izigame.me

Great art, below average gameplay.
Blasphemous (1) is the most obvious point of comparison - clunkier Symphony of the Night-style combat and platforming in a grimdark setting with some light soulslike influences like committing to attack animations and losing your held cash/xp on dying twice in a row. The combat and platforming both feel slightly subpar for the genre - there is significant input delay or turn delay that often prevents quickly turning around and attacking from targeting the right direction, animations do not transition into each other (e.g. charged attacks do not combo into standard attacks), and ledge grabs are finnicky. The movement/exploration upgrades I've found so far have been the most boring of bog-standard metroidvania standbys- things like the ability to push boxes, walljump from specific and rare wall textures, or grapple to specific and rare hooks. In the best metroidvanias, the movement upgrades that gate area progression are all applicable to multiple scenarios: enabling previously impossible progression, improving speed/ease of general platforming while backtracking, and shaking up combat either by providing more ways to positionally respond to enemy actions or by having damaging/debuffing effects. So far, these upgrades have no possible use in either general platforming or combat. Like Blasphemous, there are creative and satisfying execution animations, which seem to be unique for every enemy. Also like Blasphemous, unfortunately, whether these can be triggered seems to be strictly down to an RNG call when an enemy is at low HP rather than as a reward for good play, and having too much damage can render them impossible to trigger for an enemy type, which is a huge shame. Weapon special attacks and spells are both cool, but the mana costs are often too prohibitive to fully incorporate them into combat because there's no mechanic for mana recovery apart from from resting at a checkpoint or using consumable items.
The game isn't a soulslike metroidvania (e.g. Salt & Sanctuary, Grime, Unworthy, Death's Gambit), but it does take a bit more influence than Blasphemous. For example, you can level to dump points into various stats - HP, mana, str/dex, etc. Unfortunately, not all the influences it takes are good things, even for fans of both genres. The game starts with a class selection that determines your initial stats, but oddly classes don't come with a set of class-essential equipment, like a weapon scaling with your primary stat, a spell for mage classes, or a gun for the marksman class. Cribbing the Dark Souls model for weapon upgrades makes weapon variety illusory, as you'll be locked into whichever weapon you first start upgrading both in the short-term by the fact that newly-discovered weapons would require a significant cash/xp investment to perform well enough to be worth genuinely trying and long-term by the fact that the materials required for weapon upgrades are highly limited. As in soulslikes, rolling gives i-frames - sort of. Most projectiles and certain melee attacks ignore i-frames, and this isn't tied to another system (e.g. the way that some attacks are unblockable or unrollable in Sekiro or Lies of P) or even visually communicated to the player. You'll just be occasionally shocked that your roll did nothing for you and have to memorize that particular enemy attack animation ignores the system. Worst of all, it doesn't take the Dark Souls approach to healing (making a fixed, usually upgradable amount of healing available after every checkpoint use) or influence from the smart approaches of some modern metroidvanias, like the way Hollow Knight and its followers tie the availability of healing to combat performance or others make healing freely available when out of combat. Even old-school metroidvanias like SotN handled healing better by ensuring that (respawning!) healing power-ups were adequately available throughout the levels themselves. Instead, healing in The Last Faith comes in the form of consumable items, a la Demon's Souls/Bloodborne, which can be found as one-time drops in levels, on rare occasions as random drops from enemies, or purchased from some vendors. This means that if you run low, viable exploration range will suddenly and massively drop and bosses will become unbalanced, and rote grinding is the only way to fix it. The bosses I've seen haven't been particularly hard, but that's a concerning problem to see in a genre where learning difficult boss patterns across multiple attempts is a core philosophy. The same is true of bullets, if your build/playstyle incorporates a ranged weapon.
Like Blasphemous, this game is carried by its strong visuals and strong art direction, and it's not bad so far, but it's mechanically weak enough that I can't give it a general recommendation in this state. If the art really appeals to you, you'll be able to get past the frustrations and price-point and have a good enough time, but it doesn't seem stand out as either a unique or a well-executed example of the genre from what I've seen.