design was brilliant there where more than several problems I found throughout my time playing, all of which I’ll cover in my conclusion below.

Upgrades

As with all games in this genre you have the Handler – this character after collecting echos scattered across all the different zones can allow your player character to increase the power and strength of your weapons and armour. You’ll want to collect as many of these as possible as the weapons and armors not only gain additional bonus slots (for crystals defining stats) but also general crafting needs and damage buffs, you can generally find the Handler at the start of most zones (in some cases after clearing certain mechanics) after leaving the hub area be sure to search the Handler out whenever you gain some new gear to keep up to date with each zone.

Abilities

Much like with upgrades you also have access to abilities, though you can only have two at a time, at the other two slots are generally covered by weapon abilities (if they have any that is) these require ability splinters and while you can replace abilities whenever you wish, unlike perks as I’ll mention below. The cost of replacing abilities can become quite high overtime so really think about the abilities you wish to use throughout the game to prevent yourself having to farm and find these splinters constantly. Unlike perks there is a pretty limited pool of abilities to choose from, ranging from movement abilities to damaging AoEs, companion summons as well as out of combat stealth, take note however these abilities cost Flux (MP equivalent as mentioned previously) and the majority scale with intelligence.

Perks

Along with general upgrades and abilities you’ll gain access to perks as you traverse the many zones available to you, these much like armour and weapons can also be upgraded using “Perk Essence” the noticeable thing with perks however are these are permanent choices and can’t be changed at all, so this feature does punish new players to a degree that haven’t hyper focused on the style of build they wish to run. While there are many safe options to choose from there are also much riskier and quite frankly useless perks that may make the gaming experience harder until you reach later areas.

For me personally I feel that perks such as vampirism where a solid choice being able to keep me topped up while faithful which was a -20% in general stats felt far to irritating to use, while they both turned out to be solid perks later down the line it too far to long for something like faithful to be worthwhile.

Conclusion

So, I’ve been holding onto this for the majority of the review, can I recommend Bleak Faith to anyone? No, not really. Sure there are many players that will enjoy this game but personally throughout my experience, all the exploration and all the different combat encounters there where so many low points and so few high points that the entire game just left me more frustrated even after completing its admittedly short story section, I have no intention of returning to this game in order to go for the alternative endings as this game has sullied my enjoyment of the Souls-like franchise to the point that I unless something utterly game changing releases in the genre I will not return to it.

Before people say, “Oh you just didn’t understand the game” or “Git gud” I will state that I’ve been a fan of the Soulsborne series since the release of Demon Souls back on the Playstation 3 and have close to every mainstream titles that’s considered in the soulsborne genre, I truly enjoy this style of game which is what drew me to Bleak Faith to begin with, however, let me go over several of the massive game breaking issues I came across and see if this is something you’d want to consistently experience throughout this kind of game.

My real tipping point with this game was during a midlevel area called The Upper Blocks, the area itself was very aesthetically pleasing, however it was densely populated with broken down building and inaccessible areas and paths that branched out into nothingness, yes this is a game about exploration and discovery however, designing multiple buildings with staircases that just repeat again and again that end up going into rooms with nothing in this isn’t a rewarding experience in the slightest, in this instance I was searching around for the boss of the area – Silicon Visage. After ascending the tallest building possible while escaping some quite frankly poorly programmed modes I reached the top, to which for some reason my character was immediately thrust into the air, then thrown down right into the middle of said boss fight while stuck inside the floor unable to do anything, unable to be damaged by the boss or in short do anything at all. How did this happen? Why did this happen? I still have no clue, as the actual path to the boss area was a good distance away so there are several areas that you can traverse that not only could potentially cause this, but I’ve also come across several instances of areas that simply standing on will automatically kill the player character. Which leads me to ask, why the heck are you building assets and linking them up to other structures when standing on them instantly just kills the character? This is a frankly baffling design choice that is present throughout the entire game…

Touching on exploration, while other games have done similar – See Dark Souls 1 for an example, Bleak Faith just makes exploration a chore without any kind of reward, as you need to find the “zone” entrances in order to go to new areas and while Red Lamps can help indicate where you’re required to go these are not always clear, the difference between exploration in this and Dark Souls 1 is then within something like Dark Souls exploration is rewarded and there is a clear direction on where to go, the hub area features several areas and you instantly know where you can go and what happens if an area is too strong for you? You can simply go back to the hub, Bleak Faith doesn’t follow this method which leads to multiple instances of pointless venturing for little to no reward, you explored this entire building and climbed to the top? Congrats here’s a healing potion for you, not even the best variation, the bog standard level 1 style potion. So while visually pleasing despite having an odd mix of styles and genres Bleak Faith has a massive issue with just clearly explaining what is happening and where to go overall.

Finally, I’ll touch on my last point and that is the combat and the apparent “Hardcore Combat Experience” that’s plastered over all the promotional work. While the updated console version does have an easier time when compared to previous releases as mentioned above due to the changes to blocking and parrying, the game isn’t that hard at all. The hardcore experience of it comes from as mentioned above the exploration and sheer amount of broken aspects that the game still suffers from. Upon defeating the first boss Konrad, which is an honestly welldesigned boss that teaches the mechanics of the game to the player extremely well. The game was just over, the twohanded weapon that was presented then helped me 2-3 shot most smaller enemies throughout the rest of the game, after being able to upgrade it to max it just became all that easier. The only instance of combat being hard was coming across mobs that could just one shot you with no indication regardless of size.

To shorten this list as this review could quite literally be me ranting about all the issues I’ll jot down here some of the other issues I came across.

• Vanishing Enemies (Not a stealth mechanic just gone)
• Enemies walking through walls/getting stuck in walls
• Floating enemies (Enemies stuck in the geometry of the level itself)
• Broken physics in multiple areas
• Getting stuck in walls/floors and other locations (Either from sustaining a hit or just at random)
• Elevators (Do I need to say more?)
• Crowd surfing on enemies and vice-versa
• Vanishing items (On character)

Along with many many other issues that plagued the entire experience for me. While some may say “It’s only 3 devs that made this” my response to this would be – Whether 3 davs or 300 doesn’t excuse the level of incompetence displayed within this game. Was it released too early? Yes, it needed more work, yes? It should have originally been an early access title or similar when its release on PC. However this isn’t the PC version this is the Console version (PS5) to be specific and while things have been updated and changed these bugs and glitches are EVEN MORE prominent than the PC version that was released over a year ago… if you can take the time to update models and mechanics you could also spend the time fixing all these other issues. Rather than deciding which shade of grey to blanket the gaming environment in.

To finish while many games give a very clear warning regarding epilepsy triggers, Bleak Faith has to be one of the most foul games when it comes to this, other games may have instance of bright flashing lights but they’re not fundamentally incorporated into a plethora of mobs attacks, for instance, the zealot enemies within the Asylum section have at best described a “Flash bomb” ability that makes the entire screen go while with only a small indication of where the mob is standing. If you’ve decided to run past mobs which is a common practice when corpse running back to a boss these mobs can chain this ability thus constantly leaving to blinded, it’s not even just the mobs the general environment can present the issues as I was delving deep into a water based section I was met with a large eye swimming towards said eye immediately blasted me with a pure white flashing screen for a few short seconds before sending me to another area that was equally bright and visually disorienting that genuinely made me feel sick to my stomach and that’s without having any history of epilepsy.

Overall while Bleak Faith: Forsaken can have some truly great moments and looks visually pleasing in some places these moments don’t cover the plethora of issues that still plague this game that should have been fixed before a console release.

Written by: Steve Gilman