Bleak Faith: Forsaken Reviews
Despite some uneven design, Bleak Faith: Forsaken is an enjoyable, atmospheric adventure through a decaying world.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is a game with incredible potential. It makes up for technical issues with surreal environments and horrific enemy designs, but its core gameplay suffers from heavy focus on Souls-like mechanics and common deaths. It still needs time to resolve those problems, but if the devs make use of that time with continued updates and support, faith in this game's greatness might not be so bleak after all.
Bleak Faith Forsaken’s screenshots are impressive. The game’s art direction and atmosphere suggest an oppressive future world, but Bleak Faith Forsaken is all window dressing. Behind the façade, a seriously unpolished Soulslike filled with broken dreams awaits.
On the most basic level, there is an appeal to Bleak Faith. The enemies have creepy, science-fiction-inspired designs, the world is intriguing, and some truly inspired ideas from Archangel Studios support the whole thing. But every element feels half-baked or borderline broken. Movement and combat are floaty and clunky, exploration is unsatisfying, the visuals are hit or miss, music tracks repeat too often, and the story is indecipherable.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken takes place in a beautiful science fantasy world that is begging to be explored. However, the constant bugs and frame rate drops make exploring this beautiful world on the PlayStation 5 a chore. If Bleak Faith: Forsaken receives more polish it could be one hell of a souls-like.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken's interesting art design can't save it from its glitches, bugs, and myriad terrible game design decisions. (Review Policy)
It's worth playing for fans of the genre, and it hints at the developers having a lot more talent than this game ultimately lets on. However, Bleak Faith: Forsaken does have a lot of caveats for it to be universally recommended to everyone.
Bleak Faith Forsaken is not someone’s first souls-like, but a must try for fans of the genre.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is a collective of broken elements that were never going to work together, to begin with, and the final product is not short of a disaster. Spend your money and time elsewhere.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Bleak Faith: Forsaken has a lot of potential, and the developers seem dedicated to updating the game, so it's possible that a lot of this review will be outdated in a few months. At the moment, it's a testament to the difficulty of making a good Soulslike. All of the pieces are there, but they don't fit together properly, which exacerbates the genre flaws more significantly than any other type of game on the market. Bleak Faith has some strengths if you're willing to work past its flaws, but it doesn't stand out among the absolute glut of similar titles on the market.
Bleak Faith seems like yet another souls-like. But the more you play, the more you understand that it is closer to action-RPGs of «before Dark Souls» era
Review in Russian | Read full review
Bleak Faith: Forsaken has potential but fails to combine its elements effectively, resulting in unbalanced and frustrating gameplay. It feels unfinished, especially noticeable for genre veterans who expected more polish. The graphics and music are delightful, but the game falters as soon as you start playing.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Overall, while “Bleak Faith: Forsaken” has potential and some standout elements, the overwhelming difficulty and technical issues make it a challenging game to recommend. If you’re a fan of extremely tough Souls-like games and can overlook the technical shortcomings, you might find some enjoyment here. Otherwise, it might be best to wait for further updates and improvements.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is a proverbial rough gem. It is, indeed, a gameplay experience that lacks polish, but it has a strong identity. Thanks to the synergy between the interconnectedness of the game world, an art direction that pushes the majesty and scale of the environments and a reward system that is always on point, it will literally keep you glued to the screen, provided you can “adapt” to its edges.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Archangel Studios' effort did not particularly convince, unfortunately we have to say. Despite being a very ambitious game, it fails to give the user that memorable experience, due to all the flaws it brings with it. It is definitely not a title to recommend for those who want to try the souls-like genre for the first time, due to the flaws that worsen the game's gameplay and the presence of better titles on the market.
Review in Italian | Read full review
It successfully pushes to the forefront an alien and otherworldly experience which is indeed as bleak as its name implies, but this alone does not an enjoyable time make. With large-scale issues embedded within its narrative structure, progression, exploration, and combat, the cons easily outweigh the pros.
Bleak Faith: Forsaken gives the impression that it is inspired not by 'Dark Souls' itself, but merely by a potential synopsis of it.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is a game with a very strong vision. It puts players in a world almost comically oversized with no direction and just the sound of footsteps on metal floors. Later an impressive orchestral soundtrack paints a picture of a past long decayed while players are left alone, disoriented and lost. While combat is mostly mediocre, Bleak Faith: Forsaken has managed to capture the atmosphere of Warhammer 40k and the very first Dark Souls and somehow has woven them together into something new.
Review in German | Read full review
I have to admit that, as a user and expert player of Dark Souls (I have platinum certificates), Bleak Faith: Forsaken initially caused me a lot of rejection because I was not in that comfort zone in which I have been playing for decades. to games of this style such as Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty or Lords of the Fallen, games all cut from the same cloth; “Too many strange things” I thought. I have to admit too that it is plausible that Archangel Studios has opted to innovate and make changes, something risky, but which gives the adventure a certain freshness as well as challenging and with a quite satisfactory final aftertaste when we manage to overcome a challenge (the first will be, without a doubt, the first final boss). What I do want to emphasize and warn everyone is that you have to change the way you play a lot to adapt to this adventure and dedicate a lot of time to it. Also, it must be added that the game has some specific bugs that tarnish the experience as well as lacks some small polishing, but we hope that they will be improved as more updates are released, since, remember, when the game was initially launched The PC game was initially practically broken, but it was improved little by little until the final result that I was able to enjoy. For the rest, we will find an interesting proposal for all those with difficult challenges, but that will make more than one throw the controller out the window, or worse still, towards the television.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is a game of contrasts. Its stunning visual design and atmospheric world-building are offset by awful design choices, technical issues, and unpolished gameplay mechanics. Yes, it’s a bit better than it was when it was released a year and a half ago, but it still needs more time to cook. The game’s potential is undeniable, but it has yet to fully realize it.