It doesn’t seem like Faith: The Unholy Trinity should be able to do this, to scare us, because it looks like something I played decades ago on a BBC Micro. It’s got squiggly MS Paint lines for graphics, there are maybe two frames of animation, the sound garbles anything it plays, and you can even hear system beeps. And yet, somehow, Faith manages it – manages to be unsettling, manages to make me jump, manages to scare me. Had I played this as a kid, I would never have slept again.
Faith: The Unholy TrinityDeveloper: Airdorf GamesPublisher: New Blood InteractivePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Released 21st October. Available on Steam and Itch.io
The theme is exorcism, and Faith begins with you, a priest, driving along a road and parking by a forest, then getting out and walking into the trees. You’re going to finish what you started, with or without the Vatican’s permission, you’re told, and that’s really all you know. Faith is a game that doesn’t tell you much because working out what you’re doing is part of it.
Mechanically, though, you can’t do much: you can walk around and hold up a cross. And holding up the cross near certain objects seems to exorcise souls from them, and doing so produces a note. And notes are important. They are what fill in the story around you, detailing who you are, what you’re doing, what you’re looking for and why. And they’ll give you clues about what you’ll find when you get there, too, the answer to that one nearly always being “demons”.
So, you walk. You trudge through a forest one screen after another as you try to work out where to go. And every so often, you hold up your cross to reveal another note. And the immediate feeling is this all feels very slow, almost soporific, with the garbled classical music – the sort you’d listen to while relaxing in the bath – in your ear.
But then, screech! A four-legged horror that looks like a deranged piece of spaghetti darts out from a corner of the screen and tries to get at you. It moves much more quickly than you and crashes in with a discordant scraping sound, making you panic, but instinctively you hold up your cross and it is gone. The effect is complete: now, you’re on edge. Now you know the game has teeth.