The Last Faith review

12.01.2024 - 08:46 / pcgamer.com

It all starts off so well for The Last Faith, another entry in the growing «Fine, we'll make our own Bloodborne for PC» subgenre. A new dark fantasy game that makes me go shopping with my own XP? One more moody adventure steeped in blood? Another chance to fell gigantic bosses with too many insides on their outsides and celebrate with a bit of NOUN VERBED text afterwards?

What is it? A copy of FromSoftware's homework with added Alucard
Release date November 15, 2023
Expect to pay $28 / £25
Developer Kumi Souls Games
Publisher Playstack
Reviewed on Intel i9-13900HX, GeForce RTX 4080 (laptop), 16GB RAM
Steam Deck TBA
Link Official site

Yes please.

The Last Faith's pixel art is ridiculously lush, every single location dripping with melancholy gothic atmosphere. There are more forgotten cemeteries and dribbly candles in here than Morticia Addams' sweetest dreams. Purely as a visual work of art, The Last Faith ticks every box with a flourish. It's a shame the rest of it is about as fresh as the living dead that roam its halls.

The game's recurring problem is that it often does things because FromSoftware (and, to a lesser extent, Konami's Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) did them first, but it never really wonders why they did them, or if it can make good use of those ideas. At times The Last Faith lacks the level of polish required to convincingly pull off its copy job.

The Last Faith's story is particularly guilty: Like Bloodborne it's mostly told through a combination of frill-cuffed NPCs and scattered item descriptions, although unlike in Bloodborne every sentence seems to have been written as if the driving question behind it was «How did Bloodborne handle this?» and not «Is this conveying a tiny sliver of The Last Faith's story in an entertaining way?» I never believe anyone's talking in quasi-Catholic grandiloquence jumbled with Lovecraftianish mysticism for any reason beyond «they're supposed to.»

Like the presentation, the fights between these empty sentences start off promisingly. Gruff main character Eryk handles in much the same way Dracula's beautiful undead son did back in 1997, complete with dramatic silhouette whenever he backdashes to safety. His standard-issue dodge roll with generous invincibility feels nice and snappy, and in one rare example of brilliance The Last Faith sidesteps Bloodborne's boring-but-essential post-death farming runs for healing items by having a small supply of blood vials healing injections appear nearby whenever Eryk falls to a major boss and reawakens at the last save/teleport point he passed.

Then the problems start popping up again. This game's guns lack the sense of purpose of Bloodborne's beautifully tuned counter mechanic. Here, guns are just limited-use