Video Game / Forgive Me Father

Forgive Me Father is a Retraux First-Person Shooter that draws from the Cthulhu Mythos and is overlayed in a Comic Book-like style. It was released in April of 2022 after few months of early access, developed by Byte Barrel and published by 1C Publishing (who has taken to publish a handful of other recent throwback shooters).

Set in the 1920s, players take on a role of either a Priest or a Journalist, either of them getting Jumped at the Call through a letter of their Cousin to investigate the town of Pestisville, which turns out to be overrun by various Lovecraftian horrors. Their journey sets them up for an insane blood paved ride.

A sequel, simply titled Forgive Me Father 2, was released on October 19th, 2023.

---

Did I just name a trope? Forgive me father....:

• Abandoned Hospital: Present as one of the first act's levels.
• Abandoned Mine: One of the fourth act's levels.
• Abnormal Ammo: The Worm Nest weapon shoots out worms that crawl on the ground and explode on contact with an enemy. It shares explosive ammo as with the Nasstod and the Thundernomicon.
• Action Bomb: The game has running exploding barrels that explode if you'd ever let them reach close to you. There are also Ygolak and its children, who explode upon their death.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: The aforementioned Hospital level climaxes with such a setpiece.
• Airborne Mook: Act 4 introduces the Entity of Torment, which flies erratically and shoots out projectiles, and becomes a ground-based melee mook after taking enough damage. The next act also introduces Observers, who also use projectile attacks and upon taking lethal damage they attempt to bee-line towards you, crashing into anything.
• A.K.A.-47: Weapons that are modeled after real-life firearms are either given generic names (Revolver, Shotgun) or made up ones (The Thompson submachine gun being rechristened as Rusty Vito, the Luger is the Noller, etc.).
• All the Worlds Are a Stage: Before facing the final boss, the player must travel through a series of portals to places previously visited for a brief fight.
• Ambushing Enemy:
  • Some explosive barrels are actually disguised enemies. When the player gets close, they'll reveal their limbs and rush toward them to explode.
  • Two enemies, one melee and one ranged, hide underwater emerging only when the player moves in range.
• Animate Inanimate Object: The player will eventually learn to be paranoid of Explosive Barrels.
• Anti-Frustration Features: In one of the final levels in Act 5, the player is twice confronted with a series of fairly large pits they have to jump across onto narrow floating platforms that have been spaced almost at maximum jump distance, right after a medium-length combat section. Unlike all previous Bottomless Pits which instantly killed the player, here they are teleported back to the starting platform with minor damage taken (which is even mitigated further by any armor they may have). As there is no save point after the fight they just had, this is a mercy allowing the player over a dozen tries, assuming they have enough health to spare.
• Apocalypse Cult: Such are involved, aiming to awaken the Great Old One himself, seemingly led by Mayor Mahonay.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Enemies go inactive if they are too far from the player, allowing small groups to be kited out of the larger rooms. The flying Entities can do this to themselves, as their erratic flying pattern can move them quickly out of the active range if the player does not move forward.
  • Melee enemies may get caught on level geometry and end up stuck in place, where they can be plinked down from a safe angle without reacting. Similarly, ranged enemies can duck into cover and remain there even as you move to an angle where you can shoot them.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • In addition to the enemies susceptible of headshots, the Liquidators can have their tanks on their backs shot off by the player, which melts them and reduces them from being ranged mooks to melee mooks.
  • There are also severed heads carried by some Wretches that can be destroyed by the player.
  • Shooting the wings of the Entities of Torment will cause them to fall out of the air, turning from flying ranged attackers to ground-based melee attackers.
• Awesomeness Meter: The Madness meter can be treated as this, as it rises up as you deal damage (and finding alcohol in a middle of the fight) and resets backs to 0 whenever you don't deal any damage in a few seconds. Getting it to high levels has you deal more damage and plays a part in recharging your Madness Abilities, as well as screws up your vision a bit.
• Badass Normal: The protagonists start out as this, being a mere Preacher/Reporter that is able to hold on their own during the apocalypse. They'd eventually become Empowered Badass Normal after gaining the Madness Abilities.
• Badass Preacher: One of the player characters. His Madness Abilities placate his more defensive style with items such as a Crucifix, an Aspergillium, The Necronomicon and The Medallion. The Priest downplays this himself with one of his one-liners.
  The Priest: This place needs an exorcist, not a humble pastor.
• Bizarrchitecture: Few of the later levels from Act 4 onward can veer into this.
• Blackout Basement: A few areas are dark enough that the lantern or flashlight are required to navigate. Enemies are still present and guns can't be fire with the light out, making fights more risky.
• Body Horror: It would be easier to name an enemy type that doesn't display this. And the player character seemingly succumbs to it after killing Cthulhu before waking.
• Boom, Headshot!: While the enemies are represented with sprites, the humanoid ones can be hit on the head for extra damage. Killing one even triggers a "HEADSHOT" to appear in comic text above their collapsing body.
• Booze-Based Buff: Alcohol bottles are pickups that add up quite a bit to the Madness meter.
  The Priest: This bottle deserves to be emptied.
• Boring, but Practical: The revolver you get at the start of the game isn't up to taking down larger enemies, but it's also one of the most accurate in the game. This makes it ideal for cleaning out Wretches, Liquidators, and Fat Fish while minimizing ammo spent. Its upgrades may make it more interesting, but losing damage or accuracy reduces its usefulness for clean-up duty.
• Boss Arena Recovery: The boss arenas contain a variety of ammo, health, and armor pickups. Some ammo pickups also respawn a randomized ammo type after a while.
• Boss-Only Level: Every single final level of each act is this.
• Bottomless Magazines: Of the "guns that are not shotguns don't need to be reloaded" variety. The Priest also gets a Medallion as a Madness Ability that temporarily grants him infinite ammunition for short period of time.
• Brother–Sister Team: Downplayed as neither The Priest nor The Journalist work together in the campaign as this is a single-player game, nonetheless either of these are summoned into Pestisville by the same cousin Louis Martin, so chances are both of the player characters are related to each other.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The wetlands level from Act 2.
• Bullet Time: The Journalist has a Madness Ability like this, and she activates it by lightening up a cigarette.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The underwater level from Act 3 has no Save Points whatsoever.
• Clothing Damage: You can rip off the shirts of the Wretches if you slash their torsos with the knife, not like you'd gain that much from the view.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Aptly, this game has plenty of hallmarks of this. Fighting off the Lord of Everything not ending much that well very much included.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Plenty of blood-written messages are strewn within the game.
• Creepy Cemetery: The first level of the second act is this.
• Cthulhumanoid: Liquidator Squad Leaders manage to somehow combine this sort of look with a gas mask.
• Descending Ceiling: In Act 5 after navigating a dark maze and retrieving a key, the lights come on to reveal a descending spiked ceiling. The player must backtrack out of the maze while dodging respawned enemies before it reaches the floor.
• Die, Chair, Die!: The non-explosive barrels don't contain much, but the game keeps track of how many of them you destroy in a level.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Most of the acts are capped off by you taking on an Eldritch Abomination as a boss. And yes, the high priest of the Great Old Ones himself happens to be this game's Final Boss. With all that said however, see the Downer Ending below.....
• Doppelgänger Attack: Twice during the Act 4 boss fight, it will disappear and spawn a dozen or so copies of itself. They have the same attacks as the original but separate and much lower health pools.
• Downer Ending: Of the Cruel Twist Ending kind. You seemingly bring down Cthulhu, only for him to laugh as you morph into some kind of tentacled monstrosity... only to wake up in a hospital where you are about to get questioned for murdering almost the entire of Pestisville's population and your own cousin, and you've done it all under Cthulhu's influence.
• Eldritch Abomination: Wouldn't exactly be a Lovecraft-influenced story without these kinds of beings being involved. Including the first act's boss, Ca'tharsis, as well as Cthulhu himself.
• Eldritch Location: Act 4 leads up onto this and the one after it is mostly set in this.
• Elevator Action Sequence: Act 3 has a large descending cargo lift where waves of enemies will spawn to attack you in close quarters, capped off with two Ygolaks.
• Emergency Weapon: Your knife serves as your fallback weapon or for when you want to save even more ammo on the Cannon Fodder. However it has decent range and attack speed for what it is. One upgrade path for it even turns it into a very dependable machete that solidly holds up against mid-game foes.
• Empty Room Until the Trap: Masterfully executed by the fourth act's boss. You walk into the Boss Room that resembles a small deathmatch arena.... and the boss is nowhere to be seen. The player can possibly take quite a while to seek out this boss until the character would voice "....is there someone behind me?", at which point the player would better be sure to keep one's headphones volume down enough.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The ending has the player wake up chained to a hospital bed, having apparently massacred Pestisville in an insane rage. This has major implications for everything that happened prior.
• Equipment Upgrade: Most of the weapons have one-two possible upgrade paths that could be taken. While some of the paths provide some basic damage/accuracy/firing rate upgrade, others transform the weapon into something else entirely to the point of using different ammunition altogether (like turning a burst rifle into a grenade launcher, turning a submachinegun into a Wave-Motion Gun, turning a Plasma Cannon into a Worm Nest).
• Experience Points: The player character gains experience through killing enemies, each level-up granting one upgrade point. There's a perk that allows the player to gain experience faster.
• Exploding Barrels: Present in both typical inanimate and sentient kinds.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Aside of the NPCs encountered in the cutscenes^note Dr.Sullivan at the end of Act 1, Tom Philips at the end of Act 3, one of the only things encountered in-game that aren't hostile to the player is the friendly drunken sailor that accompanies the statues that serves as Save Points.
• Fall Damage: Averted, discounting the designated Bottomless Pits that kill the player instantly.
• Fat Bastard:
  • The Fat Fish enemies, bloated guys usually in suits that shoot out energy projectiles out of their cane. Upon taking lethal damage they split into two, and their upper half would still keep on crawling towards you and do some damage to you unless you score a killing blow with a headshot.
  • Ygolak and their Children are massively bloated and on dying will detonate with an explosive fart.
• Fish People: The Fishers are a grenadier-type enemy that lob exploding fish at you. There are also Sewer Creatures hiding within pools of water that are essentially The Deep Ones.
• Final Boss: Take a wild guess.
• Flesh Golem: The crab-men enemy is a bit of this.
• Flunky Boss: Azyzz is assisted by the Yellow and Forest Cultist enemies, while Big Ugly Fish is assisted by bouncing blobs reminiscent of Spawns from Quake.
• Foreshadowing: Tom Philips alternates between a normal and mutated appearance when discovered and tries to talk to the player character, but cannot be understood to the player's mounting fury. For a moment you saw through the illusions created by Cthulhu to trick you into killing everyone.
• Fun with Acronyms: Among the myriad of clues and story documents present that your character can examine is an advisory regarding scurvy posted by the American Sea Society or ASS.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The Liquidator enemies are mostly depicted as this, although they do have variants that deviate from this.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Some of the enemy types (Wretches, Fat Fishes, Squad Leaders, True Believers) feature this.
• Goofy Print Underwear: Some of the children of Ygolak can be seen wearing these.
• Gotta Kill Them All: The stats screen at the end of a non-boss level tracks how many enemies killed per level, as well as how many non-explosive barrels destroyed. Curiously, the game has an achievement for going through The Forest level without killing any of the enemies.
• Guns Akimbo: The revolver can be upgraded into this, which ups the firing rate but also takes a hit on the accuracy, enough that after taking this upgrade you might want to rely on your rifle or harpoon gun for long-distance engagements from then on.
• Heal Thyself: The Priest's Crucifix skill is his portable healing ability. The Journalist meanwhile has access to herbs that has her summon a Cool Sword that siphons health with each kill made with it.
• He Was Right There All Along: Entering the final boss arena, it seems empty until two glowing eyes appear in the cliff in front of you, revealing Cthulhu was sitting there watching you the entire time.
• Homing Projectile: The Yellow Cultist enemy casts these.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: By the end of it all the player gets to carry at least a knife, revolver, shotgun, assault rifle, submachinegun, harpoon gun, a plasma cannon and an eldritch rocket launcher, and that's in addition to whenever the player gets to evolve any of these weapons.
• Improbable Weapon User: The Ghoul enemies. It's not often you see anybody use gravestones or coffins either as a weapon or as a shield.
• Infinite Flashlight: Neither The Priest's lantern nor The Journalist's flashlight runs out of juice, and both can be upgraded to provide more light. These cannot be held with a weapon at the same time however.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Tormentor, a machine gun modelled after the Lewis gun that holds 100 bouncing bullets, and it has to be found in secret areas. It serves as a bit of a temporary powerup as it's discarded after you run out of bullets for it.
• Interface Screw:
  • The screen becomes Deliberately Monochrome of Limited Palette kind whenever your madness level gets high (altho' this effect can be disabled in options.... as well as be set to be forced on at all times).
  • The fourth boss, Glitch, corrupts his health bar so it displays a constantly changing mix of random gibberish symbols rather than an actual name.
• Intrepid Reporter: The other playable protagonist. Her Madness Abilities placate her more agressive style with items like the Herb Sword, a Camera, a Voodoo Doll and Cigarettes.
• Invincibility Power-Up: The Priest's Necronomicon ability serves as this.
• Implacable Man: Few of the levels feature a Dark Bane, a slow-moving ghastly enemy that nonetheless can travel through walls, can take you out in a single hit and it's so durable chances are you would end up beating a level without defeating that enemy, especially as it tends to teleport away after receiving enough damage.
• It Gets Easier: The Priest would eventually get used to causing carnage which affects his combat lines. He gets to even find destroying random props like barrels to be "strangely therapeutic".
• Kill Enemies to Open: Frequently seen as doors and portals won't unlock or even appear until all enemies in a room are cleared. Also notably averted with two levels where the player can run past the final room of enemies and into the exit portal.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: After taking enough damage, Slithers will kneel down and raise both hands in surrender while whimpering in fear.
• Last Ditch Move: The Fat Fish would split their halves and crawl towards you (unless you'd score a headshot), Ygolaks and their children fart and explode upon depleting their health, and the observers would make an attempt to fly towards you at fast speed.
• Living Weapon: The Shotgun can become this when upgraded into the Spitter, which has organic elements in its design. There's also the game's rocket launcher, the Thundernomicon.
• Lock and Key Puzzle: The good ol' three colored keys staple is present and accounted for.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Many enemies die messily and can leave behind massive bloodstains. Headshots can even make their brain pop out of the body.
• Mecha-Mooks: Abominations, introduced in the final act, are biomechanical enemies armed with their energy mortars. Mutants also appear to be this, hunched over humans with machinery fused to their backs.
• Mighty Glacier: The Crab-men serve their role as a slow but extremely durable enemy type. And to a lesser extent, the Ghouls.
• Monster Closet: Several keys throughout the game have hidden closets nearby containing enemies waiting for the player.
• Mook Maker: The Martyrs, the hourglass-resembling altars that repeatedly spawn enemies. The final act also introduce Ancient Portals that serve a similar purpose.
• Nintendo Hard: Do not let your starting max health and armor of 200 fool you, as even on normal difficulties plenty of enemy types tend to hit like a truck. It can get worse in some later levels when healing supplies are harder to come by, to the point you will absolutely be making use of your madness abilities to survive.
• No Name Given: As much as there are few named characters in the game, the playable characters are not among them, being referred to simply as The Priest and The Journalist.^note We can assume they are the Martins as we do know the full name of their cousin, Louis Martin.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The zombie-like enemies are refered to as Wretches.
• One-Hit Polykill: The Harpoon gun has enemy piercing properties.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Being a Lovecraft-inspired game, the enemy roster veers into this at times. The Gobblers, Patients (whenever they reveal their true form) and Slithers are the particular standouts.
• The Paralyzer: The Priest can use his Aspergillium Madness Ability to spray holy water on enemies to render them immobile for few seconds. The Journalist uses The Camera for the similar purpose, trading the range for wider area of effect.
• Pinball Projectile:
  • The Spitter/Abyssal Shotgun shoot out bouncing shrapnel in a matter similar to the Flak Cannon from Unreal.
  • The Abomination's mortar and the NASSTOD's rounds will bounce for a short while before exploding unless they hit a targer first.
• Plasma Cannon: The Energy Booster is this game's projectile-based energy weapon.
• Precision F-Strike: Amazingly, pulled off by the narrator during a cutscene between Acts 4 and 5, just before the protagonist is about to gun down Mahonay and his cultist goons.
  You don't give a shit about Heaven. Hell is what awaits you.
• Puzzle Boss: Azyzz, the second act's boss, whom you'd have to destroy his shield altars before you'd be able to directly hurt it.
• Radio Voice: The Liquidators use this. Their death cries are even punctuated by a Radio beeping sound.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: Your knife can become this if you'd pick the Throwing Knives upgrade.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Played with. Some of the Wretches can be seen carrying a severed head, and if you destroy their actual head, they put on the spare head they were carrying as a backup and keep on going. The player can prevent this by destroying the spare head first, or simply opting for center mass.
• Retraux: The game combines the use of two-dimensional sprites for the props, enemies and weapons (and the sprites themselves are of rather high resolution compared to the usual throwback shooters) with modern lightning and effects, all overlayed with the comic book like coat of paint.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The third act kicks off with the protagonist finding Cousin Louis dead, swearing to kill them all. The apparent truth isn't exactly what it seems.
• Save Point: The Cthulhu Statues have this role, every single one of these being acompained by the friendly drunken sailor. Aside of the very final save point in the game - just before the Final Boss - where he's been reduced to bones, the save point itself still works though.
• Scare Chord: A notable instance plays in the second level of the fourth act when at one point you'd stumble upon a silhoulette of some figure deep within the ice.
• Schizo Tech: It's the 1920s, but the cult has advanced labs, biomachinery, and even developed a plasma gun. The player character also somehow manages to jury-rig a tommy gun into a laser cannon.
• Sickening Slaughterhouse: Act 3 passes through a slaughterhouse with partially dismembered pig corpses hanging all over the place. The runoff from the process flows through the open air a pit right next to a room filled with said corpses. The pit itself opens into a series of sewage tunnels filled with blood.
• Standard FPS Guns: A knife as a melee weapon (which can become a Ranged Emergency Weapon), a revolver (which can become dual-wielded or turned into a pistol), a shotgun (of a double-barreled kind), a submachine gun (which can be turned into a continous energy weapon), a battle rifle (that can me made either automatic or turned into a grenade launcher), a harpoon gun that fills the crossbow role, a rapid-fire energy weapon (that can be made into a ground-crawling launcher) and a rocket launcher.
• Suspiciously Cracked Wall: A few secrets are hidden behind walls like these, starting from the level that introduces a (stock) weapon that can blow these up, the Thundernomicon.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: Zig-zagged. The game tends to give you plenty of supplies before a tough encounter, but it's also just as eager to give you the supplies just before the level ends.
• Super Drowning Skills: Depends on the level, on some of the levels the player can submerge onto the water just fine (they don't actually swim tho', they just move around like they are on the ground), some levels have pools that hurt the player, and some outright kill the player.
• Take Cover!: Some ranged attackers such as Liquidators will actively use cover, firing off a volley of attacks before quickly ducking out of sight.
• Teleport Spam: The Cultist enemies are fond of doing this; in fact, it's the only way they can move.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: Aside from the monster closets that open right next to it, picking up a key often causes new enemies to spawn in previously cleared rooms or right on top of the player.
• Title Drop: Occurs right after killing the very first few enemies as The Priest.
  The Priest: Did I just kill a man? Forgive me father.....
• Through the Eyes of Madness: The game's ending implies just around the entire game may have been this.
• Throwing Your Knife Always Works: The initially melee knife can be upgraded into throwing knives of infinite supply.
• Under the Sea: The penultimate level of Act 3 has you use a diving suit and go through an underwater area. Underwater Ruins are present and accounted for.
• Underground Monkey: Few of the enemies have multiple costume variants, some of which being exclusive to certain levels, like how the Wretches have a more mummified appearance in the Graveyard level of Act 2, Liquidators having a Nurse variant in the Hospital level, as well as a Biohazard suit variant, etc.
• The Unpronounceable: The fourth act's boss - colloquially referred to as Glitch - has its name displayed under its health bar as a random mess of letters that changes up constantly.
• Universal Ammunition: The Rifle shares the ammo with the Revolver. The rifle and the submachinegun can also be turned into completely different weapons that use different ammunition instead, making them share ammo with the rocket launcher and Plasma Cannon respectively.
• Unique Enemy:
  • The pitchfork-wielding True Believers are only encountered in the level they are first introduced in, The Forest that kicks off the third act.
  • Big, Ugly Fish is assisted by bouncing spawns which are not seen outside of the first stages of its fight.
• Unwitting Pawn: At the end, it turns out the protagonist ended up wiping out almost the entirety of Pesistville - including the Cousin one was summoned by to rescue - under Cthulhu's influence.
• Voodoo Doll: Available as one of The Journalist's Madness Abilities, which unleashes an area of effect damage around her.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Your Rusty Vito submachinegun can be upgraded to become Des Goules - A devastating hitscan weapon, but also now uses up the rarer energy ammo that can be hard to come by, especially in earlier levels before the Plasma Cannon gets introduced.
• Wham Line: A particular one at the begining of the fourth act's second level, where analyzing the writing at the altar makes the protagonist question one's nature.
  The Priest: "Leave your humanity at the entrance...." Wait, how can I recognize this devil's speech?