Have you ever played Elden Ring and other Souls-like games but wished there was more decaying technology and horrible, biological robot monsters to face? Enter the Omnistructure, an M.C Escher meets H.R Geiger industrial nightmare scape brimming with gross things to stab. The surroundings are immediately bleak. Rotted structures, crumbling stone ruins, and sporadic patches of green land make up the surroundings of your adventure/own personal Hell.
You play as what can only be described as an android that looks like a skinned human. Its skeletal metal structure is covered by what resembles human musculature, and its impassive, smooth faceplate looks on blankly. Strapped to your back are two rudimentary weapons, and it’s simply time to start forward. Unfortunately, there was almost no tutorial once I set out, and I had absolutely no idea what was happening.
While I figured out what I was doing, I slipped off the edge, died, and respawned. When I returned to the world, there was a jittering specter of myself at the point where I had fallen. Its hands and feet were clamped together, it hovered in the air, and its head shook uncontrollably from side to side. That’s a fair indication of what’s to come.
As you advance, it becomes clear that these horrible, undulating phantoms are actually fast travel points. I stumbled upon one higher up, and when I interacted with it, it offered the choice to fast travel back to where I came from.
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Fast travel is always a bonus in these sprawling open-world games, it’s easy to get turned around or go off course in your mission, and the ability to zip back can be extremely helpful.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken Has an Interesting Premise
The idea behind the world of Bleak Faith: Forsaken is interesting. What is going on? Whom are you playing as? Where are you? Are you dead? Is this Hell? These questions readily come to mind as nothing is explained in the beginning, and no tutorial is given apart from how to attack. While I have no issue with not knowing the narrative, not knowing what I was doing or how to do it off the bat was a mild frustration.
This leads me to a piece of advice for those interested in playing: change your keybindings right off the bat. They are incredibly unintuitive as is. I haven’t played with a controller, but the loading screen says it is designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, and some commands may not work as well with a controller.
As with any Soulslike game, you wander around a vast and seemingly neverending landscape, either killing enemies or avoiding gigantic bosses strewn around the world. The concept of the world and the creatures in it are occasionally quite interesting. There are weird flying manta ray creatures, interesting boss designs, and the idea of the technology marrying the grimy world of Bloodborne and Elden Ring is great. Unfortunately, it has a very washed-out color palette, and there isn’t much variation, but some exciting sci-fi elements are mixed in there.
When it comes to gameplay, it’s rough. The controls are floaty, and you feel completely detached from your character. The combat is clunky and feels like swinging through the water sometimes. Everything is just unpolished. The dev team consists of three people, and for a team of three, they have done a fantastic job, but it isn’t finished. There are a lot of choppy graphics, low-res textures, and unresponsive controls.
Critical Error
I checked out the Steam discussions board regarding the game after I had put several hours in, I don’t have a great computer, but it isn’t terrible. I still wondered if it was maybe down to my hardware. Upon looking, I discovered it wasn’t just me. Plenty of others had experienced the same issues I had and more. The game has extremely mixed reviews on the platform as of writing this. It has also been steadily releasing patches since day one. These patches have generally only been a few megabytes but take an inordinate amount of time to update.
I don’t want to be too negative. The dev team, Archangel Studios, is small. I will always champion the small team creators out there. Yet I don’t think Bleak Faith: Forsaken should have been released yet. The bones of an interesting game are there, but there needs to be more than just a skeleton. It’s clear with the multiple patches since it was released two days ago that the devs are putting the time in to address issues. Maybe a stint in early access would have been more beneficial than a full release at this time.
