Forgive Me Father 2 Review

Boomer shooters show no signs of slowing down, or even pausing to reload. Over the past several years, this FPS subgenre has been pumping out popular titles with the unhinged enthusiasm of the Doomguy with the scent of demon blood in his nostrils.

Forgive Me Father 2 takes all the familiar retro FPS elements and places them in a Lovecraftian world full of cosmic horrors and corrupted cultists. It's a combination that works well, bolstered by excellent lo-fi visuals and a consistently creepy atmosphere. The campaign is rather short, with level design that is a bit too simple and linear for its own good, but it's hard to mind too much when the action is as fun as it is here.

The main character in the campaign is a traumatised priest trying to come to terms with his past while contending with hordes of eldritch monsters that have infested his world. I have not played the first game, but I gather the priest was one of the playable characters in the first outing. The priest narrates the action as it happens, while a second voice with an ‘Irish' accent that is fooling no-one chimes in from time to time to urge you forward. The voice acting is a bit hammy, but in fairness it doesn't feel out of place given the grotesque beasts and creepy locations you'll encounter in the game.

You'll begin the game in an asylum, which functions as a hub that you can visit between missions to buy upgrades. Levels themselves feel a bit disjointed—you'll be whisked from a shipyard, to the trenches of World War One, to an underground railway, without much sense of why you are moving from one to the other, although each seems to be based on the priest's memories. You'll find notes and letters to read which give glimpses of a larger tale about a corrupt city mayor and atrocities in the priest's past, although these brief snippets never really come together. Which is fine considering the genre, and the notes are well-written enough to add an extra layer to the game's unsettling atmosphere.

In each area, you'll be running down cramped corridors that eventually open out into larger arenas where you'll need to mow down waves of enemies before they eat your face for lunch. There are coloured keys to collect and levers to be pulled to open locked doors, but for the most part the game doesn't pose much of a challenge in terms of navigation. I rarely got lost and sometimes found the key to a locked door before encountering the door itself. Some levels flew by in as little as ten minutes, and at times I wished the game had challenged me to explore its locations more thoroughly before moving on. As it is, it soon becomes clear that there is one critical path you are expected to follow which usually leads you to the key or lever you need next, making all the keys and locked doors feel a little redundant. Each level contains a number of ticking clocks to collect and secret rooms to discover, but there isn't much motivation to hunt down all of them unless you are strongly inclined towards completionism. Secret rooms usually contain ammo and sometimes tokens for upgrading your weapons, but as far as I could tell hunting down the clocks serves no real purpose.

As you'd expect, filling enemies with lead is where the real action is, and fortunately the shooting is fast, fun, and responsive. There's no aiming down sights, so you'll be shooting from the hip and moving around at speed to avoid being overwhelmed. Shots feel meaty when they connect, which more often than not causes enemies to explode in a shower of gore. The gun selection starts off dull and predictable, but it does improve as you gain access to more upgrades. Your basic arsenal is composed of a knife, a pistol, a shotgun, a rifle, a grenade launcher, and an ‘exotic' weapon, but each of these weapons can be upgraded by spending tokens found throughout the levels. Many of the upgraded versions of the basic weapons sport some sort of eldritch growth on them, which typically increases their raw power while also adding additional effects. There's a rifle that spits missiles that ricochet off walls and a zombie hand that curses anything it touches.

You can round out your loadout by buying access to tomes that can be deployed during combat for a brief but powerful bonus, such as increasing your damage output or reducing your ammo consumption. There are also passive bonuses that work all the time, and you are limited to a total of three bonuses (active and passive) at any time. As well as spending tokens, you'll have to complete simple tasks like dispatching 100 enemies with a shotgun to unlock each new bonus.

These mechanics are all pretty standard fare for this type of game, but I was mostly won over by Forgive Me Father 2's slick, spooky presentation. The game takes clear inspiration from HP Lovecraft's cosmic horror, throwing a motley assortment of misshapen monsters and crazed cultists at you. Mixing boomer shooter mechanics with Lovecraftian horrors is such a natural fit that I found myself wondering why more developers haven't done this before.

While the levels are three-dimensional, the monster sprites, guns, and many objects in the environments are 2D, and while this is a style common to many throwback shooters (as well as the older games that inspired them), Forgive Me Father 2 takes things a step further with a dark comic-book style presentation in which everything is outlined with thick black lines. It's a neat look that helps the game stand out from its many competitors. Once upgraded, many of the guns look positively savage. I grew particularly attached to a shotgun with a small octopus-like creature attached to it that the priest had to rip off and replace in order to reload. There are some neat touches to the set dressing too, such as posters on bathroom walls that exhort you to brush your teeth while showing a toothbrush being devoured by a monstrous mouth full of razor-blade teeth. It's in these small details that Forgive Me Father 2 shines.

The excellent presentation and snappy gunplay are enjoyable enough for me to recommend the game, with the caveat that the levels, while looking good, are very linear and repetitive. You'll soon fall into a predictable pattern of running down corridors shooting a few monsters, then getting locked into an arena where you face down a larger horde of foes, before getting a key to unlock a door, to run down another corridor... rinse and repeat. Sometimes this kind of straightforward gameplay is all you want, but I hoped in vain that later levels might take a few risks and mix things up more than they did. Alas, Cthulhu's minions don't have that much imagination.

I should also point out that I finished the game in less than seven hours, which makes the asking price of £20.99 / $24.99 USD feel a bit steep. Best to pick this one up in a sale.