Forgive Me Father

Byte Barrel

To some extent, “boomer shooters” have always had some element of horror to them. Wolfenstein 3D had mutant experiments and a fight with a literal devil; Doom, obviously, combined Aliens with Evil Dead. Even Duke Nukem 3D, famously irreverent with a focus on humor and pop culture references, presented a dark, unsettling urban hellscape devoid of human life and filled with alien monsters — the only thing keeping it from being scary is Duke himself. And of course there’s Blood. Over time the genre gave way towards more realistic shooters, but even then there were always games like F.E.A.R. and Metro. Polish studio Byte Barrel’s Forgive Me Father is a lot of things, but one cannot deny that it definitely leans into the “boomer shooter” genre’s long association with horror.

Forgive Me Father has a pretty simple premise. You play either a priest or reporter, each with different skills and slightly different gameplay. After getting a concerning letter from your cousin Louis you go to see him in his shabby hotel room in Pestisville, Massachusetts. Upon arrival, he isn’t there, but then comes a knock at the door, behind which is a dead-eyed corpse, eager to kill you and eat your brains. From here starts a 10–12-hour romp through urban, rural and industrial environments, diving into sinister temples and forgotten ruins, shooting everything from an endless array of undead citizens to more inhuman creatures.

From the screenshots and trailers, Forgive Me Father is flashy and exciting, all beautiful hand-drawn artwork and dynamic gameplay. But when you actually sit down to play it you run into the game’s most fundamental flaw: bad level design. This isn’t its only flaw, but it’s the one that is the most upfront. As you play, you start to realize some other things, like the fact that there is no rotation for the enemies — they are always facing you. The lack of a proper quicksave is also an issue — there are save points you can use, but that’s it. The movement feels skatey at times, and there’s no walk key, which makes the mandatory platforming sections a chore. And while the weapons and the upgrades you can get for them are fun, some of them feel very weak. And, ultimately, the game just feels samey throughout, with little to differentiate one combat scenario to the next. A lot of this is down to the level design, but a lot of it is also that there’s a huge stable of enemy types and yet they all basically do one of a few things.

Your enemies range from straightforward zombie types — some of which carry severed heads, which they will replace their own with should you score a headshot — to bloated undead mobsters who throw fireballs at you from their canes, to several variants of gasmask-wearing guys who carry guns with large canisters of goop on their backs. Score a hit on the canisters and it melts them, reducing them to simply trying to close the distance on you. You’ll face monstrous asylum patients, explosive barrels with legs, angry fishmen (who behave much like a similar enemy in Hexen), mutant crab men, failed experiments, successful experiments, a couple varieties of floating abominations — one of which divebombs you as a last-ditch attack, the other drops to the floor and chases after you, bloated headless child corpses full of black worms that they use like whips and explode on death, bigger adult versions of same with transparent skin you can see the worms writhing in, several varieties of cultist (from the horde that chases after you with pitchforks to a couple variants of fireball-throwing priests who teleport around — some are in league with the King in Yellow, the others dress in red) and more. It’s a dizzying bestiary, at once incredibly gross and fantastically drawn, but the problem is that most of them just do one thing: throw fireballs at you. While the Liquidators — the guys with the goop guns — will nominally take cover, the only real sense of AI you get is from a late-game enemy that darts from cover to cover constantly while throwing streams of fireballs at you.

The boss fights are a little more direct. There’s only five, but they’re all varied. The first one has you fighting a giant angry tentacle monster; he occupies most of one wall, and your job is to dodge his attacks and shoot him in his big ugly face. The second boss — a knockoff of Hastur, the King in Yellow — is probably the most difficult of the bunch, as you must destroy the crystals powering his shield while a nonstop array of Yellow Priests hassle you. This would be fine except the crystals regenerate after you’ve damaged the boss enough, and eventually he spawns painful energy walls that’s designed to force you to decide whether to stay in the narrow space he’s given you as the walls rotate around the center of the room, or push through. The third boss is a giant ugly fish that pops up from the water and throws waves at you alongside spawning several goons; the middle phase adds rising and sinking islands, and being in the water is painful. The fourth boss is arguably the most fun, with a wild chase around a morning sun-lit arena as you fight a fast-moving boss and his clones. And the fifth is, well, Cthulhu, throwing bullet-hell waves of fireballs at you, AOE attacks and so on.

Of course, fighting these guys doesn’t have to be hopeless. You’re gifted an array of mundane weaponry (from a revolver to a Thompson) to a lightning gun and an alien rocket launcher. You also get “Skills” in the form of trinkets linked to your character, for example the reporter gets a camera that can stun enemies, the priest gets a crucifix to regenerate health. A skill tree, fed with points you get from slaughtering enough enemies, gradually lets you power up your gear, though some options are mutually exclusive — do you want the “boring” but straightforward upgrade or the weird alien one that rechambers your weapon for alternate ammo? There’s also a “madness system,” which I’m not entirely sure how it works but it seems to have something to do with giving you more uses of your abilities and raises your damage the more damage you cause and kills you get in a short period of time, but you’ll know it’s taking effect because all the color drains out of the screen except for red. Go for a while without feeding the madness meter and it goes back to normal.

The level design is, in short, a mixed bag. The very first level left an incredibly bad impression on me, being essentially a nonsensical maze of hotel corridors with little to make it seem like a real space. It doesn’t get much better for most of the first episode. The second episode is an improvement, with first a level set in the woods at night during a thunderstorm as you’re surrounded by a horde of screaming cultists baying for your blood; the level after that is a fun one as you explore an abandoned farm. More interesting level design gradually makes itself known as you work your way through the set, making me wonder if the early levels were done first and the design philosophies improved as the later maps were produced. It’s not unlike some Doom wads that way. In any case, towards the end while I wouldn’t say the level design was interesting in the way I’ll forever be chasing from the better Build engine games like Blood, it starts to take on a late 90s 3D FPS vibe, feeling more like something in the Quake II engine in terms of how simple the brushwork is while still attempting to present a quasi-real world space.

On a purely aesthetic level it’s a top-notch game. Forgive Me Father is loaded with beautifully hand-drawn artwork that, alongside the UI elements, gives the whole thing a comic book feel. Blood splats go everywhere; every fight will leave the space coated in big splotches of red. Do enough damage — say, for example, using the shotgun up close, or scoring a headshot — and hand-drawn bits of gore go flying. (This results in some absurdities such as two brain sprites landing at your feet!) The player characters drop quips the whole time, Duke Nukem style, though the priest is perhaps a bit more sullen in his dialogue. The whole thing is a silly, goofy, gory mess, making it feel like they should have called it Mike Mignola’s Brutal Lovecraft or something. The only things I ding it for is the music is generic electro-metal crap that for the most part does not linger in the brain after it’s gone, and the voice actress for the reporter just didn’t seem to give a shit about her job, giving the reporter an incongruous valley girl vibe that was quite frankly annoying to listen to, which is a shame because as a rule I prefer to play female characters. (In any case, as of Forgive Me Father 2, the priest is the canonical player character.)

I can’t say I didn’t have a good time with Forgive Me Father, but ultimately as these things go, if it weren’t for its stunning aesthetic and occasionally interesting gunplay, it would be considered pretty forgettable. But this is cosmic horror, and some things it’s good to forget…

-June <3

Hybrid children watch the sea
Pray for father, roaming free