I can’t say I’ve ever played a game where the first hour was dedicated entirely to trying to fix the default button mapping. Until now. In fact, struggling with the simplest of tasks is a common occurrence in Bleak Faith: Forsaken, a game that is consistently fighting to even hold itself together.
Soulslikes have come and gone over the years, some have been brilliant (Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Hollow Knight), others… not so much (Thymesia). Developed by Archangel Studios, Bleak Faith is the latest of which, and caught the eye of many Souls fans for its heavy resemblance to Dark Souls. On top of this, Bleak Faith has also uniquely grabbed some inspiration from the likes of Shadow of the Colossus by teasing the ability to climb up towering giants in order to take them out rather than sticking with the Souls tactic of slowly nipping away at their ankles.
Story-wise, Bleak Faith remains true to its source of inspiration. And by that, I mean that I have absolutely no clue what’s going on because no one has released a story analysis video on YouTube yet (once someone has worked it out, please hit me up with a link). In fact, Bleak Faith offers less information than the Soulsborne series because we’re not even treated to rare snippets of lore in item descriptions; we just have a very vague exposition intro and NPCs droning the usual: “Ah another lost soul comes to challenge Knight Dark Souls of Dark Souls Land, we are all desolate souls in this bleak kingdom and we’ll all perish here as everything is miserable and nobody’s happy. Our ruler lost a war like one hundred years ago and my socks are cursed blah blah blah”. Thanks… so, why are there stingrays in the sky?
Bleak Faith’s store description describes its setting as ‘the last remnants of civilization… learn what is left of its history. Discover pockets of natural life in the perpetually expanding Omnistructure’, which describes the desolate, apocalyptic landscape of this world, known as the Omnistructure, beautifully. In fact, the art design of Bleak Faith is its strongest feature. This world is a mix of cyborgs and machinery in a fantasy-style setting. There’s a strong variety of creature designs, ensuring your opponents never get too dull, and a large selection of armour choices to choose from that stand to compete with Dark Souls II and Elden Ring for the best Soulsborne fashion. I also loved the added touch of your body remaining in the game each time you die, making for some funny scenes if you’re struggling with a boss as the arena will be filled with your own corpses.
The audio design is another strength to Bleak Faith’s otherwise flimsy list of things it has done well. There are some truly unnerving and creepy noises coming from the enemies, and I was also fond of the soundtrack which uses both ambient, apocalyptic themes and Slavic styles. That being said, the audio editing does let Bleak Faith’s audio and music down as there are moments where you can literally hear a break in the music as it loops and a lot of the sound effects become repetitive after a while.
Bleak Faith is an open world game, but not in the sense of sprawling fields and masses of unfilled land. Instead, this world is best described as an endless labyrinth of intertwining corridors and passageways. Invisible walls are non-existent in Bleak Faith and you’re instead given free will to investigate every nook and cranny for hidden loot – jump onto a ledge and it might just lead you to a whole new area. Each area also stands to differ from the next, covering different themes and offering a palette full of interesting visuals to keep you somewhat entertained even if the gameplay is painful. I must give props to Archangel Studios for bringing my greatest fear to life in the Deluge area, which tasks you with diving into deep, murky waters where you’re at risk of being snatched up by giant underwater creatures.
That being said, a lack of any restrictions in the world map also means that you’ll find yourself in a lot of sticky situations where you dropped off a ledge to explore for loot and ended up getting stuck where you shouldn’t have been. Bleak Faith’s store description remains true to its word; this game truly is unlike any other. I don’t believe I’ve ever played a game that has paths leading directly to unfinished areas which are intended to be decorative backdrops, just freely available to wander into – which I actually found myself doing on a number of occasions while trying to find the next area to progress the story.
Speaking of being lost, Bleak Faith’s huge map is just as much of a burden as it is impressive. There is supposedly an overworld map available which just shows the core areas, but you do have to dig around to find this and I have yet to come across it myself. In the meantime, your only indicator of where you need to go next is a marker which appears on the screen only when you’re standing directly next to a checkpoint, which makes it pretty damn pointless. As this marker only gives you an idea of the general direction you need to be heading in, I see no reason why this can’t just remain on the screen considering what a maze the Omnistructure is. Yes, the Dark Souls series also forwent maps in exchange for vague directions hidden in the riddling monologues of its NPCs, but these are also linear games which always have a clear path heading somewhere, even if it’s not clear which one you’re supposed to take first. Like Bleak Faith, Elden Ring is an open world game, so it has general pointers of which direction you’re supposed to be heading in on the world map. The lack of navigation in Bleak Faith is easily one of the most frustrating factors of this game. In fact, I spent two hours in one area just aimlessly wandering around in circles because I couldn’t find the path to the next location.
As mentioned before, another hour of my life was wasted on Bleak Faith’s utterly abysmal default button mapping. This is an issue on both keyboard and controller, though the developers have since advised players to opt for keyboard. Although this issue has been mildly improved in recent updates, there are simply too many actions with separate buttons to easily map this onto a controller. In fact, on keyboard even walking needs to be toggled on and off so that you don’t jog off a rooftop. Overall, your character’s movements feel incredibly awkward and janky. The default sensitivity is also way off, with your character moving too quickly (especially for a game with platforming segments), while the camera drags slowly across the screen. This also took a lot of tweaking to be somewhat manageable. The action descriptions in the controller and keyboard menus are also really difficult to understand, which makes working out what an action actually does and where you would want this on your keyboard/controller even more frustrating.
So, if even the simple task of walking is painstakingly difficult in Bleak Faith, how’s the combat? Don’t ask. Like many Soulslikes, Bleak Faith rushes you through a brief tutorial before throwing you in at the deep end. The only difference is that the Souls series still squeezes in menu descriptions and tutorials and its controls are basic enough for a quick tutorial to suffice.
Bleak Faith has the added challenge of relying on combos in combat. You must perform a combo to avoid a single swing from swallowing your stamina bar, which will render you unable to attack again or even roll away to safety. So, your next question will probably be: “but Jess, how do you perform a combo in Bleak Faith if it’s that important?” To which, I have no answer for, and neither does the game apparently as the only direction you’re given is to ‘just perform a combo’. So, there’s your answer. Just do a combo. My professional advice would be to just mash the attack button and hope for the best.
Even one of Bleak Faith’s highest selling points, killing giants, falls flat on its face due to some odd design choices. Like all enemies, a giant has a health bar which needs to be depleted to kill it. To begin with, you need to attack its legs, each of which have their own health bar. Once you have taken out the health bar of one leg, you bring the giant to its knees. From here, you must climb onto its back and go to one of the marked weak points which also have their own health bars, you must move to avoid the giant’s swipes as it tries to get you off its back, and repeatedly attack the weak spot until its health bar is depleted. You will then drop to the ground and a chunk of the giant’s main health will be cut down. So, to recap. The legs have their own health bar and the weak spots have their own health bar, so attacking these will not affect the giant’s overall health points. AND, even if you’ve painstakingly chipped away at the health bar of one leg, brought the giant to its knees, and then attacked a weak spot on its back, if the giant successfully knocks you off you have to start again as the legs and the weak point you were working on will reset each time you fall off the giant’s back.
This entire process is utterly tedious and unnecessarily long. Giants will hit hard, but their movements are often slow and easy to read, so actually getting their health down is a task of just being patient and slowly picking off each part of the sequence. But it does take an awfully long time, especially if you keep getting knocked off its back and needing to start again. It would be better for attacking anywhere other than the weak points to inflict minimal damage to the giant’s overall health, and then climbing onto its back will deal higher amounts of damage. Especially as it doesn’t make any sense that the giant’s ankles seem to have a life force of their own.
On top of this, fighting enemies in general has a lot of gimmicky attacks that are designed to kill you in one hit. There are plenty of paths which involve traveling up many flights of narrow stairs, and guarding these stairs will often be creatures that can deal blast damage that will send you soaring into the air and off the side. Your only chance to survive in these instances is to essentially just hope for the best.
And this is if you’re actually able to engage in combat without the game breaking. Several bosses and areas will cause your frame rate to drop dramatically upon nearing them, even on a high end gaming PC such as mine. In fact, this was so severe in some cases that I was unable to progress. With the Silicon Visage boss, I ran back out of the arena to prevent my game from crashing… but the boss fight just persisted with the music still blaring and the boss’ health bar remaining on the screen. I was also unable to access my inventory during this, so ended up having to restart the game. And this is if the boss is actually present in the arena, at one point I walked into a boss fight and the Aberrant Knight wasn’t even there.
Hitboxes seem to mainly consist of the game just flipping a coin to decide whether an attack lands or not because there certainly aren’t any physics involved; some swings painlessly pass through their target while others will clearly miss but still deal critical damage. There were also a few occasions where either myself or an opponent would just drop dead mid combat even though we still had health points left… maybe the sickeningly glitchy FPS gave them a stroke? Beats me.
I was about two hours into Bleak Faith (remember, the first hour was spent trying to make the controls functional) before I discovered how the leveling system works because, again, the game doesn’t care to inform you of anything. Unlike other Soulslikes, Bleak Faith does not have standard RPG elements which require you to raise a currency from enemy kills and looting to spend this on leveling up your stats. Instead, your stats are managed purely by your equipped gear and perks, meaning that you really can’t wear something just because it looks good. Equipment and perks can be upgraded via an NPC in the hub area and you can also fit crystals onto your weapons and armour which will further boost your stats. All items are found by exploring the map, meaning that if you’re aiming for a build that requires certain equipment such as a bow or staff, you will need to first find these. Your perks are also tied to how many potions or arrows you can hold at a time, which is really irritating. Bleak Faith couldn’t seem to decide whether to go for the Dark Souls-style of healing or the Bloodborne way. So, it went for both. You collect healing potions as you progress, but can only hold two at a time to begin with which will replenish once you have left a fight and the same applies to arrows of which you can only carry five of with your starting stats.
Because there is no in-game currency in Bleak Faith, there are no drawbacks to death other than a loss of progress. But this is not to say that having to start again at a checkpoint isn’t gut wrenching as Bleak Faith is very punishing with its checkpoints. You can fast travel between checkpoints, and later in the game you will acquire a portable spawn point called a Homunculus, which you can put down between checkpoint and respawn there rather than at the last checkpoint you visited. This is all well and good, only there’s very few places you can actually put the Homunculus down considering it can’t be placed where enemies are nearby (this is a Soulslike, where is there not enemies?!) and sometimes you’ll be unable to place your Homunculus down because the ‘ground is unstable’… whatever that means. So really, it’s just there to make you panic as you frantically look for somewhere to put your Homunculus down before you lose your progress. I also noticed that enemies will respawn once you have left that general area rather than on death like most Soulslikes, making backtracking incredibly annoying – especially if you’re lost.
Bleak Faith somehow couldn’t even get inventory management right. Although this situation has improved since the game’s release, to begin with there was little to no sorting inventory items. You can equip two rings, and amulet and a cloak, but I wasn’t aware of this on release as these slots aren’t actually named, so I was very confused when I thought I could wear four rings, yet could only equip two, it didn’t help that all four of these boxes just took you to a bulk menu of your rings, amulets (which look just like rings) and cloaks (which I hadn’t found yet). Luckily, these now have their own menus. I also found that certain pages on the menu, such as the perks and abilities pages, don’t highlight which option you have currently selected very clearly when using a controller, so it’s unclear what perk or abilities you’re trying to pick.
I will give Archangel Studios credit for the hard work they’ve put into the slew of hotfixes and updates which they’ve put out nearly every day since Bleak Faith’s release. They have addressed the feedback on their game and have demonstrated that they are keen to act on any faults that have been highlighted. Bleak Faith is the closest Soulslike to Dark Souls which we’ve had in a long time and it holds so much promise, if only it functioned properly. Because of this, I would be happy to revisit this game in a year’s time so that I can fully enjoy this passion project that the developers have worked so hard on. Despite this, in its current state, Bleak Faith: Forsaken should not be on sale. This is actually a prime example of a game and a team of developers that would have benefited greatly from an Early Access release, rather than delivering this severely unfinished product to the marketplace. I cannot recommend Bleak Faith: Forsaken to anyone.
Jess played Bleak Faith: Forsaken on PC with a review code.
