If you follow the cursed checklist, Unholy certainly has more than enough ingredients to create an immersive horror adventure. It casts you as a desperate and vengeful protagonist, pitting you against a malevolent religious cult that you must infiltrate and overcome, and arming you with a suite of every guard and ghoul that stands in your way. Unleash special powers, driven by emotions, to defeat Unfortunately, the execution of Unholy is as unbearable as trying to crucify someone with a cardboard cross. Unresponsive controls, erratic AI, and frustrating instant death always make the seven-hour journey feel as much fun as whipping yourself.
Young mother Dorothea wants to escape the control of a religious cult known as the Eternal Fountain, but she has one problem. The high priest of the church has trapped the soul of his son Gabriel and escaped from the human world to the cathedral in the human heart. A supernatural underworld known as the Eternal City. A crumpled old woman she met in her father’s apartment acts as her spiritual guide, allowing Dorothea to cross into this eternally dark underworld through an esoteric ritual. And here she must subdue a disappointingly modest sort of morose armored guards and twitchy zombie-type people trying to save her only heir.
The Eternal City landscape itself isn’t all that far from the real world, it’s just darker and more on fire. That said, a great deal of care has clearly been put into the construction of Unholy’s underworld, with roaming through disgusting, vine-covered subway tunnels and spooky, candlelit mournings for the dead. You can crawl down a street lined with words. Unholy’s post-apocalyptic environment is its strongest attribute, so it’s a shame that everything that happened there was shamelessly wasted.
emotional control
Dorothea’s plight is in many ways an emotional journey. Because in the realm of the Eternal City, human emotions are harvested from corpses in the form of colored orbs and can be used to your advantage – at least in theory. When loaded into Dorothea’s supernatural slingshot, ‘Anger’ blasts itself off into surrounding fragile elements, ‘Shock’ becomes a literal bolt of electricity that can destroy power circuits from a distance, and ‘Sorrow’ turns into an enemy’s enemy. Acts as a smoke grenade that cuts the lines of battle. Sight and “desire” can be used as a temporary distraction to keep guards off patrol paths. It’s a shame I couldn’t put my usual feelings of frustration into Dorothea’s slingshot. Because nearly every enemy encounter, especially in the second half of Unholy, should have been blessed with infinite ammo.
The problem is that Unholy’s enemies are only momentarily stunned by Dorothea’s head-on attacks. The only way to dispatch raiders is to lure them near explosive barrels or electric traps, open fire, and hope to be collared in the process. If you miss, or indeed the enemy survives somewhat illogically (as it often did during my playthrough), they will dispatch you sooner than Amazon’s delivery and return you in pristine condition. Be prepared for a 1-hit or 2-hit kill counterattack. Checkpoints usually feel significantly further back than they should. Unholy probably could have benefited from incorporating a melee attack to give it a little breather. Especially since you have to manually shuffle each ammo type instead of quickly selecting the ammo you need, forcing you to change your strategy when you’re heavily cornered. It’s probably more annoying than you’re used to in other games.
Dodging enemy attacks might not have been so bad if Dorothea was a little more agile, but unfortunately, she felt the urgency of a child who had just been told to brush her teeth. to move. She also gets stuck in parts of the environment that she shouldn’t be grasping, and often fails to cling to climbable surfaces that she should be able to grasp. Enemies block the only exit from the area, limping around in circles like the last drunken guest on the dance floor at a wedding reception, and there’s no way to move them when they’re fresh. is not. From the Orb of Desire.
Even if I do manage to stagger to my hiding place locker, will my pursuer immediately ignore me and return to my post, or will I wait patiently outside until I am finally forced out of my locker? I wasn’t sure. Throw it in the locker and resume the clumsy pursuit. Unholy’s mostly passive weaponry makes it a frequent stealth approach, but its tedious stealth mechanics, especially against its large groups of ghouls, make it a pleasure to walk through the shadows. It’s fine, except it doesn’t feel reliable enough for Latter half.
masking up
After all, the Eternal City is plagued by a plague, killing all of its inhabitants, so it’s no surprise Dorothea is told to wear a mask upon entering. However, this is not his surgical-grade N95 shield, but a mystical veil with a special visual mode that, when switched on, reveals a world of collectibles, explosive barrels, ubiquitous lockers, and more. interactive elements are displayed. Upgraded further over the course of the campaign to act as a real gas mask to prevent Dorothea from dying in a toxic gas cloud, and eventually a sort of thermal vision to detect completely invisible late-game demons can function as Each of these are useful in most cases, but oddly enough, these masks cannot activate his mode while manipulating Dorothea’s slingshot, thus trapping unseen enemies. Luring in becomes an annoyingly close task.
However, Dorothea’s mask also has the added benefit of hiding her stiff facial animation during cutscenes. Still, she can’t hide the phrasing and unglamorous sarcasm of her lines, nor can it prevent her from hyperventilating for ludicrously long periods of time at a time, even after escaping her peril. It’s as if her Dorothea gasping voice and Unholy’s swelling soundtrack are trying to make her believe her situation is scarier than it actually is. In fact, a few hours into Unholy, I got fed up with her recurring asthma symptoms coming through her headphones and dove into the pause menu, permanently muting her nagging breathing sounds.
I was especially grateful for that choice, as there aren’t many meaningful choices elsewhere on Unholy. An additional upgrade system lets you sniff out special mementos from Dorothea’s past, like her mother’s sunglasses and a letter from Gabriel to Santa. These can be exchanged for 7 different skill buffs at special shrines, but the obvious difference is your approach. Unlocking the ability to carry more than 3 slingshot ammo of each type is one really handy exception, save for the initial dash through a timer-based gate that serves as a tutorial for the ability. , did not find a convincing use for Dorothea’s running slide move.
In fact, there are many elements in Unholy that are introduced and quickly forgotten. In the early days, I was able to use smoke grenades to confuse motion detectors and bypass locked doors, but I never found a similar example of such security bypass again. Similarly, a Banshee enemy with a lantern that shrieks to alert patrolling guards of your presence, he appears in just one area throughout the adventure, but in total the various Given the number of enemy types, this is a shame. Aside from the cheap terror when an invisible enemy suddenly appears inches in front of your face, there’s nothing particularly terrifying about encounters.
The puzzles are similarly lacking in variety, and there’s nothing more exciting than cracking a combination lock or cracking a rotating dial in a sealed trunk. To be fair, both seem as redundant as the way Unholy frequently requires you to expend your precious Rage Orbs to shoot the crates’ fragile locks… purely, So that you can collect another wrath orb that is revealed to be inside it.
If the plot had been worth the struggle, all of Unholy’s sins might have been partially forgiven, but unfortunately the cost of reaching the heart of the Eternal City was to say the least. is not overwhelming either. It certainly didn’t help that Dorothea’s personality was just too obnoxious for her to be so warm. So her final fate and that of Gabriel hit me more like a damp squib than a slingshot-shot shock orb. On the positive side, I was dreading the idea of having to endure an unruly battle with a potentially formidable endgame boss, but thankfully the final encounter was a stress-free stretch of non-interactive cutscenes. Contained within – it would have been disappointing if that was the way to complete a better horror game, but it felt like a small mercy here.
