An incredible dreamworld that’s not ready to be explored - Bleak Faith: Forsaken quick review

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Skip it for now, unless you’re prepared for a lot of jank. One of the most visually striking worlds I’ve ever seen in games, Bleak Faith: Forsaken’s Omnistructure feels like something out of a half-remembered dream—one I might have had after a night of poring over M.C. Escher albums and watching Alien. It’s a vast mash-up of impossible ancient architecture and hyper-modern megastructures, with stone archways spanning yawning chasms formed by infinities of dingy apartment complexes. Unfortunately, it arrives severely lacking in fit and finish, and feels like an alpha build of a game that will be genuinely fascinating to explore when it’s done.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about three hours of Bleak Faith: Forsaken, which was enough to explore its opening area and defeat the first boss, Konrad the Traitor. This initial zone, the Monastery, is visually impressive and has multiple routes to explore and items to find. I had to search dark alleyways and crumbling fortress ruins to find gear that was up to the task of taking down Konrad, whose arena reminded me of the confrontation with Knight Artorias in Dark Souls’s DLC.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• The Omnistructure itself. The world of Bleak Faith: Forsaken is forbidding and dreamlike, and it uses huge swaths of open space to create a truly otherworldly atmosphere. Like the dream sequences from Inception, the Omnistructure seems like an infinite landscape of anonymous urban chasms and spires, cobbled together organically from cities separated by thousands of years.

• Exploration. There’s a wonderful sense of discovery of the unknown in Bleak Faith: Forsaken. One moment, I was treading carefully into a dark ventilation duct or sewer, only to emerge onto a grassy, windswept butte the next. Just looking around and seeing architecture and geography materializing from the fog in the distance made me want to explore more of this strange world.

• A haunting and beautiful score. The ambient music that filled my ears as I explored the Omnistructure was terrific and helped enhance both the world’s sense of scale and its dreamlike quality.

WHAT SUCKS

• It’s not finished. As I mentioned above, the current version of Bleak Faith feels unpleasantly like an alpha meant as a proof of concept. Movement feels floaty, PC controls are unreliable at best, and menus don’t always work. Trying to play with an Xbox controller on PC, I found several of the inputs mislabeled: There’s no button mapped for jump by default, for instance. Bleak Faith is promising, but it needs a significant amount of work before it’s ready for a general audience.

• Combat. Bleak Faith wears its Dark Souls inspiration on its sleeve, and its marketing touts a “hardcore combat experience.” Right now, though, combat just feels bad. Enemy lock-on doesn’t really work, and the stamina system has hiccups that prevented me from swinging a weapon until I stood still for several seconds during encounters with tough enemies. Weapons—both mine and the monsters I was fighting—would frequently clip through their targets without registering damage. Combat feels slow, soupy, and frustratingly fickle.

• Perhaps too derivative of its influences. Look, I love Dark Souls as much as the next writer who refuses to shut up about it, but there’s a difference between paying homage to an inspiration and lifting character designs and whole dialogue sequences from it. Bleak Faith veers into the latter territory on several occasions during its opening hours, making the game feel more like a mod or piece of fan art rather than a work that stands on its own.

💬Will you be venturing into the surreal world of the Omnistructure in Bleak Faith: Forsaken, or is this an adventure you plan on passing up? Let us know in a comment.