FAITH is a recent retro indie horror game by Airdorf Games. If your eyes started to glaze over when you saw the words “retro indie horror game”, I know mine would, don’t worry just yet. FAITH sets itself apart from the bunch very easily.
When I say FAITH is a retro game, I can’t stress it enough. The Atari-era pixel art is the most noticeable thing about the game. Despite the old art style chosen, FAITH actually manages to look quite good. It uses very little in terms of graphics but what little it uses is very well executed. There are occasional shifts in the art style which are absolutely beautiful to watch. What little dialogue in the game is presented through a garbled text-to-speech translator which adds a lot to the eerie atmosphere.
In FAITH, you play the role of a Priest returning to the scene of an exorcism gone wrong upon the anniversary of the event. In a classic horror game fashion, you slowly pick up on the things that have transpired by collecting logs scattered around the environment.
The first section of the game has you walk through a forest to reach a house as Moonlight Sonata plays in the background. The only item you are given is a cross which you are told can be used to ward off evil. Throughout this part of the game, you are attacked by a white crawling demonic figure. It is hard to put into words how it feels when the thing jumps out of the corner of your screen at your pathetic self, wailing “I HAVE THE BODY OF A PIG!!”. I suppose “fucking horrifying” does an adequate job.
The second half is where the game really gets going. While the forest section was a slow walk with a gradually increasing paranoia, the house section dials up the intensity to 11. I am not going to get into much detail but it has some outstanding sequences which take full advantage of the art style. There are five possible endings to this game but there is still enough ambiguity in the end that the horror doesn’t end up losing its bite due to over-explaining.
According to the developers, the setting took inspiration from the “Satanic Scare” of the 80s. In my opinion, the game manages to get under my skin because everything about it comes together and manages to successfully evoke a time period before the internet was a thing, before you could access all the knowledge in the world through a smartphone. It was a time when you were never really certain what was true and what wasn’t. It is the sort of game that urban legends, and later creepypastas, were made about.
It is a short game which is available at a ‘name your own price’ model. Fans of horror games should definitely check it out. The demo for FAITH: Chapter II is also out now.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up1otP8qc8s&w=420&h=315]
