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The TL;DR version: perfectly cromulent.

The slightly longer version: The Last Faith is a mix of my two favorite genres, as a Soulslike and a Metroidvania, of much the same ilk as Blasphemous and Blasphemous II, with which it also shares a weirdly religious background, a relatively incomprehensible story, and pixelated art design. And, to be completely honest, I could end this review right here by saying that if you liked Blasphemous II, you should pick this up, and expect a game that is about 85% as good. Which is a compliment! Both of those were good games. This is not quite as good– it’s easier, for starters, and it’s a little too fond of instadeath spikes in obnoxious locations (although part of that was my fault, for not figuring out a way across an obstacle in a really annoying place) and the graphics aren’t as good. Your inventory can be really rough, for example:

Okay, a few of those are obviously guns, but if I told you that the item that’s highlighted is a grenade launcher, more or less, would you have any idea? Can you tell that the item next to it is a bow? What about the one above that? Or the one to the left of what is pretty clearly a minigun?

The spell icons aren’t super clear either, and this isn’t the worst example of the inventory screen, but you get the idea. I don’t complain about graphics often, but even for something with retro graphics this game can be pretty muddy. Combat is excellent and the variety of weapons available is pretty good– superior to both Blasphemous games, so long as we’re making comparisons, although I never really got into the guns very much and I’m not convinced a gun build is really viable since bullets are limited. Control is snappy and sharp, though, especially on some of the later bosses where dodging a barrage of lightning bolts is going to depend on near-pixel-perfect positioning (say that four times fast) and without good controls that would have been hellaciously annoying and frankly a little unfair. Fair is a critical component of a good Soulslike, of course: if you can find lots of videos of people beating a boss without being hit when you can’t get a quarter of the way through its health bar without getting melted, chances are it’s a pretty good Soulslike. Soulslikes love bosses who are hard until you figure them out and then become trivial. This game does that quite well.

One slightly less fortunate aspect of Soulslikes that it brings with it is super obscure side quests, unfortunately, including one that I wasn’t able to finish because it just abruptly became unavailable on me. I was two achievements away from Platinum on this game; one of them was for that side quest and another was for fifty parries, a mechanic I never used, as this is very much a dodge-and-jump game and if I was standing still and close enough to parry something that was attacking me I was doing it wrong. I’m probably not going to do another playthrough just to collect those two trophies and the Platinum. I might, you never know, but probably not.

But yeah– we’ll call it an 8/10, easily, and at $24.99 for full price for about a 25-30 hour game depending on your skill level and willingness to do some farming (progression was pretty quick one way or another, although I don’t think I actually lost any … uh … nycrux, whatever that is, to deaths during the game, and if you’re dying a lot YMMV) you’re getting pretty good value for your money if you like these genres. I finished the game at 98% completion before hitting the final boss and I assume that last 2% is probably related to the quest I missed as I’m pretty damn sure I hit the whole map.

Check it out.

Well, this was an unexpected little bit of awesome.

I don’t know what caused Carrion to catch my eye– I mean, it was on sale for $5, and still is until tomorrow, but that’s usually not enough– but if somehow you happen to be the reason I found this fun little game I need to thank you. Carrion is a pixel-art Metroidvania and a “reverse horror game,” where instead of playing the intrepid scientist or lone soldier trying to kill the horror that wants to eat you, you play the monster. Your goal is to escape the giant facility you’re imprisoned inside, and if you happen to eat every living thing inside it along the way, more the better. You are, effectively, playing a shoggoth; a giant Lovecraftian creature made of flesh and teeth and eyes and tentacles, and over the game you acquire powers ranging from defensive spikes (which I don’t think I ever used, come to think of it) to different movement abilities to growing protective chitin to just getting real, real big and terrifying.

It is gross, in a pixelated sort of way, and your attacks can literally rip your enemies in half. I encourage eating every little part of them, but if you rip someone in half and then just eat their head I think you get the same benefits (health and size upgrades) you get from eating the whole body, so if you decide to toss the legs across the screen, go ahead:

Most screens end up covered in blood after a while, because even your non-offensive moves will cause your shoggoth to leave blood behind; if you smash through a door it won’t actually affect your health but you will leave bloodstains behind.

Your various enemies range from unarmed humans, who will hide and cower, to unarmored people carrying handguns to shotgun- and flamethrower-toting soldiers to the occasional drone and mech. Nothing ever respawns, which led to what at first I thought of as a cheap tactic when facing a ton of enemies– run into an area (your monster moves crazy fast most of the time,) rip someone, anyone in half, and then dart back out before the three guys with flamethrowers and the one guard with a shield and machine gun can kill you. Head to the nearest save point (you basically make your way through areas by unlocking all the save zones, at which point you can get to the next area) and save, which gives you your health back, then rinse and repeat.

It felt cheap until I realized that it was exactly how monster movies work a lot of the time. The monster shows up, kills somebody, then disappears for a few minutes until coming back and killing someone else. The fact that there were generally multiple ways to approach any given zone full of ~~food~~ enemies just made this even better. Of course I can come back at full strength! Did any of the monsters in the Alien movies ever limp? Obviously not. This is a monster movie. My job is to terrorize motherfuckers, not to get killed.

Oh, and you can also smash through a door, then grab the door and beat the hell out of something with it. The way to beat drones is to grab them and bash them into other things, like walls, and floors, and civilians, until they’re broken. It’s a blast.

I had a lot of fun with this, obviously, but there were a few points where the game got in its own way. To start, at the maximum size, your monster can get tricky to control. Check this screenshot out:

You tell me: which end of that thing is the front? Is it going clockwise around that block in the middle or counterclockwise? At maximum size, you can easily stretch most of the way across the screen, or bunch up into a big blob, and this leads to occasional control hiccups, especially when trying to squeeze into small holes or (especially) flip switches at maximum size. There are a couple of places where you need to squeeze into an elevator and flip a switch just outside the elevator to move it, and hitting the switch with a tentacle was more annoying than it should have been. The most frustrating part of the game was a sequence where you needed to be at full size (abilities are tied to the size of your monster, which … was not my favorite design choice) in order to grow armor that would keep a little exploding harpoon-thing from one-shotting you, but the harpoon-thing respawned, and it respawned faster than your armor ability, so if you didn’t get your entire body past the radius of where the harpoon would shoot at you, you could survive the first shot and then get killed by the second one before you could do anything about it. Most of the time, though, traversal was a lot of fun; you can basically move in any direction at any time, as the beast just flings out tentacles and pulls you toward wherever you want to go.

If you have a PS5, there’s literally no reason not to grab this right now while it’s $5. If you like Metroidvanias, it’s maybe a little short, at 5-6 hours, for the full $20 price, but I suspect it’ll be on sale again soon, and even if it’s a little short for the price it’ll be a good time.