Unholy is a game of interesting ideas but lacks execution at every turn.
Duality Games, the developers of Unholy, were established in 2017, with their first main project being the survival horror Unholy. Duality Games aims to work on a variety of projects in differing genres as they expand on the games they both make and publish. Unholy was released as a stealth horror that allowed the player to experience the story of a mother searching for her son who has been kidnapped by the cult she is a part of.
Unholy tells the tragedy of Dorothea, a mother whose son has been kidnapped by an evil religious cult called Spring of Eternity. In order to retrieve him, Dorothea has to cross over to another world, a supernatural cathedral called the Eternal City. An old woman is used as a tutorial, showing the player the dark ritual they need to cross into the eternal plane of existence and further the story. The old woman acts as a tutorial drip feeding information to the player as Dorothea learns more about those who have taken her son.
From here, Unholy’s story is much the same as many other survival horrors of recent years. Enter an area, explore it and search for resources, meet a new foe, learn how to defeat them and move on. The combat, however, varies a great deal from other games in the genre. While the main story of Unholy is somewhat run-of-the-mill for horror, it is in the notes that the care and passion of the story come into play. As the player explores the environment, they will find notes from those who have explored before her, with some being very emotive and poignant.
Of the gameplay elements, it is the exploration that stood out to me as one of the highlights. Every nook and cranny is filled with something; great care has been put into every book, chair, and pile of strange goop the player encounters. The first hour of Unholy is purely this exploration with a very linear path the player must follow to progress the story. There are, of course, pros and cons to this single-path gameplay style. The player is unlikely to get lost, meaning the story can unravel in a well-paced many and avoid long sections of backtracking and frustration. However, it can be a little dull.
Unholy falls firmly into the “a little dull” category in the first hour. The single pathways and lacking combat at this time mean the opening starts to feel much like a walking simulator. This is very unfortunate as the environments mean the exploration could be, by far, the most interesting aspect of the game, but they are, instead, moments of relative boredom to open the game.
The puzzles in this section of Unholy also meet this level of lacking inspiration. Every puzzle is a variation of finding a combination or turning gears in a specific order to open a door or gate. In one section, I even managed to open a door and just wander into the next section; it wasn’t until I doubled back on myself that I found a leave I was, in fact, meant to use to open said door. The trigger points to progressing the game are clearly somewhat broken, as I was not the only one to experience such an issue.
While much of the opening of Unholy is dedicated to stealth, a combat system is introduced later in the game through a slingshot Dorothea gets about an hour into the game. This is one of the more creative moments of gameplay as the Eternal City stores emotions that can be collected in the form of crystals that can be gathered from corpses. Each of these is related to a specific emotion.
Red is anger that can break breakable walls, light blue shocks and becomes bolts of electricity that can jolt electrical circuits into working; dark blue is sadness and works as a smoke bomb to break an enemies line of sight; yellow is desire and can be used as a lure or distraction. They are loaded into her slingshot and can be used to defend against enemies. When used directly on the enemies, the crystals only cause a slight stun rather than actually hurt or kill. This stun lasts less than a second, and with the extremely limited ammo, it is very frustrating as it makes a lot of the stealth even harder than it should be.
The only way to kill enemies is by luring them to an electrical trap or an explosive barrel and setting it off to kill them with collateral damage. This is very hard to pull off, particularly with the erratic movements of many of the creatures you have to face. What makes the combat even harder is the fact that most of the foes have a one or two-hit kill means that should you perform this very difficult action even a little wrong, it almost always ends in death. Beyond this, the checkpoints are very unforgiving, often setting the player back a lot further than feels reasonable.
The enemies in Unholy taking little damage was very frustrating due mostly to the lacking ammo. While I love survival horror with limited combat, the stealth mechanics simply aren’t good enough for the level at which the resources were lacking. And this was not a resource management issue. As far as I can tell, there was very little adaptation from the game when it came to which ammo type I needed. I would be fully stocked in anger and in desperate need of an orb of desire to remove the foes from my path but would still just be finding red crystals.
A large part of the reason the stealth felt so limiting was due to the clunky mechanics when moving Dorothea around the environment. I can only assume that, despite what it looked like in the cutscenes, Dorothea is apparently the size of a barn door, as it was rare I could navigate through any doors or corridors without getting caught on to the environment around me. To add to Dorathias apparent difficulties is her grip strength of a toddler, which she perfectly demonstrates as she leaps against climbable edges, refusing to hold on. This led to me getting killed many, MANY times.
I can also only assume that Dorothea was not even nearly as scared as she should have been during the events of Unholy, as she seemed to stroll from room to room without a care in the world. This made her a lot slower than the enemies pursuing her, so getting caught during a stealth section was nearly always an instant death. This is, unfortunately, one of many instances of mechanics not quite being as polished as a player would like. Changing the crystals in the slingshot was also a laborious task that felt like it took an age. This made it even harder to lure enemies into traps and set them off before they got bored and wandered away.
There was also a seemingly huge issue with the AI of the majority of the enemies throughout Unholy. One of the main instances of this was when hiding in lockers. Like many horrors before it, Unholy uses lockers as the main way of evading enemies once a chase has begun. I assumed that these would work in much the same way as they did in Outlast, with the AI automatically checking the locker next to the one I was in. I couldn’t wait to experience the same tension I had before in other games as I waited for a pursuer to move around the area I was in before eventually moving away.
This was not the case in Unholy, however, as the AI would have seemingly random reactions to lockers. This sounds like it would be an interesting way to shake up the gameplay, but it was, unfortunately, just a bit of a mess. At times an enemy would do as it should and would rustle around in the area I was in, keeping me on the edge of my seat. This was only about 10% of the time, though.
More often than not, the foe would just reset and wander back to where they had been patrolling in a way that didn’t feel organic. Several times I would wait for the music to calm down and would leave the locker only to find I was being camped and facing an instant death from the monster that was just idling outside. And again, with the unforgiving checkpoints and one to two-hit kills, I was set back, being unable to feel anything other than pure rage at what I had just been through.
The AI would also have as many issues with doors as Dorothea seemed to have. I was trapped in one room that a foe had wandered into and got stuck in the door of when it tried to leave. I was out of lures, so I had to come up with creative ways to try to get out on the multiple times this happened. More often than not, it would end with me getting impatient and trying to use myself as the lure, but due to my slow speed and the power of the enemies, this would always end in my death.
One time I decided to wait it out and see just how long I would be trapped in a room, and after nearly 20 minutes of being trapped by a shuffling moron who was seemingly very fond of the door frame, I decided to take my lumps and get reset. There were also upgrades available throughout Unholy, although I noticed none of these to be helpful outside of the level in which they were introduced. The only exception to this was the increased ammo for the slingshot, which was a necessity in the later game.
The enemies in Unholy were limited in both number and variety. My favourite of these was the banshee that carried a lantern and would scream if it saw you, bringing the guard’s attention to the player. She is one of the more exciting and interesting elements of the game, although she only shows up once. This was a shame as the only other fear I felt from the very limited selection of other enemies in Unholy was the cheap jumpscare from the invisible enemies popping up in front of Dorothea with a musical sting loud enough to make me regret playing with headphones.
These invisible enemies come into play towards the end of Unholy and work as a perfect way to introduce The Mask. There is a plague in the Eternal City that is killing those in it, so Dorothea is given a mask. This mask has different modes that allow Dorothea to see an interactable. It can be upgraded to be used as a gas mask later in the game and eventually can be used to detect invisible enemies. This, again, could be a fantastic element of the game, but it’s executed poorly. The mask and slingshot cannot be used in tandem. This makes luring an invisible enemy into a trap harder than other enemies, which were already a nightmare.
In terms of visuals, the design, particularly the clutter, is one of the best aspects of the game. The team behind Unholy did a fantastic job of making an environment I wanted to explore as much as possible. Many of the character designs were very effective, with a lot of the monsters having a grow otherworldly feel to them. Many of the facial animations are a little wooden, however, with some being unemotive at best.
Much of the voice acting and line deliveries are uninspired, particularly when being sarcastic or angry. She also remains out of breath for a comically long amount of time, even when she is safe and walking. It feels like the over-exaggerated breathing exists only to create an air of horror, even when there was very little. Beyond this, the sound is very good, with the orbs each having their own sound effects that are uniform to the emotion they are related to. The background of the music is also very atmospheric and adds the majority of the horror to a game with few genuine scares.
Unholy’s ending is yet another disappointment. The plot is simple, with a predictable ending in terms of story. The characters aren’t really likable enough to feel a sense of great sadness at any of their fates, and the whole ending section of the game is beyond disappointing. Not because, as it would be safe to assume, the combat is too weak to handle an end-game boss, but instead because the whole of the ending of the game is one uninterruptible cutscene with no input from the player.
The opening of Unholy is certainly very intriguing. The amazing detail in the environment cannot be diminished, and the notes were a welcome addition to the game, proving that when the world-building was done right, it was done very right. But the bad controls and lacking enemy types make a sometimes boring, often frustrating experience that isn’t unplayable but is certainly lacking in execution.
