The Last Faith Review (Switch eShop)

While the world continues to wait in vain for Konami to release another 2D Castlevania, plenty of indie game developers have stepped up to try filling the gap with their own take on the famed formula. Some of these games have almost copied the gameplay beat for beat, such as in Timespinner or Chasm, while others have taken things in a more unique direction, such as Blasphemous’ 2D Soulslike take set in a Spanish-inspired world. The Last Faith falls more into this latter camp, and while it does stumble a bit in its execution and performance on Switch, this is an overall compelling game that’s certainly worth your consideration.

The Last Faith follows the story of Eryk, a grim man with amnesia who’s been afflicted with a mysterious curse that’s slowly consuming him. Eryk awakens on the edge of a massive gothic city called Mythringal, and it doesn’t take long for him to recognize that something has gone horribly wrong, as its many inhabitants have become mutated beasts that attack on sight. As he searches for someone who can cure him, Eryk slowly pieces together the details of the civil war that led to the fall of Mythringal and the role that he played in it.

Quite like the Souls games it clearly draws from, much of The Last Faith’s narrative is inferred by the player, drawn from filling in the gaps you see between the various item description blurbs and enigmatic rumblings of the few solemn people you come across. Though the narrative doesn’t seem to be the focus here, we appreciated the experience of slowly unraveling more about this unsettling world as we dove deeper into its depths.

As mentioned, gameplay in The Last Faith could be best described as a 2D Soulslike with some Metroidvania elements, very similar to Blasphemous. You’ll traipse through a grim and harrowing non-linear world, unlock shortcuts, kill a whole lot of baddies, and get bodied repeatedly by the occasional boss until you finally prevail. Should you lose a fight and die, you’ll drop all your unspent experience on the spot and have to trek back from the last checkpoint to reclaim it, and if you die again before making it back, that experience will disappear forever. Success is thus a mixture of fully exploring environments to uncover all the pickups you can, learning enemy tells to understand the best times to either strike or dodge, and mastering the timing of the main weapon you’ve chosen to use.

As far as Soulslikes go, there’s nothing here that you haven’t seen done in the genre before, which can feel like both a good and bad thing. On one hand, it would’ve been nice to have some sort of innovative feature or gimmick to help The Last Faith stand out a bit from the pack, but on the other hand, it executes well on the tropes. Combat encounters feel punishing, but fair, and persistence is routinely awarded, while the world feels satisfying to navigate due to it frequently looping back on itself and revealing shortcuts to ease backtracking.

Our only real gripe here is that the Metroidvania-style unlocks feel a little underwhelming. Uncovering the ability to push a box or climb specifically marked walls isn’t exactly riveting stuff, though we do concede that it clearly isn’t the main focus of progression here. Even so, it would’ve been nice to have seen some more creative movement options explored here, especially considering the many possibilities of this release’s brand of cosmic horror.

Growing Eryk’s stats is as simple as successfully making it back to the creepy level-up maiden and choosing which one you want to invest your points in. The soft caps are pretty high here and the hard caps are even higher yet, which gives you a lot of leeway to go all in on a specific kind of playstyle if you have a good idea in mind for a build. We went with a basic strength-based build and were satisfied at the progression; stat gains don’t feel like they completely break oncoming encounters, but they certainly help take the edge off if the foes in a given biome are giving you trouble. Plus, it's always satisfying to revisit an earlier area that you once struggled with and cruise through enemies that gave you a lot of grief.

Visually, The Last Faith sticks to a rather monochromatic and bleak color palette, and while it can feel a bit drab in some places, it overall does a great job of building that consistently heavy atmosphere. Meanwhile, the spritework is impressively detailed, especially in the character and boss designs, while there’s some visual flair sprinkled in for the animations, such as the brutal finishers you can execute once an enemy has only a sliver of health left. The Last Faith may not be particularly boundary-breaking with its looks, but it's clear that the development team put a lot of effort into this side of things and it shows.

These visuals are then matched by a moody and sparse soundtrack mixing together a lot of strings and winds, adding plenty of atmosphere to the creepy locales you fight through. Things pick up a bit more in the boss fights, but this is overall a very quiet and reserved collection of tunes—we even encountered many instances where Eryk was accompanied by nothing but weighty silence. This soundtrack generally amplifies the experience, giving it more texture without breaking the tension.

Unfortunately, that tension is broken rather often due to performance issues, which The Last Faith struggles with quite a bit. Though load times aren’t too bad, there are frame hiccups to be found all over the place, particularly in areas that are crawling with enemies—which is the last place you need to have these issues. We encountered several instances where frame drops led to late inputs, missed jumps, and broken combos, making an already difficult game much harder and more frustrating to play. A recent patch smoothed over the worst of these issues, and we’d recommend you make sure you're playing with the latest update if you intend on playing this one Switch, though enough problems remain to drag down the overall experience.