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You’d have to be brainwashed to join up with this messy horror game’s cult - Unholy Quick Review

6K View2023-07-23

Unholy

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Skip this one. Unholy starts with an intriguing concept: You play as a mother and devout member of a strange modern-day cult who finally leaves the flock after her son is horrifically sacrificed. It’s a killer hook, but it’s sadly wasted on a game with subpar everything else—writing, voice acting, level design, stealth mechanics, all of it.

TIME PLAYED

I played around three or four hours of Unholy, which was enough time to make it into chapter four of ten total chapters in the game. Judging from poking around on YouTube, it seems the full game can be completed within the same amount of time I’ve played, but if you spend a lot of time exploring the environments, get stuck on any puzzles, or struggle with the annoying stealth sections, that will pad out the run time.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Evocative setting. Cult stories are one of my favorite branches of horror, and Unholy adds a unique twist by putting players into the shoes of a woman who’s already deeply committed to the cult in question as the game begins. In theory, at least, this forced me to think about the positive angles on the cult and what could have pulled this character into it in the first place.

Even if it doesn’t quite live up to that promise, though, I did enjoy the game’s eventual otherworldly setting of the Eternal City. I had to explore the sewers, subway systems, and bombed-out buildings of a plague-ridden eastern European city patrolled by ritualists in metal masks and guards decked out in full knight armor. It’s a strange, fascinating world, and I wish the game had given me more reasons to stick with it.

• Emotions given form. Unholy’s most interesting game mechanic is how it uses emotions as varying types of ammunition. As I explored the city, I came across countless corpses, and depending on how the person in question died, their body would crystallize as an emotion of a certain color. I could pick up and use those emotions with a spiritual slingshot, with each emotion providing different effects.

For example, the emotion of shock takes the form of electricity, which can then be used to power up or overload machines, while sadness operates as smoke bombs, temporarily hiding the main character from the view of enemies and spotlights. It’s not the most robust or deep system, but it’s interesting at least and is used to good effect in both the puzzle solving and stealth sequences.

WHAT SUCKS

• Brain-dead dialogue. Despite Unholy’s strong concept and its emotionally powerful opening—the player character literally witnesses her son being burned alive!—the game’s writing quickly takes a turn for the clunky. The protagonist is dragged along by a mysterious old woman who speaks in nonsensical riddles and seems to exist primarily to introduce new game mechanics and point the main character in the direction of the next plot beat. Even if the dialogue had anything interesting to say, the stilted, emotionless voice acting wouldn’t be able to pull it off.

• Annoying stealth segments. Besides exploring and completing simple puzzles, most of Unholy’s actual gameplay takes the form of stealth sequences where you must hide from or avoid enemies. While the emotion slingshot charges I mentioned above offer some cool tools for getting through these parts of the game, the stealth itself feels terrible. The AI of the guards is extremely limited, but I still found myself getting locked into loops of getting caught over and over simply because they explore the same tight paths that were often directly in front of my only way forward. It turned an already slow game into a mind-numbing slog.

• Amateurish level design. While the world itself is fascinating, the moment-to-moment structure of the levels inhabiting that world sucks. Unholy plays out as a series of mostly linear hallways that often hint at the idea of offering multiple paths forward but rarely actually do. I regularly ran into fuse boxes that didn’t actually do anything when I shocked them to life (or death), ledges that I was never totally sure if I was supposed to be able to climb up, and doors that opened up as shortcuts to areas I just left and didn’t really need to return to. It’s baffling stuff.

• It runs like garbage. I don’t have the most powerful gaming PC in the world, but I’m able to run games that look a hell of a lot better than Unholy with limited slowdown. This game, on the other hand, took ages to load a level and regularly devolved into a stuttering mess whenever I took a corner too fast or looked up at a detail that apparently wasn’t expected. Several of the few Steam reviews out for the game so far mention similar issues. It doesn’t feel like it’s been optimized well at all.

💬 Are you planning to check out Unholy, or is this one cult you’ll be keeping your distance from? Share your thoughts in the comments.