Forgive Me Father 2 Review (XSX)
Summary: Byte Barrel returns with another explosive love letter to all things Lovecraftian.
3.6
I Kick Arse For The Lord
Byte Barrel’s fiendish follow-up to their Lovecraftian love letter to 90s shooters, Forgive Me Father 2, finally slithers its way onto consoles this week after a year stuck in the twisted realm of PC gaming.
It’s safe to say I had a soft spot for the original Forgive Me Father when I reviewed it back in the year of our lord 2023.
The same can certainly be said of its Sequel, which feels more streamlined than the original but no less fun. Most importantly, like its predecessor, it gets the fundamentals right.
Movement is fluid and fast. Fights are tense, furious, and thrilling affairs that keep you on your toes. The odds are always stacked against you; the twisted legions of the old ones are numerous, varied, and imposing, and your retribution, bloody and gratuitous. Best of all, firing a shotgun feels like you’re wielding the fist of a vengeful deity (and eventually you can wield the fist of a vengeful deity).
Forgive Me Father 2 opens with the hard-drinking, hard-praying hand cannon-packing protagonist of the original, locked up at the Central Lunatic Asylum (which acts as the game’s hub) after being convicted of murdering everyone in Pestisville (the setting of the original) while suffering from a psychotic break.
Drugged up to the eyeballs and questioning his own reality, the Priest recants the actions in his life that brought him to end up stuck in a hospital for the criminally insane, and the hordes of nightmare fuel he dispatched along the way.
From sodden streets and dingy docks to a corrupted church and all the way to snow capped mountains (of madness). Forgive Me Father 2 is packed full of nods, references, and nods to the works of HP Lovecraft, beyond the cultists, strange rituals, and tentacles. So many tentacles. There’s a sense that what the Priest is facing may be much bigger than any mortal man could ever hope to tackle.
Thankfully, he’s packing an arsenal of increasingly weird weaponry made from the twisted flesh of long-dead gods and eldritch horrors, disgorging streams of energy, globules of plasma, and insects that track and circle enemies before tearing right through them.
If that’s a bit too strange for your tastes, though, there’s also a suite of old reliable guns like a solid six-shooter, grenade launcher, and the ever-reliable shotgun
In a pinch, the priest can also turn to the pages of a dark and foreboding tome of ancient magics that grants you all manner of temporary boons like increased damage, and the ability to drain the life from slain foes.
These, along with passive buffs like improved shotgun damage and regenerating bullets, are earned while performing various basic tasks during each level, and then equipped on your return to the Asylum. Chopping and changing your increased repertoire of powers is a lot of fun, and finding the right combination of perks and powers to fit your preferred loadout and playstyle is a cinch.
Likewise, you can change out your weapons for more ghastly variants before each level after finding the base gun in the wild. To unlock more corrupt versions of your arsenal, you need to find tokens scattered throughout each of the levels in hidden passages and secret areas. SO if you want all the toys, you’re going to have to comb every last dark corner for the loot to buy them.
The presentation is as lovely as the original. Once again taking its cues from Darkest Dungeon and vintage EC comics, the mix of thick line work and vivid colours to convey a sense of otherworldliness is pure Creepshow, though the monsters aren’t quite so varied this time, as they are more human and less grotesque, at least to begin with. Not so much eldritch horror as twisted reflections of fellow inmates at the asylum and the half-remembered faces of long-dead soldiers the Priest cut down in the trenches of the First World War – tapping more into the uncanny than the openly grotesque.
The score, once again, is all over the place and has a weird habit of leaning back on metal when the action gets intense. As I said before, I like metal, but it just doesn’t match the setting very well.
Final Thoughts
Forgive Me Father 2 is a decent sequel. How could it not be? It’s essentially more of the same with much more varied maps, a slightly more smoothed-out difficulty curve, and a revamped weapon system that rewards finding every last secret room and grabbing every last bonus item you can lay your fingers on.
It’s as stylish and as violent as the original while exploring more lesser-explored Lovecraftian tropes to tell a more intimate story about guilt, loss, and ultimately accepting your fate, as grim as it may be.
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