Forgive Me Father

The retro-FPS revival stopped being a novelty around 2019. Dusk, Amid Evil, Ion Fury, Prodeus — the genre now has a canon, a house style, and a glut of imitators who think “no reloading” is a personality. So when a small Polish studio shows up with another 90s-rules shooter, the burden of proof is high. Byte Barrel clears it, but not the way you’d expect. Not with combat design. With a pen.

Forgive Me Father, published by Fulqrum Publishing and released April 7, 2022, drops you into a 1920s New England town that has come apart at the seams. H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is the scaffolding: the residents have been reshaped into something wrong, the geometry of the place resents you, and you are the last person whose mind is still nominally intact. You pick a priest or a journalist — each with their own skill tree — and start shooting. That’s the pitch. What sells it is the presentation. The entire game is rendered as a hand-drawn comic book: heavy inked outlines, sprite-based enemies, a palette that looks like it was pulled off a pulp magazine rack and left in the sun. It’s the rare art direction where “stylized” isn’t a euphemism for “cheap.”

Market position is honest about itself. This is a 6–10 hour campaign at $19.99, sitting somewhere between a weekend indie and a full-priced release. The broad critical reception — a Metacritic average of 74 — matches the shape of the argument here: the look, the guns, the soundtrack, and the madness meter earn praise, while fatigue sets in somewhere in the back half. That tension — a game with one genuinely great idea and not quite enough level design to support it — is the whole review in miniature.

• The Madness Meter: The headline mechanic. Killing fills a sanity gauge that distorts the screen, alters how the game behaves, and unlocks stronger abilities. Power and clarity are in direct opposition. Push it and you hit harder while seeing worse.
• Two Characters, Two Builds: The priest and the journalist run separate skill trees, not cosmetic variants. Weapon upgrades are bought with collected points, so a second run plays differently rather than just re-treading the same loadout.
• Strict 90s Combat Rules: No reloading. No regenerating health. Ammo, armor and powerups live on the floor. Enemies come in swarms and you survive by moving, not by taking cover. The arsenal runs from revolvers and shotguns through a Tommy gun and flamethrower into outright occult weaponry.
• Comic-Book Rendering: Inked outlines, hand-drawn sprites, a deliberate flatness that makes the 3D spaces read like panels you’re walking through.
• Secrets and Multi-Stage Bosses: Hidden areas and collectibles reward wall-humping the way the genre demands, and the campaign closes on layered boss encounters rather than a single damage sponge.

The Gameplay Loop

The moment-to-moment is built to be fast, loud, and unforgiving in a way that feels researched rather than imitated. Byte Barrel clearly understands why the no-reload rule exists: it isn’t nostalgia, it’s a pacing decision. Remove the reload and you remove the natural pauses, which means the only rhythm left is movement — constant strafing, breaking line of sight, circling a room to vacuum up the health pickup left as insurance. The design is competent at this. Arenas open up at the right moments, ammo placement is stingy enough to matter, and the weapons are built with genuine recoil character — the shotgun in particular is designed to land with the concussive weight that separates a good retro shooter from a tech demo with sprites.

Where it distinguishes itself is the madness system, and it deserves more credit than a bullet point. Most shooters treat a rage meter as a straightforward reward: fill bar, press button, feel strong. Here the reward is contaminated. As madness climbs, the screen warps, the visual language destabilizes, and the game starts feeding you abilities you actually want. The cost is legibility — the single most precious resource in a game about reading enemy positions at speed. The player is choosing, continuously, between being powerful and being able to see. That is a real mechanical idea, and it’s thematically airtight in a way most Lovecraft-adjacent games never manage. Cosmic horror is about knowledge that damages you. This is a shooter where that damage is rendered as a UI problem.

The trouble is that the idea is load-bearing, and the level design isn’t strong enough to carry the rest of the weight.

Where It Sags

The first half moves. Environments shift, encounters stay legible, and the drip-feed of new weapons keeps the upgrade economy meaningful. Then, somewhere past the midpoint, the seams show. Enemy variety flattens out — the same three silhouettes reskinned — and level architecture settles into a pattern of corridor, arena, corridor. The game’s answer to this is volume: more enemies, more aggressively placed. That’s a difficulty curve produced by arithmetic, not by design, and it’s the most common complaint in the user reviews for good reason.

That escalation also collides with the art style. During heavy fights, inked outlines, particle effects and madness distortion pile onto each other until incoming attacks become hard to parse. There’s a difference between a game that kills you because you misplayed and one that kills you because you couldn’t see the projectile. Forgive Me Father crosses that line more often than it should, and the resulting difficulty spikes feel arbitrary rather than earned. Add occasional bugs and the back third becomes something to push through on momentum rather than enthusiasm.

The Onboarding and Progression

Credit where it’s due on friction: the game explains almost nothing and doesn’t need to. Pick a character, read the skill tree, shoot. The upgrade points create a light but real decision layer — sink into the revolver early or save for the occult hardware — and the two skill trees are the strongest argument for a replay. A second run at a higher difficulty, on the other build, is where the systems finally show their full hand. Whether the back-half fatigue lets anyone get there is the honest question.

The art is the reason to play this. Full stop. Hand-drawn sprites against inked 3D geometry is a hard trick to pull off without looking like a mismatch, and Byte Barrel nails the register — grimy, sketchy, unsettling in still frames. Enemy designs land somewhere between woodcut illustration and body horror. The metal-leaning soundtrack is the other standout and does enormous work setting the tempo; it’s the rare shooter score you’d put on outside the game.

The technical cost of a sprite-based, stylized renderer is low, which is the whole point — a 2D-heavy game of this scope is light on hardware and should scale down gracefully. The real performance problem isn’t frame rate, it’s signal-to-noise. When the screen fills with enemies and the madness distortion kicks in, the same stylistic choices that make screenshots beautiful actively work against the player. Style winning a war against readability. It’s a defensible artistic trade, but it’s a trade, and the game rarely gives you a way to opt out mid-fight.

Steam is the correct way to play this, and it isn’t close. A shooter built on constant strafing and precise, snap target acquisition against swarms wants a mouse. Keyboard-and-mouse gives the turn speed to make the circle-strafe defense actually work, which is the difference between the madness meter being a fun risk and being a punishment. It’s also the version where the frequent, deep discounts live — and this is a sale purchase, not a full-price one.

Nintendo Switch is a more complicated proposition. The good news is structural: sprite-based art and comparatively simple geometry are exactly what that hardware wants, so the game should hold up better there than a polygon-heavy contemporary would. The bad news is input and screen size compounding a problem the game already has. Analog aiming caps turn rate in a design that assumes you can whip around instantly, and the handheld screen shrinks an image that’s already fighting itself for clarity during madness-heavy fights. If buying on Switch, dock it and check whether gyro aiming is available in the options — motion assist meaningfully closes the precision gap in shooters like this. Portability is a real argument for short, punchy levels on a commute. Just go in knowing it’s the compromised cut.

Forgive Me Father is the work of a studio with one excellent idea, considerable artistic talent, and not quite enough level design to fill a full campaign. The madness meter is the kind of mechanic other developers should be stealing — it turns a genre-standard power fantasy into a thematic argument, and it does it without a single line of exposition. The art is better than the game deserves. The first four or five hours are as good as anything in the modern retro-FPS wave.

Then it coasts. The back half leans on enemy volume instead of invention, and the visual noise that makes the game distinctive starts costing health bars for reasons the player can’t control. That’s not a fatal flaw, but it’s the difference between a good game and a great one — and at $19.99, the math is tight for a six-to-ten hour campaign that peaks early.

We rate it a mixed recommendation: hard to justify at full price, worth a look once the discounts hit. Byte Barrel has proven they can build an identity. The next step is building a campaign that sustains it.