It’s an old truism to assert that what you can imagine is scarier than what you can see. That, certainly, is something that fuels the current movement of lo-fi horror games, whose polygonal graphics are nothing if not suggestive, their images and ideas truly coming to life in the mind of the player. Many of these games are in the key of the 3D stylings of the N64 and PS1 era, but Airdorf’s Faith: The Unholy Trinity looks further back for inspiration, as its visuals are redolent of the colorful 8-bit worlds that were brought to life on the Atari 2600.
The game is broken up into three distinct chapters (two of them previously released) that tell a continuous story but otherwise stand alone. Consistent with Faith’s simplistic aesthetic style, protagonist Father John Ward doesn’t have an arsenal of tools or an upgrade tree to distribute experience points. From an overhead perspective that lets you see the entirety of a room, you interact with the world using just one button to both examine the environment and use whatever object you have on hand. Mostly, though, it’s just Father Ward, whose faith has been shaken by an exorcism gone awry, and his golden cross against hell’s minions.
To our eyes, the image of Father Ward is functionally a silhouette, a human-shaped splotch of blue broken up only by the white pixel of his priest’s collar. The game’s environments are presented on a black background, and most objects are represented as single-color sprites. You can make out small details well enough, but they demand an additional degree of focus and scrutiny that suggests any object might have a specific purpose. One might figure into a puzzle solution, hide an explanatory note that fleshes out the story, or be purely decorative. Where another game might have simply colored in all the interactive objects, Faith leaves us to find out their purpose for ourselves, thus priming us for a sparing and effective series of jump scares.
The game builds its atmosphere on how unsettling it feels to deprive us of information in this way, as much through the mechanics as the visuals and sound design. Long stretches pass by without music or ambient noise, leaving only silence and the anticipation that something will fill it. Some sequences plunge the screen into near-total black and display only what’s directly in front of you, while another illuminates the screen for the split second of a camera’s flashing.
Crucially, Faith keeps introducing new ideas rather than repurposing ones we’ve grown accustomed to. Once you puzzle out how to maneuver around the presence that’s stalking you in a church, for example, you’ll never encounter those exact game mechanics again. There’s only the one deadly game of “red light, green light” and only one instance of trying to move while strapped to a gurney. Even Faith’s horror references are varied, pulling from J-horror and internet urban legends as much as the Satanic panic of the 1980s and ’90s that defines the story, along with stray shout-outs to films ranging from Antichrist to The Exorcist III.
Faith’s visual and mechanical variety, as well as its one-button simplicity, helps obscure whatever rules it operates by. Sometimes the “save” function briefly changes, and sometimes a pivotal moment takes place from the ordinary overhead camera view rather than in the elaborate rotoscoped cutscenes, just to keep you on your toes. Faith’s masterful sense of timing and mood create a truly rare feeling of persistent uncertainty where anything can happen. The game manages to be frightening because of its technical constraints rather than in spite of them.
This game was reviewed with code provided by New Blood Interactive.
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