The Last Faith

I went looking for something to scratch a very specific itch: the kind of game that makes a wet November evening feel like a ritual. The Last Faith almost nails that feeling, and the gap between almost and fully is the most interesting thing to write about. Kumi Souls Games are a London-based debut studio who wear their influences on every pixel. The world of Mythringal is a soaking, gas-lit cathedral of dread that pulls unmistakably from Bloodborne's gothic Victorian DNA and routes it through the side-scrolling lineage of Castlevania and Blasphemous. You step into the coat and collar of Eryk, an amnesiac cursed with a deteriorating mind, navigating an interconnected 2D map that opens up steadily as you acquire new movement tools: a double jump, a grappling hook, and a dash that rework your relationship with areas you thought you had already cleared. The Nycrux currency system does what you expect it to do, pooling your earned resources into five stat categories and weapon upgrades, and yes, death drops the lot for you to collect later. The save-point bonfire cycle is here, enemies respawn, and the fast-travel between checkpoints is genuinely generous. None of this reinvents anything. But the moment-to-moment loop of dodge-rolling, landing a melee combo with a scythe or whip or sword, weaving in a pistol shot or a spell, then triggering one of the custom execution animations when a staggered enemy blinks at you? That sits well. The four starting classes, Brawler, Rogue, Stargazer, and Marksman, shape your early stat weighting but converge as you build, and a Dexterity-Mind hybrid that blends swift slashes with trick weapon moves feels particularly alive. The presentation is where Kumi Souls earn the most goodwill without argument. The pixel art is meticulous, each location dripping with gothic grime across every background layer: boggy swamps give way to derelict crypts, moonlit castles, and caverns that feel genuinely oppressive. The execution animations in particular are the kind of small craft detail that makes you slow down and appreciate the work. The soundtrack sits under all of it with a measured, atmospheric weight rather than showboating. It adds to the dread rather than decorating it, which is the right instinct. The honest caveats matter here though. The story is told in the cryptic lore-note tradition and rarely grabs hold of you beyond surface interest. More concretely, the difficulty balance has a structural wobble: because the map is semi-open from early on, you can wander into a zone far beyond your current power level without any real signal that you have done so. That leads to a punishing early stretch followed by an overpowered late game once you have over-levelled to compensate. A consumable healing potion system rather than a refillable flask adds to the friction. Input delay, noted by multiple reviewers across platforms, is also present and requires a short calibration period before it stops feeling like the controls are fighting you. No re-spec option means a wrong build commitment stings. For all that, the Steam community has landed around 84 percent positive across nearly 1,800 reviews, and the game received a free post-launch expansion called Awakened Ancients that added content and quality-of-life refinements. Kumi Souls clearly listened to the launch feedback. If you have already finished both Blasphemous entries, logged your hours in Salt and Sanctuary, and still want more of this exact texture of world, The Last Faith is a completely reasonable next stop. It is not Hollow Knight. It is not Bloodstained. But it holds its own inside those long shadows better than its roughest moments suggest.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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