Forgive Me Father 2
Byte Barrel
In this modern epoch of endless remakes and reboots, it can be easy to get tired of everything being the same thing, to lose sight of the fact that some of the best games we ever played, best movies we ever saw, were sequels. Sequels are great. Maybe the first outing was a bit half-baked. The creators were still learning, or didn’t have the kind of money or staff needed to make the best possible product. A successful sequel is often iterative: it builds on the good while learning from the bad. Byte Barrel has certainly learned a lot… and the result is Forgive Me Father 2, one of the best sequels I’ve ever seen after such a lukewarm initial offering.
My feelings on the original Forgive Me Father were rather mixed; solid, but low-variety combat and an incredible aesthetic couldn’t make up for middling-to-bad level design. In a great many ways it felt like a throwback to the also-ran days of the late 1990s, games running on established engines (if we were lucky) or some bespoke creation that had promise but just couldn’t stand up to the big boys. The sequel, in contrast, feels like a true successor to those big boys: I see an understanding of games like Quake, Half-Life, and Duke Nukem 3D, with a heavy dose of Painkiller.
FMF2 is set at an indeterminate point in time after the original game. There’s only one character you can play, the nameless Priest (though the Journalist is positioned as a relative, and is mentioned as having disappeared while tracking down a story that seems connected to everything you’ve been through.) The events of the first game (spoilers ahead!) were revealed in its ending to have been entirely a hallucination by the player character who proceeded to massacre most of Pestisville, MA before finally being captured and locked up, insensate, in an insane asylum. The sequel picks up where this leaves off, with the Priest now left to wander the corridors of his own mind, which are filled with monsters who populate the ruinous memories of his own checkered past. These memories range from his university days, with rumors of blasphemous experiments in the basement; to his participation in the Great War, where he saw suffering and death at an untold, unprecedented scale; to his time in the Pestisville public works department, building a luxury subway system for the mayor until something sinister was discovered down in the tunnels; to his time at seminary, trying to find meaning in faith; and finally to his life in Pestisville, grimy and waterlogged.
Pretty much every complaint I had with the original game has been addressed. The big one is the level design — it’s much more elaborate and detailed, with a strong sense of place that just wasn’t there in the original game. Much of it is fantastically paced, with some great setpiece fights and a real sense of progression as you worked your way through maps that split, rejoin, twist in on themselves, circle around and generally don’t feel half as linear as they really are. Some have their own conceits, like the university basements, which are almost totally pitch-black, forcing you to rely on your wind-up flashlight, or the penultimate level called Teleports, which has you jumping into a series of holes to engage in brief setpiece fights modeled after your experiences in the game.
The
experience system has been replaced with a vaguely-explained “madness
token” setup, where killing enemies gives you more tokens, which you can
then spend on pages (most of which are unlocked through collectibles)
for a “Dark Tome” — a twisted religious document that grants you powers,
from passive ones like letting you store more ammo to active ones that
work when using the book, like stealing health from enemies or making
you invincible. Kill enemies to fill up a meter, and when a segment of
the meter is full, you can activate the book, and the attendant active
powers you’ve put into your loadout (you have a maximum of three pages
you can use at any one time.)
The weapon system has been split from your powers, and now each category has four different weapons, which don’t scale in strength but rather offer different behavior — you can swap out your grenade launcher, for example, with a rocket launcher. Some of these weapons are pretty exotic, such as the shotgun that’s been taken over by some kind of sea creature and can be used as a midrange sniping weapon. To unlock these weapons (you get the first variety of each for free, you just have to find them in the normal course of play) you have to find weapon tokens, which exist hidden in the game world and must be searched for. Unfortunately don’t expect much in the way of power scaling — some of the unlockable weapons seem rather less powerful than the defaults, such as the handgun, which trades the revolver’s power and accuracy for firing rate. (I wound up sticking with the revolver.)
The enemy roster definitely feels more robust than before. (And yes they have different angles now!) Much of the original cast returns, but you’ll have a few new creatures to deal with, such as the Abomination, a twisted corpse (or several) of a soldier that carries a heavy machine gun and can take quite a beating. On the downside, the more common enemies don’t have local variants anymore — remember the doctor Liquidators in the original? Yeah, no such thing happens here. It’s a small thing but I was disappointed.
Make no mistake: Forgive Me Father 2 is hard. Clearly taking cues from Doom Eternal, it gives you significantly less ammunition storage and health is hard to come by. With a greater variety in enemies combat scenarios can get pretty interesting, sometimes feeling borderline unfair even on normal difficulty. Sometimes it feels like the difficulty moves out of the Plutonia zone and into R̶’̶l̶y̶e̶h̶ Hell Revealed; luckily, Byte Barrel have seen fit to finally give us a quicksave option — and loading times, at least for me, were pretty short!
Aesthetically it’s the same Mike Mignola’s Brutal Lovecraft we know and love, lovingly rendered cosmic grossness for us to marvel at. There’s a level of detail in the maps that really gives the game a sense of place; the monster designs are slightly updated from the originals but are still familiar enough for returning players.
Forgive Me Father 2 is a big step up from the original. While some may be put off by the spike in difficulty (though lower skill levels may still be an easy ride) I find it a welcome change after the mostly unmemorable journey through the original game. I appreciate the myriad references to other games, loving shoutouts to fellow indie shooters like ULTRAKILL, and its strong sense of aesthetic such as a late game level evoking the art of Zdzislaw Beksinski. All in all, Forgive Me Father 2 is the game I wanted out of Forgive Me Father 1; like Assassin’s Creed II or Mega Man 2, sometimes sequels are necessary to give an idea the life it deserves.
-June <3
No comments:
Post a Comment