REVIEW – Duality Games’ game will not stand its ground in the horror genre in the long run and will be forgotten, as it fails to innovate sufficiently inventively. As a result, it will bring to mind more familiar (and better quality) titles while trying to get through it all. It’s lacking in all areas, so it could be called a one-off right from the start…

Open the doors between your everyday reality and a dark, unholy world to unveil the mystery of your child’s disappearance. Explore both worlds to find clues, solve puzzles, decide whether you infiltrate or fight brutal enemies and stand up to an aberrant establishment.

Dorothea

Our protagonist tries to escape the Spring of Eternity cult, but its leader has taken her son Gabriel. The high priest fled the real world to the cathedral of the supernatural world, the Eternal City. Fortunately, Dorothea can cross over through her father’s apartment with the help of an old lady who performs a ritual to get him there. This concept alone is something that seems to have been seen in many other games, but add to that the fact that the AI is sometimes unaccountable (which often results in instant death as a “reward”), the handling is lousy, and the combat is a bit incomprehensible, as you can get masks to attack with emotional stones using your slingshot. Suppose there are so many negatives on the first page. In that case, this is not an 8/10 or a 7/10 game because the environment, while nice, almost everything else (even the otherworldly visuals) looks terrible.

You can extract emotions from the corpse of your opponent. Anger can be used to dismantle breakable elements in the environment, shock can be used to electrocute the power grid, sadness can be used to make a smoke bomb, and desire can be used to misdirect guards. The problem is that the opponents can only be knocked out for a short period, and more often than not, they survive the whole thing, while we usually get a game over from a single punch. Anyone who wants this kind of inhuman gameplay should get out their PlayStation 5/4 and look for the shovelware wankery of LGS Productions, aka Gilson B. Pontes. At least there’s melee combat, but Dorothea has no way of doing that here, and the poor handling is shown by the fact that you have to keep switching between “ammo types” instead of being able to select the one you need quickly. Okay, so maybe the lady can escape rapidly. No: she can get stuck in particular objects more than once and is so clumsy that she fails at grabbing ledges. When it’s the fourth time your opponent is circling the only exit, you have to ask why we bother and don’t do something more sensible and practical… and that’s bad enough.

(Sh)City

You have to build on stealth, but it would also require that if Dorothea hides in a closet, her opponent shouldn’t wait outside the closet until she comes out. Then you might expect the stealth mechanisms to work correctly, but even that doesn’t happen. One can guess why the perpetrator of this bunch of characters got this task: the inhabitants of the town are dying in turn from a plague, and Dorothea has to wear a mask, which, depending on the type, will show us other interactive elements (lockers, collectibles, explosive barrels), and in time, can be used as a gas mask so that the ordinarily invisible demons that appear at the end of Unholy can be detected. Why can’t the masks be activated while using the slingshot? It’s worth wearing them because that way, the scenes won’t be so noticeable for how much the mostly ugly game’s facial animations are out of place.

The sound is also shoddy because it’s distorting loud in places, and in others, the soundtrack tries to be scary but falls flat on its face because it tries too hard. You can guarantee in advance that Dorothea’s breathing voices will be muted over time because, in a game that takes about 3 hours to play through (and you can get it done even faster), it will be annoying to hear this often. You can get buffs by collecting memories, but a lot of them are useless; there’s also one for movement (not sure if sliding from running after the tutorial is even necessary once…), and generally speaking, the problem is that the game draws your attention to a lot of things at first, but then seems to forget all about them. In the case of software, it could be called feature creep because it adds something that the program is not intended to do, deviating from its original purpose. Okay, there are those annoying jump scares, but it’s not scary at all, and the puzzles can be solved in seconds with brute force.

zzz

Unholy gets a five and a half out of ten because it’s a nothing kind of game. There was no point in spending time with it. There is nothing memorable about it. Unholy is not worth 30 euros, or currently 24 (but it’s a launch sale; this price will end on July 27 until it gets the inevitable discount or price cut). Five euros max for playing through once, then it goes down the drain—wasted time.

-V-

Publisher: Hook

Developer: Duality Games

Style: Action-adventure

Release: June 20, 2023.