forgive me father is really cool at a surface level. a lovecraftian shooter with a beautiful art style, filled with various upgradeable weapons and abilities? sign me up!

and then you boot up the game, and… it’s disappointing.

all of those really cool ideas are still there, but there’s a distinct lack of polish in every single aspect. the cutscenes are basically slideshows with a slightly off sounding voice actor telling a boring story. the ability and weapon tree is cool, but you get a majority of the upgrades early on, and the balancing and progression is really thrown off.

they’re still fun features, for sure! i’m not saying they’re bad, but it feels like the developers either didn’t have the budget or didn’t have the knowledge to make some of the more complex systems work out.

my largest true complaint is the level design; there are lots of tight corridors, sharp corners and hidden enemies. for this type of shooter (the doom 2016 likes), that kind of style just doesn’t work; even the tightest of hallways in doom still had room to get around, no matter what.

look. don’t get me wrong. forgive me father is a totally solid shooter at its core, that feels great to control and has lots of variety in its runtime. but, at some point, i’d rather a game be simpler if it could spend more time on making what it has more polished; i mean, look at dusk. it’s not a complicated game, but everything it does is polished to a T.

there is an excellent game hidden in here somewhere. it just needed some more polishing.