Forgive Me Daddy, a retrospective shooter’s review

His city is prey to indescribable horrors aroused by ancient creatures whose very existence is a curse. Faced with the advancement of the underworld, he is a devoted priest who decides to attempt an attempt to reach the heart of evil. Who will you meet at the end of your journey? Suffice it to say we’re dealing with a splash of Lovecraft mythology-inspired first-person shooter to understand this (more or less, because things get more complicated as you progress).

It’s an illuminating detail that you actually have to understand how this story might end, if it’s worth living, as we’ll try to explain below. forgive me daddy reviewA vintage-flavored first-person shooter that looks like it came from a dimension Half-Life 2 never came out of.

gameplay

Forgive Me Father immediately declares his commitment to the modern school of shooters looking back or modern vintage if you wish: the graphics engine looks like it came out of the first half of the 90’s, at least in terms of general emotion, classic maps with an abstract design, despite the existence of a skill tree with 2D sprites of enemies always facing forward (experience points you level up can be done by killing enemies) obtained). Then move forward, look for colored keys to open closed doors, read the documentation to understand what’s going on, shoot the enemies that explode, smearing the floors and walls with blood, and manage active skills and health to not leave it to us. In a world drawn in a comic book style, its graphics have one of the elements that most distinguishes it from its competitors.

Their enemies are creatures that look like they have stepped out of the pages of a fairy tale. art of love. Thus, there are ordinary citizens who turn into crazy, death-thirsty monsters, priests summoning sprawling monsters, shadowy hooded figures firing bullets too fast, cursed beings firing volleys of a deadly compound, and the like.

There are also bosses placed at the end of the chapters (each chapter consists of several levels), it cannot even be said that they are Lovecraftian creatures. In short, Forgive Me Daddy’s inspiration should now be clear to you… also consider that it’s a mechanic linked to the hero’s madness, allowing you to use some powerful skills. The more you kill in this game, the better you fold, the stronger you become.

L’arsenal what our beautiful priest spreads death and destruction is indeed quite classic: a knife, various pistols, a shotgun, machine guns, some kind of biological cannon, and others. As the genre requires, maps should be sought for ammunition and medium kits.

So don’t expect the bar of health to rise on its own, but be prepared to fight for supplies, often risking your life. Many of these aspects are also character progressionSkills that can be unlocked by spending the accumulated points by leveling up allow you to buy new weapons, improve some features of the character, increase the amount of bullets that can be carried for each weapon, upgrade the weapons you have, etc. .

Occupational problems

Forgive Me Daddy is a very direct game in its goals, such that it sacrificed any complexity in gameplay or narrative to actual footage. There are enemies everywhere and a fair amount of skill with the genre is required to tackle certain situations. Unfortunately, he has a few issues that don’t allow him to perfect himself, leading us to talk about a qualitatively fluctuating experience.

The most obvious is in the level design and the choice of how to create the gods. checkpoint interactive and fixed (so no free recovery) led to some distortions that somewhat compromised the experience as a whole. Basically to save you have to reach the pillars where there is a drunk homeless man you will interact with. What would seem like a simple gimmick with little effect to most people actually determines how levels are built.

Basically, recovery points become bottlenecks where different areas can flow from time to time. The player actually has to pass them because of the pain of not being able to save. This includes a highly disorganized structure of levels that focuses on those bottlenecks that limit the possibility of unlocking levels and forcing level designers to create real funnels into which the player can flow. Another problem is represented by the location of checkpoints sometimes too far apart and sometimes too close to each other. So he has to die and redo long parts of the game without having to have major stimuli (the location of enemies and the location of consumables are always the same) or having to find two close save points where usefulness really matters. suspicious.

It must be said that the advanced levels are better than the first, as they are more complex and diverse. Unfortunately you have to tackle really flat maps to see the best. It looks like the developers learned some map design principles in the process.

Too bad they actually resorted to the wrong tricks throughout almost the entire game. difficulty Like the player appearing behind his enemies in newly cleared areas, or making it rain on them by making a lot of them come from who knows. The problem then is not so much about dying as can happen in a video game, but having to redo all the level pieces after suffering a mistake. The paradox is that embarrassing the player like this slows down the pace of a game that works best when experienced at maximum speed, basically because that’s the nature of Forgive Me Daddy and his greatest strength point. .