By sticking close to beloved formulas and polishing every element with care and competence, The Last Faith has earned its place among the greats of its genres
I am a sucker for a great Metroidvania game. Throw in a gorgeous gothic insipired pixel artstyle and you've got me. I am happy to say that The Last Faith perfectly nails those two things.
You play as the grim yet determined warrior Eryk, who kinda sounds like Henry Cavill to me, sent to lift a curse shrouding the land. Right away, the fluid and somewhat challenging combat hooked me with its variety of weapons, magic, and active parrying. Slaying down the monsters is utterly satisfying, especially when you perform executions on them. You might have already seen some of these executions in the trailers, but once their health is down enough, you can well, execute them. These animations are gory, visceral and extremely satisfying. It never got old ripping the wings off of a gargoyle or just punching the brains out of a downed vampire.
In a Soulslike fashion, killing monsters earns you, let's call them, souls. You can use said currency to upgrading your character stats back in the hub area. The hub areas serves also as the main place where you will interact with the other NPCs you find throughout the game that either sell you consumables, weapons, spells, upgrade your existing weapons and also give you side-quests to complete for them.
While the story lacked unique twists, environmental details brought the decaying world to life. Creaking architecture hinted at past grandeur, and subtle audio cues kept me on edge. You'll go through grand gothic cathedrals, dark crypts, decrepit old castles and the sorts. Kudos to the art team as they have delivered some stunning dark pixel art.
Now, I played the game early, before they fixed it and a known bug, at that time, was that weapon scaling based on your stats did not work. That made the game way harder than it currently is right now. I found The Last Faith's version of the Moonlight Greatsword and leveled up the stats that scaled the sword. But as I said, that did not work, for like 12 hours and the game was quite challenging. Luckily, through experimentation, I found a cheese, an OP spell, that made things easier. Still, I got stuck in the last area, couldn't do anything against the final boss. Patch hit, like yesterday, the devs fixed that problem and I cleared the final boss after a couple of tries and without the cheese, just using my giant ass sword. So don't expect the combat to be insanely hard like Blasphemous for example. It's still challenging, but I wish it was a tad harder or at least that there was contact damage with the enemies as that would up the difficulty by quite a bit.
Exploration rivaled the combat in fun, as misleading paths and secrets areas hidden behind destructible walls kept me investigating every nook. Shortcuts created after platforming sections felt like sweet salvation. New abilities felt properly gated, encouraging backtracking in a organic way. The map became as much a checklist as a navigation tool in my hunt for upgrades. So make sure to hit every wall you see in the game cause if it looks like a hidden wall, chances are it actually is. I explored a lot of the map and found a lot of cool hidden things and still only got an 86% percent completion.
In the end, The Last Faith garnered my faith not through revolution, but evolution. By sticking close to beloved formulas and polishing every element with care and competence, it has earned its place among the greats of its genres. For fans of Soulslikes and Metroidvanias looking for another vampire to sink their teeth into, The Last Faith will quench thirsts both holy and damned.
The game was reviewed on a PS5 using a promo code provided by Playstack. The Last Faith is out now on PlayStation, Switch, PC and Xbox.
