This review contains images depicting stylized bloodshed.

The Last Faith combines familiar RPG character development mechanics with a side-scrolling, non-linear platforming structure in a bleak, rain-soaked setting reminiscent of Victorian England. I play as Eryk, a prisoner who was subjected to human experimentation with a substance called Nycrux by a fanatical inquisition, the Junas Ministry. Those infected by Nycrux are eventually consumed by it, mutating them into Cold Ones, deadly monsters who take on many bat-like features and a ravenous hunger for human blood. Escaping—or let loose—from his cell, Eryk explores the city of Mythringal and its neighboring provinces in search of a cure to his condition. His search is made dangerous by an outbreak of Nycrux across the country, turning every building and every street into a battlefield where hunters seek to exterminate the infected, and fully mutated Cold Ones attack anyone who comes near them. Eryk must fight through the chaos as his search carries him into the heart of the Junas Ministry’s sinister religion of blood and death, knowing that any wrong step will complete his mutation into one of the murderous Cold Ones.

The Last Faith is especially focused on quick, precise side-scrolling combat. Eryk fights with a number of weapons that he discovers scattered across Mythringal. Most of the damage he deals comes from the melee weapons he equips in his dominant right hand. These weapons may be as simple as a sword or double-headed axe to more arcane tools like a coiling metal whip fixed with innumerable serrated blades. 

There is a single attack button that unleashes Eryk’s equipped melee weapon in a basic combo the more it is pressed. Holding down a special attack button transforms the basic attack into a Weapon Skill unique to each weapon. The basic Nightfall Blade extends into a spear with much greater range. The Severance Reaper unleashes a fast attack with each use of its Skill, letting Eryk dish out much more damage in a short window. The Rift of Blood creates a narrow eruption of viscera that stuns and damages any enemy it impales. It’s tempting to use these alternate attacking modes regularly but each use drains Eryk’s limited Focus pool, demanding they be used sparingly and strategically.

Eryk’s remaining offensive options are even simpler and I barely use them. Firearms like the Nightbane Pistol and Leena’s Bow require Demioxide bullets to fire. Bullets are frequent drops from enemies and destroyed decorations but Eryk is still only able to carry a limited number. If he runs out, he must return to a checkpoint to fully replenish his ammo belt from his stockpiled reserves. Spells like Explosive Candle and Barsov’s Electrocution may also be equipped in Eryk’s offhand. They are powered by Focus which is much better used for special attacks from melee weapons. The resources required in exchange for unimpressive results means I rarely use Eryk’s offhand weapons, even in situations where their range might be an advantage.

Eryk’s final resource is Power and it has the least tools which drain it. For most of his adventure, Eryk is equipped with the Stigma of Reprieve. In exchange for a sizable portion of his Power meter, this Stigma lets Eryk counter an enemy attack with exact timing, dealing significant damage and restoring a lost portion of his health meter. Much later, Eryk finds additional Stigmas that lets him temporarily increase the speed of his basic attacks or withstand enemy blows with a shield that sprouts from his forearm. Unlike Focus, Power rapidly refills with every attack Eryk makes, allowing him to use Stigmas much more often. It takes a long time to unlock Stigmas that aren’t the highly situational Stigma of Reprieve. By the time Eryk earns them, I’ve been trained to rarely use them.

The most useful ability in Eryk’s combat skills is his humble dodgeroll. It has no cooldown. It does not require a resource. Eryk may dodgeroll, over and over, as often as he needs to put space between himself and an enemy attack. It’s especially useful for moving Eryk behind an enemy where he may swing his melee weapon from relative safety. Few enemies or even bosses are designed with any guile, punishing Eryk when he moves behind them. Nearly every enemy in The Last Faith may be defeated by guiding Eryk to dodgeroll through their attack, then turn and strike their exposed backside. The few bosses that provide any amount of challenge are the few that notably subvert this tactic.

The disappointing truth at the center of The Last Faith’s combat is the boring and practical abilities are far more effective than the flashier and resource-intensive ones. Skillfully dodgerolling into range for a melee attack is always more effective than relying on a ranged one. Eryk’s offhand options are, at best, a supplement to his mainhand weapons, and ones that may be ignored with no apparent penalty.

However easy it is to dodge behind most enemies to completely avoid their attacks, Eryk will inevitably take damage. He may heal this damage using a syringe filled with blood called a Healing Injection. The healing effect is instant and scales with Eryk’s Vitality but it takes a moment for him to pump the Injection into his arm. I must ensure Eryk has a few seconds of safety from enemy attacks to prevent interruption.

Healing Injections have some of the same problems that affect Demioxide bullets. Eryk may only carry a limited number of Injections at a time. They commonly drop from defeated enemies but if he ever completely empties his belt, he must return to a checkpoint to replenish his supply from his reserves. Unlike Demioxide bullets, I am unable to ignore their existence.

If Eryk ever gets stuck on a room filled with powerful enemies or a particularly difficult boss, it’s possible for him to respawn at a checkpoint with no Injections left to restock his belt. At these points I am forced to steer Eryk away from his present challenge to replenish his supply. Luckily, they may be purchased with Nycrux from a non-player character in Oxnevylle’s Manor, a hub and the lone place of safety Eryk discovers in Mythringal. Injections scale up in price as Eryk progresses through his quest but the amount of Nycrux enemies drop scales much faster. It’s annoying having to occasionally spend a few thousand Nycrux buying more Healing Injections but the chore of purchasing them never seriously disrupts The Last Faith’s flow.

The damage Eryk deals and how much he may absorb is determined by how I choose to develop his stats using Nycrux. Every hunter, beast, and Cold One carries a small amount of Nycrux which Eryk absorbs into his body when he kills them. If Eryk is killed in combat, he leaves behind a floating spirit containing the Nycrux he was carrying. If he can return to this spirit, he reclaims all his dropped Nycrux. If he dies again in the attempt, all that Nycrux is lost forever. Delivering gathered Nycrux to Lady Helenya, a mysterious aristocrat Eryk encounters early in his search, allows him to purchase an experience level and upgrade one of his core attributes. The higher Eryk’s experience level, the more Nycrux it costs for the next. This RPG development system is familiar in indie action-RPGs and The Last Faith does nothing to expand upon or reconceptualize the idea. 

Understanding how Eryk’s stats impact his combat performance is integral to his success. Each weapon he wields has damage which scales with an associated statistic. A weapon which scales with Strength will be useless to an Eryk who has high Dexterity, while a high-Strength Eryk won’t get much use from a weapon that scales from Mind or Instinct. This system encourages me to equip the player character with a weapon whose speed and range meshes well with my particular playing style and invest Eryk’s levels up on stats which scale best with that weapon. Again, all these ideas have been pilfered from other popular and successful RPGs and The Last Faith does nothing to make them its own.

One interesting wrinkle to Eryk’s stats is how they affect his defenses. In addition to improving the damage he deals with certain weapons, individual stats also improve his resistance to a specific kind of damage. An Eryk built for Strength-scaling weapons will have an easier time fighting frost-based enemies while an Eryk built for Dexterity-scaling weapons will take less damage from fire attacks. The strangest quirk of this system is Vitality, which not only increases Eryk’s total health but also his resistance to physical damage. The result is a feedback loop of durability: the more health Eryk has, the less damage his expanded health pool actually takes. A few points invested in Vitality are transformative, turning Eryk from a frail man into a durable superhuman able to take multiple blows from even the most titanic terrors he encounters throughout Mythringal.

Eryk’s beginning stats are determined by a character class system. The choice barely matters. When beginning a new game, I choose whether Eryk will be a Brawler, a Rogue, a Stargazer, or a Marksman. Each class starts Eryk out with an advantage in a particular statistic. The advantage is a half dozen points at most, a difference which is easily made up with a few experience levels. The class system adds some nice aesthetic differences but has far less impact on Eryk’s performance than the choices I make at level up.

The other half of The Last Faith’s design is non-linear platforming. Again, it does little to reimagine the ideas it takes from a genre well-worn by indie developers. Eryk is free to wander from his starting point at the Temple of the Deposed Gods, into the massive city of Mythringal, and beyond into neighboring areas with inspiring names like the Marshlands of Shadows, the Damned Ruins of the Osseus Fortress, and the Drowned Crypt.

Occasionally Eryk’s path into an area is blocked by an obstacle such as a platform placed just out of his reach, a heavy object blocking a passage, or even something as mundane as a door locked by a key. Eryk must find an artifact hidden somewhere in the world that lets him jump again in midair, increase his pushing strength, or the key to the door so he may overcome these barriers. These opened passages typically lead either to new items that expand Eryk’s abilities, stashes of Nycrux that make him stronger, or into whole new spaces filled with new things to discover. This is a popular and influential style of videogame design and it works as well here as it ever has.

An edge The Last Faith has over the many other indie non-linear platformers is that its world is massive and truly non-linear. At first Eryk is restricted by his limited abilities to a largely linear course. Once the narrative has exposited a few key details about the Nycrux it really needs him to know, he gains enough new platforming abilities to expand the number of areas he has access to. He is permitted to visit them in any order he wants, repelled not by impassible pits—though there are still a few of these—but rather by enemy strength. There does seem to be a prescribed order Eryk is intended to explore the world denoted by ascending enemy power. If I have enough skill and persistence, it’s possible for me to break Eryk away from this path and take him through the world in an unorthodox order. 

These design choices ensure Eryk’s next destination is always unknown. In a typical non-linear platformer, when its player character uses their newest platforming skill to overcome an obstacle and discovers a new area, I know they have discovered where they should be exploring next. Mythringal and its outlying territories offer no such comfort. A distant platform or blocked passage may lead to challenges Eryk is unprepared for. This allots a real sense of tension and discovery to The Last Faith’s world.

Players familiar with Fromsoft’s Bloodborne may find much of what is described in this review familiar. The Last Faith echoes many of its ideas. Mythringal, a pastiche of Victorian England rendered in moody greys and battered by perpetual rainfall, feels much like Bloodborne’s Yharnam. Also like Yharnam, Mythringal and its neighboring cities crawl with people infected by a curse that transforms them into violent beasts, though where Bloodborne’s transformed horrors resemble werewolves, The Last Faith’s resembles vampires. The infected are hunted by mobs armed with firearms and improvised weapons. The player character is dressed in a long coat and wields a melee weapon in his mainhand and a projectile weapon or magic in his offhand. He heals the damage done to his body by injecting himself with syringes of blood that drop in limited quantities from enemies. In its themes and mechanics, The Last Faith is essentially Bloodborne recreated in pixel art as a side-scrolling indie platformer with a few aesthetic changes.

Another obvious point of reference for The Last Faith is another indie non-linear platformer built around religious horror and Fromsoft-inspired RPG mechanics: The Game Kitchen’s Blasphemous. Just like in Blasphemous, every item in The Last Faith is represented as a flaming orb. Another idea that feels lifted straight from Blasphemous are finishing moves. When an enemy is brought to the last sliver of their health, they become vulnerable to an elaborately animated killing blow where Eryk decapitates them in especially brutal fashion, and scores a nice Nycrux bonus on top of it.

The Last Faith is derivative. This does not mean it’s bad. This does not mean that I did not enjoy playing it. What it means is that not only have I already seen everything it does in other videogames, I also get the impression that it is deliberately copying those other videogames instead of being inspired by them. The Last Faith tries to be Bloodborne by way of Blasphemous and at that goal it acquits itself well. Whether it might be a better videogame if it were not so obviously based on other ones is irrelevant; that is not the videogame The Last Faith tries to be.

The Last Faith is a satisfying and beefy action-RPG. Its character development systems, while derivative, do a good job supporting the combat systems. Its main weakness is that most of the men and monsters Eryk fights across Mythringal and its neighboring cities aren’t terribly bright. Most of them may be defeated easily by dodging behind their bodies and attacking them repeatedly in the back. Despite this relative ease, a few boss battles and set pieces still hold surprises for Eryk. All of these are set across a gigantic non-linear world which must be truly explored to discover all its secrets and find the path leading to the heart of the Junas Ministry. The Last Faith may not break any of the molds it too readily uses to cast itself. Sometimes a videogame that feels comforting and familiar is exactly what I’m looking to play.