What would happen if you were faced with the end of the world?

If desolation’s creep surrounded humanity, what role would you assume? Leader or follower? Fighter or healer? Confronter or runner? Cynic or idealist?

When grotesque monsters of unknown origin burst on into your life with unbridled intent to tear apart everything you’ve ever loved and collected, and the dregs of society’s hope give in to relentless waves of encroaching apocalyptic fog engulfing the majority of towns, settlements and cities - what will you do?

What will you decide? Who will you be?

“Prayer of the Faithless” is a game I’ve been looking forward to for what seems like an age now. In ways, this is the "Apocalypse Ending" to my 7 years waiting on that hill, anticipating with great hope the day that Red_Nova’s previous “big game”, “Soul Sunder”, one of my favourite RPG Maker games of all time, would see its renewed sunrise. That game was the first block in a pattern of Red_Nova’s unique mastery of creating fascinating story reversals, of generating in-the-moment dramatic heft, of supporting the sometimes juvenile motivations of characters with surprisingly down-to-earth empathic and well-reasoned emotions, and of constantly keeping the player on their toes, and hanging on to every last sliding turn the story drifts into.

My love for Red_Nova’s games stems from the clear fact he keeps doing a good thing - dedicating himself wholly to making every last bit of game display what the essence of its story and characters are.

You probably hear that classic talkpoint of "ludonarrative resonance" all the time. That blessed fact you can fuse the player’s emotional wires to a game’s circuitry by establishing mechanics that portray character traits and story beats effectively. Moves that illustrate ways a character thinks. Battles that replace the cutscenes with their own unique tension. Choosing when to show in place of telling, and leading the player through the story by their primal instincts.

Red_Nova excels at this in each and every project he continues to put out. It's one of those qualities about a game storyteller that invisibly heightens the stakes of whatever's happening on screen at the time, between the gameplay and the cutscenes, and every last thread of connective tissue in-between.


“Prayer of the Faithless” is an apocalyptic downer of a tale, with folks facing the end of life as we know it in a world that’s bare and desolate, and where hope is hard to come by. Fog comprising a shifting red gaseous material called Miasma is engulfing the world, and kingdoms have already fallen due to it barging right on in and screwing crap up. Everything organic it touches gets poisoned and dies, except the Manna, a race that has been inhabiting this land since far before the humans landed.

The earth is going to die, and you are too.

You’re Aeyr, a teenager struggling with the lineage of his father, Thane Wilder, who killed the Prince of the Kingdom of Asala, and for that action, attracts the ire of the entire population upon his genealogy. Aeyr has grown to be rebellious against a system that resents his very presence and is bent on making his life a living hell, and so, frankly, they deserve his resultant rebellion. At least from Aeyr’s perspective, the city of Asala is filled with the swift and cruel judgements of those ready to put anyone under fire who does not live up to their morbidly narrow expectations.



The city of Asala has an order of knights that emphasises toughness, self-discipline and the importance of virtue. We’re introduced to the character of Vanessa, who expresses early in the game how distressed she is with The Fog encroaching, and that she can’t see the sky anymore. She berates one of her Knights in training, a moralistic yet naive knight named Amalie. Amalie also happens to be a Manna - that is, a member of a race that has been oppressed by the kingdom and put into effective servitude on castle grounds. The Manna have historically been in touch with the magic of the land that has been coursing through the world’s veins since well before the Asalan kingdom arrived and thrived, and yet she maintains a position as a Knight, the only Manna to be bestowed this “honour”. She is the first and only of her kind to achieve Knighthood status, and she maintains that perceived "honour" by truly honouring her superiors, who sure act like the oppressing class they are, leaving her out of key decisions and away from important information.

From here, themes of racism, colonialism and oppression course through the veins of some incredible subplots (many of which I’d honestly like to see more of, especially Knight Amalie’s storyline), with some implications being pertinent reminders of the dangers of ineffective communication with indigenous peoples and disrespect of the power balance inherent to colonisation. And some of it has unintended implications that if I were to be quite honest I’m not 100% on, but let me be clear - there is no guarantee of correlation between the effects of an author's work on the general population, and what that author actually believes and supports. When you as an author construct story beats and characters with particular conflicts in mind, they’re going to inherently illustrate and relate what happens in reality either by inclusion or omission. Every story produces inevitable parallels. This is the art of the story and it flows through every conversation and interaction, for a story is as universal as breathing.

But even an unintentionally imparted message is a message, and though their import varies based on audience perception, there’s still the more popular common messages we can discern. For we are filtered through the code of our shared experiences. (And, as an aspiring “Good Writer™”, I’m going to try my best to experience and summate that wide range of experiences.)

In addition to the themes of colonialism and racism, we have another theme introduced when our plucky protagonist Aeyr wakes up into a strange dream, in which he confronts a masked figure in a haunted labyrinth (that is shaped like the castle of Asala). The scene highlights another important conflict - the “Cynicism versus Idealism” conflict, two forces in conflict - a battle for the ages.



This “Cynicism vs. Idealism” duality is presented center-stage as one of the most important conflicts in the game, a thematic lynchpin that’s introduced as early as the second scene.

When you’re telling a story, it’s important to let the player know exactly what’s going on very early on in the piece, and to foreshadow future elements. “Prayer of the Faithless” chooses to have interactable statues in the dream world that highlight two important sentences…



It’s this duality of the “nihilist” (Aeyr) and the “feeble” (Mia) that sets them down a path of examining what world-ending events might do to a person, and which side of the cynicism/idealism spectrum that person might fall into. This discussion of whether the “power/nihilism” dynamic is more important or useful than the “purpose/feebleness” dynamic calls upon an age-old duality of "authority and power" versus "tenderness and empathy", and, perhaps more contextually, what is the utility of each competing force when trying to organise a group of folks to survive the apocalypse... if that even is your intention in the first place.

For it seems that the cynical Aeyr might be so jaded and convinced by the vices of humanity to be cynical that he might not even necessarily care whether the human race is saved or not in the end. Aeyr is quite immediately hostile and perceivably cruel towards other knights in the order, but we learn that he has both run out of patience and lives in the shadow of his dad’s actions and legacy. He laughs at anything, and treats the town with contempt, because he believes the world as a whole can’t be saved. Even if it could be saved, perhaps he doesn’t necessarily want it to be.

This puts him at odds with a wide-eyed idealist Mia, who, unlike Aeyr, doesn’t consider self-interest to be a primary motivator, but rather places moral ideals as a force to be followed. Notably, she seems to stake her entire wellbeing on the idea that a purely idealistic force driven by the goodness of humanity can itself unite people, and save the world, and… make everyone happy, and like her, and accept her, all that good stuff- but wait, it’s always for the good of others! Honest… honest!



And so, upon my reading of the text, I feel the truth Prayer of the Faithless attempts to convey is that “it’s never that simple”.

Indeed, it’s implied that no one consequence is better or worse than the other, and if you’re facing such a widely encompassing world-ending scenario, casualties are going to occur. Can “friendship power” save the day? Or should we “kill on sight”? Will “those who believe” get the victory? Or will they get “ruthlessly bullied by everyone else”?

Does “might make right”? Or does “might make the world crumble”?

When I recognised this conflict occurring early on in the piece, it was a theme that I felt was really effective. I feel like the story itself attempts to straddle a middle ground between pure cynicism and pure idealism, but if I’m to be completely honest, while some beats were effective, others were also quite jarring. I felt conflicted about story beats where Aeyr’s actions, despite occasionally being depicted as excessively cynical, were more frequently portrayed as “positive” traits than "negative", generally speaking. There were points where I would’ve liked to have had a more even playing ground to choose who I stand for and what ideals I stand for, but when a character such as Aeyr appears in full glory mid-scene only to have all the variables stacked on their side, and then another character only seems to be crying all the time with everything seeming to go wrong and bad for her, I start to feel a dissonance at play. There's the guy who is always right, and the girl who always cries and who is wrong about herself. The girl who always runs to the safety of a man… and then whenever she tries to achieve power, things go badly for her.

And hold on just one dang minute - let me make this clear that I don’t think all of these implications were necessarily Red Nova’s intention. My experience chatting with Red_Nova has been that they are an extremely kind person who I have known for several years and wouldn't have a harmful bone in their body.

This is also up to personal interpretation - I’m just one person playing an RPG Maker game and feeling certain feelings as I go…

…but they are feelings. And they are felt. And these feelings are sometimes joyful, due to the very on-the-money, fantastic thematic import that I've know Red_Nova has a mastery over for YEARS. And yet, some of the errant threads, leave a little bit of a "yikes" taste for me, and even if I trust that these impacts are unintentional - these feelings are still there, and they are valid.

Further, any of the conflicts that deal with standing up to oppression of a kingdom that doesn’t care for you, of colonisers breaching their own conditions with native people and the complications that come with that… even when it’s being done in a “peaceful” way - are mostly skilfully handled in this game, particularly in some certain scenes to do with a "cave" (hopefully the fact that there is a "cave" in this game doesn't spoil much). As an example, I felt the entire conflict with Amalie and her backstory was done incredibly well. In fact, to the point where I felt like I would have loved to see an entire story built around Amalie.

To that note, Amalie might be my favourite character in the story, followed with a close second by Vanessa… but not for the reasons you might think about.

But since that seems to go into spoiler territory, we'll mention it later. It will only make sense to those who have played the game, and you should go play it now! It's an interesting game with a fantastic sense of the dramatic, and a great battle system that, while I struggled with it at times, brought on a lot of fun! Then, if you do play this game, you can enjoy the spoiler part of this review that much more ;)

The conflicts that the story creates are often so memorable and incredibly well-balanced, with Red_Nova utilising great turns of conversation to establish rifts between characters that are believable and supremely watchable, so much so that it seems me “bouncing off” some of the things that happened in the story is a more of a teensy shame rather than anything fundamentally broken with the story. As a whole, thematic import is quite difficult to get right, and there’s a few times where I felt like I got the wrong message.

The clashing of cultures between the Humans and the Manna raises a lot of great plot points, the religious implications of the story raise a lot of great plot points, the cynicism vs. idealism in the story raises a lot of great plot point… so much that it’s bursting with great ideas that I wish had more time to explore.

It’s a lot of fantastic thematic stuff! There’s substories and subplots in here that would make fantastic individual games of their own. An incredible saga of Amalie facing her demons, or Vanessa facing hers, or a duo discovering their truth. All these threads are fascinating and interesting in their own right.

The game spends its story switching between parties and plots to provide a sweeping narrative, and because of this split nature, it can get caught up in the fragmented nature of it all, but overall, I actually… did enjoy it.

And that’s what actually matters, right?

When I left the game, when I finished it… I wanted to play more. And I did. I reloaded some saves and played a few more battles. It’s a great fun game.

It’s a fun game, because of a massive factor I haven’t mentioned yet.

The battle system. This glorious, complex, magnificent, ambitious, crowded, monstrous, fascinating, double-edged, grand hunk of a system that should be put in a museum and studied in schools.

Let’s get into it.




Now we get to the topic that is this game’s gameplay, and whoa Bessie, it's a chestnut. This game, upon Red_Nova’s own admission, went through a sort of development hell of sorts, going through iterations upon iterations, trying to find the correct balance that this complex set of mechanics in the battle system would thrive on.

And upon finally playing the full game - yes, it is complex.

It’s complex upon complex, it’s the full complexity that you’d expect from the most complex turn-based RPGs you know.

For sure, this game has one of the most complex battle systems I’ve ever played in an RPG.

This complexity works in its favour in many ways, and yet in others it manages to show its flaws. Because it’s so clear that Red_Nova tried his best to rework and perfect this system until it was the best it could be. The complexity and innovation is through the roof (filtered through my admittedly limited experience with turn-based RPGs). But this kind of complexity and innovation invites balancing issues like insects to a lantern. And we all know what happens when they reach their destination. (Burn, baby, burn.)

Except the burning light sparked from Red_Nova’s tempting of fate with his many invented complex systems does return magnificent dividends. The utter euphoria when a battle mechanic is implemented just right, and usable just for a particular situation, for one? Irreplaceable.



As a quick survey of the game’s many, varied systems that all interlock in staggering complexity: Stamina Points (SP) are used to fuel skills, but also provide “Armor” for your player, reducing damage received. Having low SP increases your chance of being targeted. The Power, Skill, Armor and Psyche stats all interplay with the base damage of Physical and Magical attacks (there is also a third damage type, Guard Break, which damages SP only). A skill comparison between attacker and defender affects “critical rate” and “graze rate”, which affect chances to crit and graze in turn. Armor = PHY DEF, Psyche = MAG DEF, there are Counters, skills that affect Target Rate, equipment that affects Pharmacology (healing item effectiveness!), Attack Items that vary in elemental type and scope (One vs. All), a “Miasma Charge” state which makes heroes and enemies like superheroes and supervillains, Counter States, Physical Ailments of the Arm Injury, Head Injury, Bleeding, Blinding… and then there’s Emotional Afflictions on top of that! Rage, Fear, Panic, Despair and Joy, all affecting different Stats of Power, Armor, Skill, and even max SP… *GASP*

We haven’t even got into Burst Drives, Soulfire, Bladelord, Sheathing and Unsheathing, Armatization, Brand (something I didn’t quite get to master of course, since there’s so much here), Stagger, and the fact that each character that enters your party is designed to have an entirely different system that you are expected to master and use at just the right moment, with just the right timing.

In short, the technical nature of the battle system is nothing short of astounding. And there was a lot of fun I was able to have by just playing around with different strategies, and seeing what worked.

But in fact, “Prayer of the Faithless”’ complexity does not stop there. It’s a maze of interconnected systems that rely upon one another, tweaked over 7 years to both Red_Nova’s delight and chagrin.

The complexity of the “View Enemy Info” screen shows all the elemental weaknesses, strengths and stats of an opponent. This fuels the player’s innate ability to use that brain power that would have otherwise been used for memorisation into more valuable skills, like pure strategy customisation.

And it’s fun to watch your plans come into effect in this game! It’s fun to utilise a Bladelord Burst Drive using Mia, use Amalie to manipulate Aggro unto herself, and then use Luke’s Magic burst drives to debuff and cause physical ailments… The sheer amount of customisation that you can wield in this game is phenomenal, and it allows for great expression of style and allows you to play in the way that you’d want to play.

And this went well for a fantastic period of time having full enjoyment of this game.

But something unfortunate happened… over time, I started to use only one character.



Yup, only one character… well, per party, that is. There were several parties you control throughout the course of the game, but when using each party, I began to use only one character in each party, specifically the one who could deal the most amount of damage and not get hurt so much that the party would die.

And they just happened to be two of the major players in the game - Aeyr and Mia.

To be clear, the other party members were probably interesting in their own right, and probably had their own utility in the system! But the fact is that I was able to easily complete the game while (mostly) only using one character. For those who are confused how I can only use one character, the game gives you 3 actions per turn in a battle, and you get to choose which characters you use to do what actions. The assumption is that you’d use all 3 characters in synergy to display teamwork, which did work for me for a while, but I found that the simplest tactic to work was to use, for example, Aeyr’s Soulfire tactics, and heal him only when needed.

But when it works - it really bangs!

Satisfaction flies like the weight of nothing, and I actually legitimately felt at points that I’d just play a 20 hour game that was battles in this system and nothing else. No plot, no conversations, nothing. But there was something else that hampered my enjoyment just that TINY bit.

And it starts with the fact that I played this game one-and-a-half times.

The way that I did this, was that I played halfway through the game, and then I hit a wall.

The wall that I hit was me having minimal HP, and having no money to buy any restorative items, despite selling everything I had - even my spare equipment. Something was wrong. Upon hitting this “softlock” of sorts, I messaged the developer Red_Nova on Twitter to ask him one question that had been plaguing my mind since I had begun playing this game - was I supposed to fight all the monsters, or was I supposed to dodge them?

Because in my first playthrough (which was actually a “half” playthrough), I had used a strategy that I had learned before, in Red_Nova’s previous game, “Soul Sunder”. I’d assumed that the game being a survival game relied on limited resources and limited healing skills, in order to simulate a feeling of survival.

However, the reply I got from Red_Nova was that the game was designed in such a way that if you fought every monster along the way, you would be able to defeat the boss with a fair amount of ease. No wonder I was having trouble in a certain swamp area (which, in retrospect, was the hardest part of the game). So I had got stuck in this one area, without any healing items, and having sold most of my equipment - I was truly softlocked.

So I started the game again from the very beginning, and used Red_Nova’s advice that he sent me in his Twitter replies. I was going to fight every single monster along the way at least once, and see what happened. The result was that it was a much easier game. Not too easy, mind you! But just the right amount of easy and the right amount of difficult. I was all of a sudden not struggling through every single battle hanging by a thread, and I certainly wasn’t underleveled.

The problem I had, though, was that over time, I became overleveled. Much of my battles after the swamp area were so easy that I didn’t need to use much strategy at all. And it’s a bit of a shame, since there were many times that I absolutely enjoyed the rush of finding out new strategies and using them. But I feel like perhaps the magnificently complex design of the game seemed to bounce me out of the experience just that little bit.



The good thing is that the game has an in-built guide, which describes many of the gameplay mechanics, along with some lore. For a long time, I didn’t read many of the entries here, because I felt that it was too much text and expected the game to explain itself through gameplay eventually. It... didn't, so much. I’m generally not a big fan of reading massive walls of text to understand important game mechanics, but here, it turns out it was needed, because it describes some aspects of the game I wasn't learning through trial and error.

Still, there is so much to admire here. The gameplay system is very admirable. It's one of the coolest systems I’ve seen in an RPG Maker game, with a big emphasis on encouraging experimentation and customised fighting styles. I think that for a battle arena type game it would be fantastic, and certainly, it helps to create a vibe of teamwork and support, with the interconnected dynamic of all the systems enhancing the feeling of character interpendence and trust. There’s definitely a lot of good that developers can learn from this.

And so it begins - the creeping realisation that there’s so much that I love about this massive, hulking achievement of a game with a complex battle system and many subplots that explore deep topics that often take an entire game on its own to figure out…

…coupled with the realisation that I might not unilaterally love every part of the experience.
But that’s just games, right? That’s just art. We have differing experiences, we parse these mechanics and story beats through our little squishy brain and we call it “emotion” and we galivant around afterwards, parading our ideas as if they’re objective (when they’re really nothing of the sort!), knowing full well that another person who plays this game might find it utterly blissful at every moment, and that it might have changed their life, and knowing that I cannot argue with that one bit. Because it happened. This game has probably changed a life. I can't change that. I can't argue with a changed life, and I don't think I want to.

But I can argue how this game made me feel, and what I think it represents for us as the audience long-term.

And so, this is where I feel the need to talk about where a game like this gets its personal import - the themes.


Themes are difficult. Especially when the big questions are posed. Questions about life, relations, and oppression. Questions about how we are to live in a world where our race is nearing extinction and we’re forced to decide what we have to do about it- okay, wow. That hits home.

When talking about thematic imports that affect our life, especially those where it has a high capacity to alienate people between two extremes, it’s often quite Based And Lovepilled to take it all, and slap on the simple adage “it’s not simple”. I mean, I do it all the time.

But the fact is, all games are political. Sure, some have more political impact than others, but it’s the change spurred on by thought processes in art that defines our culture, and the direction and intensity of resultant actions. It’s just that. Culture drives change.

So that’s why all the English class-y stuff of thematic importance are on my mind constantly when I examine a game like “Prayer of the Faithless”, especially given it explores themes that I have real, lived experience in.

That’s why I feel it’s ultra important to…

TALK ABOUT THEMES, BABY…. WITH BIG OL’ SPOILERS!!!!!

Yes, this is that part I warned you about earlier, that part where beyond this point lie the spoiler dragons.

I mean, if you haven’t figured out by now that this is an excellently interesting game with a compelling gameplay loop and great story beats - I’ll just say it now.

The game is excellent. It’s skilful. It’s everything I expect from a Red_Nova game. It’s wonderfully self-aware, ready to tackle depth, and ambitious to its core - traits that I feel both I and Red_Nova share with a great deal.

But with great thematic depth and meaning-making comes great thematic import and life-changing effect… responsibility… (I really butchered that quote, didn’t I?)

So if you want to experience the great complexity of themes at play, I’d suggest you stop reading here, play the game, and come back afterwards. Cool! Here we go.



So it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of the themes in the game. And oh boy, are there capital-T Themes at play, here. I’m just going to headline them one by one, and talk about them at length as they come, until I’m satisfied. Savvy? It just feels natural, and I think we’ll come to a greater understanding by the end of it.





This game explores what would happen if humanity was going to die. It examines our reaction to what might happen if this occurs. And in this story, two vitally different reactions exist, embodied by the two main characters of Aeyr and Mia reacting to each other's contrasting ideals.

Aeyr’s cynicism is fueled by his disillusionment with humanity's fairness, leading him to be a ruthless and listless individual who walks about in angsty malaise. Mia’s idealism conversely results in her believing that it’s her responsibility to aid everyone in need. The world has a bunch of needs, and she is the one to solve them! Solve them all, mind you. Mia’s job is to save the entire world from its troubles, and nobody else can do it, because nobody else steps up. Whenever she travels with Amalie, Amalie is the one to point out that they should reduce risk and be strategic, and evaluate things “objectively”, whereas Mia prefers to utilise her feelings in the decision. However, her lack of confidence means that she couches herself in Amalie’s experience.


Okay, let me be the first to say that most of my theories on this I’m not 100% confident on, so bear with me on that front. But I do believe there’s lots of inferences to ideas of faith. I mean… it’s in the title, and the game in its final moments shows where Aeyr becomes the Faithless.

It seems that Vanessa was a knight who gave strict orders to her Asalan people to avoid the village of Lavingard, for it had “become a nest of Miasma monsters”, but Reyson reveals that Miasma don’t make nests, and Amalie is incredulous that Vanessa would lie at all - Amalie trusts Vanessa, the state, and the glorious kingdom of Asala.

Except it’s true. Vanessa was lying, and the party explore the depths of a secret passage in a Lavingardian house where we learn the story was a cover-up for a nest of wild experimentation on humans. We see starved corpses, and a clear division between willing and unwilling participants from all across the globe being sent to Asala for the sake of groundbreaking research… and people-breaking, too. Those who are as young as 15 were sent unwilling to a location to be prodded, mutated into genetic strangers and disposed of as failures.

We also learn here that *gasp* Luke was a “successful” yet unwilling participant in these trials. Mia immediately puts Vanessa under questioning for these practices, whereas Amalie is a lot more hesitant. Vanessa’s pure motivation is to do whatever is necessary for survival, and so she represents a very Machievallian side of the cynicism/idealism spectrum - she will do whatever it takes to get the job done, with hard-nosed toughness being always a pure virtue, and tenderness being for the weak.

Which makes it also tragic to learn that yes, she actually did want to help humanity. Because Vanessa did learn that in a study, there were some humans implanted with Relics, who had a resultant trace amount of Miasma in their bloodstream, and enjoyed complete and total immunity to Fog. When Mia confronts her about the fact she destroyed an entire village (whoa!) to fuel this research practice, Vanessa dismisses that Lavingard was a threat to Asala anyway, so their deaths were warranted.

And so Vanessa decides to order Paladin Amalie to kill everyone in the room, because… killing is the means that justifies the ends.

A central message of “Prayer of the Faithless” rears its head - it’s never quite so simple.

Being able to have a conversation with someone else about the ethics of decisions that were committed in the game is one of the best things that a morally complex game offers. The decisions to make characters in this game flawed beings that constantly poke at what is “right” and “wrong”, encourages the person experiencing the story to think that little bit deeper, and to exercise our cognitive abilities of logic and empathy, and come to our own conclusions.

Vanessa hurts people, kills for the lives of those to come in future, and looks down upon other races. In many ways, she’s a piece of shit. And yet… I think there is still good in her deep down. She’s just created a maze of mirrors and believed a lot of her own lies to get her where she is.

And isn’t that how a lot of monsters are born?


Vance’s arc might be one of the most understandable in the game, in that it becomes obvious early. Which is not something that is not inherently bad, in fact it’s well communicated, but his heel-to-face turn (effectively speaking) is only as effective as it is believable.

And it is believable.



At first, he’s portrayed as a heel character, showing over-the-top amounts of harshness, for example, when he discovers that one of the village members has a sprained ankle. Much like Vanessa, he’s all about the big picture stuff, and if someone has to die to save the many - then we must do what we must do.

It is quite a singular point-of-view that seems to understate how much morale matters at a time like this. Let’s say if we killed the straggler who sprained his ankle (his name’s Parker, and he’s cute :)), then the entire morale and trust could begin to break down. The clan might even lose some of their tenderness and empathy, and even when they reinstate their new home, they could have lost a vital part of themselves in the process. This is why I feel it’s of utmost importance to assess a situation in each context and come to a balanced conclusion, and following a code of ethics too slavishly won’t always provide the results you hope for.

Indeed, upon Amalie supposedly “violating” the code of Knights by refusing to be stoically emotionless about their decisions (like they’ve been taught to do by Vanessa as a survival mechanism), Vance launches an attack on Mia and Amalie, in an action that I can only think of as “ill-advised”. So when Mia and Amalie defeat Vance and Amalie strips Vance of his authoritative power, Vance quickly detracts into a new submission and (albeit begrudging) respect.

It’s when the clan here confides in Mia as their new leader that Mia also then realises she can garner respect, and does have a desirable set of skills and attributes that means she can choose to step up to a plate of leadership. She’s given the buff of having become a “Guiding Light”, which means that when her party is at Max HP, she gets the “Joy” buff.

This shows that Mia truly cares about others.

And so it’s when Vance recognises that Mia’s leadership works much better than his, which was based on care of others rather than a harsh stonewalling approach, it’s only when aboard the Odyssey that…



…Mia tries to deliver a speech, but she’s unpopular with the folks because they feel she hasn’t delivered them to the Promised Land. I haven’t yet got into the Bible stuff yet, but this has a neat Biblical parallel with Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, under God’s command, but the people proving rebellious and churlish, due to their dwindling belief in the ideal and rapidly accelerating cynicism of any sort of improvement occurring.

And then…



It might seem a little tad rushed, but this continuation makes sense - Vance only upheld the protection of the tribe as his main motivation for action, and now he understands by observing that Mia wants to do the same. Perhaps Vance’s words are also a little bit earnest, but the function’s there, and it carries the scene - he has been brought to the realisation, he’s grown as a human being.

Vance’s growth showcases great story structure and writing on the macro level.

It’s often difficult to create time for a whole host of characters to come to their own realisations about themselves, but I felt like Vance’s was a nice addition. To finally hear him advocate in favour of Mia, even when the entire crew was against him, was a great character-defining moment, and it’s handled extremely well and to great effect.



Serra and Reyson are a duo from the Eastern Empire of Vergio, whom we meet in the Eastern Lakreshin Valley, where our first encounter with them is them being cornered by a bunch of possessed humans called the Stranded. Serra’s playfulness interacts with Reyson’s ability to go with her playfulness, and they make quite the cute duo.

We also learn that Reyson is quite a bit older than Serra (his portrait does look kind of young, in a way), and jokes back in a way that plays upon Serra’s reactive nature quite comically. Serra seeks to uphold the reputation that she is an Oracle worth protecting, and that Reyson ALWAYS, ALWAYS obeys her, giving her authority and importance - things she really, really wants. Reyson also displays a great amount of competence in battle, and believes that the Fog has blotted out all humanity in the Stranded.

Reyson is proud of his physical abilities, which complement Serra’s magical abilities, of which she’s really proud of. Reyson sees physical abilities as an art, shown when he really appreciates Mia’s proficiency. Serra believes that her magical powers are a form of “divine punishment”, implying she’s a punishing force sent by the deity or deities at play. To wit, she is an oracle, and oracles are traditionally the mediums through which deities send their messages to humankind.

We also learn that Serra has regained her powers, unlike any other oracle in existence, and she seems quite childishly excited to share this along with the fact that she faked her own death as propaganda, and uttered the Last Prophecy, a prophecy that foreshadowed the arrival of the Revenant, and the “destruction” that would occur under their hand.

Meanwhile, Reyson stays protective of Serra for reasons that we discover later…


Aeyr might be the character that brings up the most dissonance in me when it comes to character development. I thought I’d start by examining this dynamic with Aeyr & Luke discovering Trill and her community of Manna hanging out in the castle.

I understand why Trill’s character was included - her desire to experience new things and her want to cling to someone like Aeyr will conflict with Aeyr’s desire to be alone. Indeed, Aeyr is a Lone Wolf, with buffs that make him stronger if he’s fighting alone (not something that happens much in the game, to be honest, and if he does, we don’t have much control over it since we don’t get to choose our party layout, so it’s essentially the same as not having a buff, I feel). Then we introduce Trill, a person who becomes helplessly dependent on Aeyr for their survival, a trait that everyone has by the end of the game (recognising Aeyr’s true power, that is), but it’s just that much more obvious in Trill’s every line.

There’s a scene in the swamp area of the Caustic Grave where we finally get Luke and Trill confronting Aeyr on his brashness and cold nature, which is honestly the one scene where I feel Aeyr’s willingness to change is truly tested.



In a quick-as-silver flashback of Aeyr’s previous encounters with a hulking, all-consuming Authority Figure that hangs over his every move, we gain much-needed context into the reason why he is who he is.



The game does a great job here in illustrating exactly why Aeyr is the way he is.

I wish there were more scenes like this one, where Aeyr is forced to confront his own inner demons, in a way that doesn’t involve him enacting the power fantasy he always wanted, and always being the smartest in the room. Some day he’ll have to confront the fact that sometimes it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just strong-arm your way through every conversation because you happen to be right. That ends up hurting people, and not in the way that’s fun either. Because I get the feeling that Aeyr actually enjoys being cynical, because it provides him comfort from having to face his own hurtling apathy that would otherwise consume him.

And this makes him a supremely fantastic main character to have… if we explored his vulnerability more often. Because part of me wishes that we explored these struggles without him always defaulting back to his stoic self, and maybe some internal thoughts about what he fears? Maybe some ideas about what he backs away from? Maybe some more insight into why this happens? Because in my experience, people like Aeyr who couch themselves in sarcasm, laugh every situation away and proclaim all as meaningless… have as much to reveal about their internal struggle as a Mia does. It’s just that I don’t feel this game does that too often.



This scene also demonstrates the beginning of a great arc where Trill begins to recognise her ability to choose what she wants.

Indeed, throughout we examine the shells of a culture robbed of their own self-sufficiency, and ability to make their own choices. But just as in real life, exposure to other cultures allows us to make the decision on what to keep and what to reject…

For now, it’s good to point out that Luke and Trill provide good foils for Aeyr’s selfish cynicism - here they call him out when he needs to be called out (see below) and leave him to learn his own lessons (and carry his own logs back to the raft-building location while he’s at it).

And so it’s when Aeyr and Luke encounter the Forsaken Fortress where Trill and the Manna have created their abode, we learn a few things - Trill is the Manna who has learned most advanced speech in her clan, and her appearance is met with the traditional Aeyr snark where he immediately mocks her speech patterns. Which she learned by herself. Because she’s actually really smart.

And so it begins the journey of examining a different theme, which we’ll snap to and come back to this one afterwards…



So we come to this. We’ve hinted at it throughout the game, including a race of beings known as Manna who are subjugated by the larger kingdomites, and they have been displaced by this militaristic kingdom who seeks land… sounds familiar?

That’s because it is - several aspects of colonisation, system racism and othering are called to here, a topic that… well, even I feel underqualified to tackle!

My overall conclusion being that I felt some parts of this topic were well-presented, and others made me feel icky feelings due to reinforcing of stereotypes about indigenous peoples. There are great storylines here, for instance, regarding the true story of Aeyr’s father Thane, and the role that Amalie had to play in the demise of her own tribe, and the guilt that she must have to hold that entire time.



To wit, upon meeting the Manna, Aeyr’s first reaction is to make parallels between them and dogs and cannibals, which… it can be framed as a result of Aeyr’s childishness, but even in the scene, Trill’s reaction is over-the-top exaggerated to make it play for laughs, and because the clear parallel is about interactions with indigenous and colonised peoples, (complete with dark skin and indigenous body paint, as well as hair styles typical of indigenous peoples), I won’t lie in saying that the combination of the direct parallels and the comedic nature of these scenes did make me feel weird about the juxtaposition



Coupled with that, due to the fact that the indigenous Manna speak in English that they are still learning, I feel it was almost an unintentional slight there is the implication that they are children also, since they have only lived short lives up until this point. This makes all the Manna act like children begging for attention, displaying childish behaviours, almost making their race analogous to childishness and lack of critical thinking.

Aeyr’s snarkiness is always “above and beyond” what the Manna can comprehend, despite the fact that even with language differences, the issue with indigenous interactions and negotiations is actually power differentials, not differences in intelligence or childishness.

To “Prayer of the Faithless”’s credit, later in the game is a series of scenes that skilfully depict the imperfect and incredibly damaging relations between the humans and the Manna. However, this is just one theme among many, and I don’t believe it is the main theme, so for how it is introduced… I just feel like it’s an incredibly heavy topic to just treat as one of the themes in a game like this.


So this game has four endings - Tired, Judged, Resolve and Love - and getting an ending depends on the balance of these things called “Resolve Points”, and the endings are based on how this balance of “Resolve Points” is between Aeyr and Mia.

The Different Endings:
1. TIRED - Aeyr has more Resolve Points than Mia
2. JUDGED - Mia has more Resolve Points than Aeyr
3. RESOLVED - Aeyr and Mia are tied, with 2-3 Resolve Points each
4. LOVE - Aeyr and Mia are tied, with 0-1 Resolve Points each

What a way to clearly indicate that the balance between these two! In concept, measuring an ending based on how a duo’s relationship tracks is a fantastic way to personalise an ending.

Except there is an issue I have with this, and it’s not in concept - it’s in implementation.

Things that make Aeyr win Resolve points include:
1. Using Soulfire powers at least 50 times over the course of the story
2. After defeating the boss in Vergio, go straight to the dungeon without looting other areas to get missing items
3. And finding both Luke and Trill after being separated in Purgatory.

Things that make Mia win Resolve points include:
1. Speak to 50 unique refugees over the course of the story (but only after Mia becomes leader)
2. Before leaving the Invader’s Rest puzzle room through the north exit, you must both:
a) make sure to collect Amalie
b) arrange the planks in such a way that creates a path from the West entrance to the North (This will ensure that the refugees are capable of following Mia through the caves)
c) NOTE: If Reyson stops you from leaving a room, you will have failed this check, and must reload an earlier save
3. After departing the Odyssey in Kakuri, go back and talk to Aeyr

This allows you to accumulate anywhere from 0 to 3 points for both Aeyr and Mia, and the ending you get will be calculated by the comparison between these 2 values.



Upon first playthrough, I got the “TIRED” ending, which is where Aeyr has more Resolve Points than Mia.

Now I believe the idea is that “if you act the way that Aeyr would act in this story” you’ll get points, which means that I used a lot of Soulfire powers (which I did!) and that I found Luke and Trill after being separated in Purgatory, but that’s mostly because I explored the entire map before continuing, not because I had any meaningful decision to do so. I used a lot of Soulfire powers, but this approach relies firstly upon the balancing of the 3-turn round system in the battles (which I felt was balanced in a way where you didn’t have to use the same actor for each move, so if you just so happened to use Aeyr all that often, it didn’t necessarily indicate that you were acting “like Aeyr would” in this situation), and I just happened to come across a strategy where I, uh… used Aeyr almost exclusively throughout. So I accidentally got this one, not by roleplaying but just by trying to survive. I can’t remember if I looted other areas efore continuing after Vergio, but in retrospect, I didn’t see this as meaningful to Aeyr’s character, at least that wasn’t what was going through my head at the time.

I wouldn’t be sure if I spoke with 50 refugees over the course of the game, and I can’t even remember if I let a route through the Invader’s Rest puzzle. Although it was a concern to me, I wasn’t aware at the time that it was an important part in dictating the story, which is fine I suppose, but it further reinforces this interesting dynamic question - “does a choice matter if the player is not aware that it matters?” But the whole maze of “does a choice matter?” leads me to some opinions that might constitute a whole essay, so I won’t dive into that just right now. Suffice to say that it’s extremely tricky to make choices “feel like they matter” in games, and that the essence is in the “feeling” of the thing, rather than the technicality. Eeeeeven though people get annoyed about the technicality of “Choices Matter” style choices, once they happen to see the strings of the game, which I’m arguably doing right now, except to say I’m using this “Choices Matter” style ending to illustrate a point about “choices mattering” in general.

For if I was acting out of idealism with Aeyr, and cynicism with Mia, it… didn’t quite feel like it. And I think the “feeling” of the choice is enough, complexities of the technical branching aside. Maybe the fact that I didn’t use teamwork to get through was very “Aeyr” of me, or maybe me not talking to every last NPC wasn’t very “Mia” of me, but nonetheless I didn’t feel as if I was obviously illustrating me to be “one way” or “the other” through the choices that were being analysed.

And let me be clear - this kind of story ending differentiation is EXTREMELY difficult to get right, where even AAA games with mounds of cash poured into rooms of writers can let one down. But it’s still important to bring it up - and so I do.

I also believe that utilising unseen measures such as these to customise an ending experience is an incredibly inspired practice in theory. I’d love to see more of this in games. It’s just that after seeing the strings, I wish there was at least a little more correlation between the actions and the perceived importance of those choices at the time. I’m fairly sure that Red_Nova tried to shy away from the “Make Obvious Choice Here” style of endings, instead opting for the more unseen factors to influence the style of ending, which is commendable. And despite some of the ending feeling too glorifying of Aeyr’s decision-making and planning process and the whole “I know everything that’s going on, just trust me!” side of Aeyr being proved as infallible until the very end, it still left some space for variance and interpretation towards the end.

And there is that excellent moment towards the ending where, when combined, Mia and Aeyr combine their 3 actions each to provide 6 actions, doubling their power in the process. It’s that ludonarrative resonance that Red_Nova excels at yet again.



I won’t go into the 4 endings in full, but each represent an alternative reality of what the ending might look like with some different combination of whether Aeyr and Mia had enough love for each other to leave each other alive, or if they had enough of a sense of duty to save the remaining townsfolk, or if cynicism had taken over instead of idealism.

With the “RESOLVE” ending, Aeyr and Mia have decided that they prefer to be with each other and to preserve each others’ lives more than they need to care about the world outside them. This ending hits on the themes of the need to care about the world (idealism and hopefulness), versus the need to care about just you (cynicism and lack of hope). And especially in our current political climate, it makes sense to ask these questions of yourself - how much are you caring for yourself and your own bubble? And how much are you caring about others you do not know very well, i.e. “The World”?

The ”JUDGED” ending is where Aeyr does not have enough power to put himself into a bubble to save himself, and shoots Mia out of the hole outside of Purgatory. Mia’s heart is plummeted into the depths of despair, and becomes “Faithless”, feeling only apathy, which is just where Aeyr was before his death. Instead of rushing straight overseas, we are able to chat with each party member, and Mia converses in full, about evil and the future, and about how much of this apocalyptic demise was their choice. Amalie blames herself for Aeyr’s corruption, while also acknowledging that Aeyr wouldn’t want Amalie to feel like that. I very much enjoyed this emotional complexity on display.

This ending also displays a manifestation of the vast pressure that Mia feels upon herself to be the World’s saviour. They choose to ask Vanessa to co-rule with Mia, despite her chequered past. Mia is also consumed by the stream sucking her into a sense of obligation and duty to a people who did not care for her to begin with. She then has a badass moment of throwing the head of the Revenant at an uprising citizen, before… putting the entire town under martial law. It’s here that I start to feel like Mia is making unwise decisions (some others would say this happened earlier in the story *sweats*).

We get a glimpse of an imperfect rule of a city that is itself rotting from inner ruin, which is something rather unfortunate indeed. Then we approach Vanessa in the final Tower of Sinners with the whole party, instead of with just Aeyr and/or Mia, like in the other endings. This is perhaps the most “unifying” ending, but also unifying utilising a harsh hand of Big (Powerful) Government and martial rule. Even for someone who is a big fan of Mia in the story, I found this to also be an ending I wouldn’t want to get first time.

The first ending I achieved was the “TIRED” ending, where I had behaved in a way where Aeyr cared about Mia, but Mia did not care so much about Aeyr. It’s actually the ending that I did not expect to get, assuming that I showed greater empathy for Mia’s character than Aeyr’s. In this ending, Mia is not present in the final scenes to call out whenever Aeyr is overly brash or harsh.

In this ending, they smuggle Aeyr into the castle in a cloak, and you are able to explore at ease. It is much like the “JUDGED” ending in this way, except it consists of Aeyr confronting the party instead of Mia. Aeyr seems to pacify Vanessa in his own way, emphasising his own views about being set on a damned path, and notions of “deserving”. Then at the end, we have a “TIRED” Vanessa giving in to the ideas of a cruel and unforgiving world. And the presence of selves in the chaos that is this apocalypse.

The “LOVE” ending is achieved by producing low scores for both Aeyr and Mia (perhaps this is them being taken over by “selfishness” and “cynicism”), and this culminates in Aeyr and Mia choosing each other over the world. What ends up happening is that by observing Aeyr and Mia choose themselves over The World, The World then bites back. The group have seen Aeyr and Mia decide to abandon The World for themselves, and have an argument outside collapsed Purgatory.

This culminates with a grand fight of Aeyr and Mia versus the group, which I’m glad I did not encounter on my first playthrough. (I didn’t want to fight these friends!) This was a really depressing ending, and I definitely would’ve hated to get this first time around.

It also happens that in an ending scene with Vanessa, they are around a campfire instead of just in the darkness alone, with Vanessa turning up to chastise them for feeling so good at the end of the world, so to speak. They respond by stating that they “needed to focus on healing themselves, and left their “missions” behind.



Vanessa then says that we are defined by the impact we leave, rather than our intentions and all the hidden things. But Mia responds with her trademark care and empathy, deciding that it is not an “evil” thing to care for one’s self. This is shown by a reflection of Aeyr and Mia recontextualising their self-forgiveness with Vanessa in the nothingness. It here provides no easy answers. You can choose to forgive yourself if you wish. And that is only if you do so wish.





Let’s take a breather here. Ready?

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Cool? The reason I did that is because I feel like I’m talking (writing!) a lot, and I feel like we’re gonna get into the heady space of the final thrall where… I start to get into some honest feelings I have about the story itself, and its implications. And they’re not all good feelings, either.

Now, I’ve taken care to try and give a positive look at all the magnificent parts of this game that make this game super playable and excellent - because it is! This review has a 4.5 star rating for a reason - it’s FRICKING. GOOD.

And it also raised feelings in me that weren’t good, that I can only pin down to issues I had with story, themes, characters and so on.

And I also don’t feel 100% good about poo-pooing on aspects of a game that someone spent so lovingly for 7 years on… so much so that I wanted to emphasise - THIS. GAME. IS. GOOD. You’re in the spoiler section, so you’ll know. It’s dang good.

But, because I’m in love with storytelling and everything that results from it, I have to share my findings. And they’re not all positive. But Red_Nova - I love you, and thank you for creating this gift of a game.

Anyway, any more of this talk and I’ll come across as babying or insincere - but I’ll risk that for PROFIT!!!!!!

(moving along to a weird section header that aptly describes how lovingly brash I’m gonna be from here-)




I’ll just be frank here - I think Mia cries a bit too much.



Okay… maybe other girls in this story do, too. In fact, I got the feeling that whenever a woman was in this story, she’s either crying a lot, or being emotional, or clinging to a man, or being petulant/argumentative…

And I’m sure it’s not the intention! People cry, and they exhibit vulnerability, and it’s a normal part of our psyche. But repeatedly throughout the story, I felt like vulnerability was repeatedly recognised as weakness, and strength was repeatedly praised. The inclusion of this embodies the weakness that media has put on women for a long time. Mia presents an emotional fragility that leads her to be overly reliant on Aeyr, until the very end, and so does Trill - two of the dominant female protagonists in this game, and Aeyr in turn mocks Trill’s weakness in the height of his anger, and doesn’t seem to get comeuppance for it. This is just the world is. And in turn, I would have thought Mia would have figured out how to stand up for herself and have confidence in her decisions… and she does end up doing so! She sends Aeyr to a suicide mission, but this also brings in the problem that this is just pretty much a dick move. So the only thing where she stands up for herself… has to be a dick move?

But no! She did stand up for herself when she offered to take Vanessa’s place in ruling the kingdom, but doing it right this time. However, the universe is against her again - the people don’t approve of her rule, and she’s required to resort to underhanded tactics (and more crying and retreating into lack of self-worth) in order to redeem her power.

It seemed that in every turn, she was more than willing to cave in to everything that Aeyr said about her as being correct - she doesn’t deserve to have confidence in her own abilities, and she needs to stop believing in herself.

It seems the world sides against her by providing unfulfilment for her inner issues of confidence. She retreats back into her own lack of self. Mia decides that it is not actually worth being confident in one’s own abilities, and that’s the end of her arc.

Correct me if I’m wrong, and I might be wrong - I’m willing to admit it! I want to be wrong here! (And I indeed might be.)

The thing about Mia crying too much that strikes me the most is not that it’s annoying, or not that it feels ingenuine - it could be both of those things! It’s that I don’t think it’s because I inherently think her personality deserves it, and that the game perhaps doesn’t have too much of a flattering view of empathic and tender viewpoints, particularly when it seems that everything an empathic person does in this universe seems to be cast down or aside, unilaterally.

My point is that I felt throughout the story, that the scale of empathy was always on Aeyr’s side, and those who are empathic and tender, who are “weepy, teary types” almost… deserve to lack confidence in themselves?

And I might be wrong. I might have missed the mark on the themes of the game. And yes, those are definitely either possibilities… or fully right, I’m willing to admit that I’m being harsher probably than this game deserves (I really do like the game, and I think the positives outweighed the bits that I’m more critical of), and of course, arcs go unfinished and this is the nature of things, life isn’t perfect - the game states this itself - but I would contend that even if the moral of the game is that life isn’t perfect, that the odds shouldn’t be stacked unfairly against those that are empathic. And I don’t believe that’s just me trying to make excuses for empaths - empaths can do things that invite terrible consequences, and this should happen, because life is life and we all lose at some point.

Yes, you could say that “strong” characters like Amalie and Vanessa and Serra exhibit some brand of strength, but I would in turn argue that they are also led by their emotions too, and get punished for it on almost every account. Even Vanessa seems to cave to her emotions big time, and gets punished for it, and she seems to be the strongest" female character in this story.

But I feel like a great way to explore this is by diving into another aspect of the game, which I’ve again, kinda harshly titled…





I’ll be honest in saying it was sometimes difficult to understand why Aeyr and Mia were so infatuated with each other. I didn’t see many scenes of them showing comradery, or looking out for each others’ best interests. In fact, oftentimes I felt the opposite - sure, Aeyr always wanted to find Mia (her physical location, mostly), but there were also many times where Aeyr seemed to undercut Mia’s confidence, especially when that’s the main thing that Mia was trying to grow. And Mia in turn would betray Aeyr, because Aeyr didn’t want her to take Vanessa’s place as leader.

It’s almost everyone who bends to their emotions at every will… except for Aeyr.

And it seems Aeyr is… almost universally praised for his character traits? I’m not talking about other characters, I’m talking about… the world itself. Yes, it seems that things go well for Aeyr most of the time, and his snarks always happen at the right time, and everything he does is justified, and he’s…

Well, he seems like whatever the male version of a Mary Sue is. When he’s put in the danger of jail, he’s okay with it. He finds his way out. When he lets Mia know that she won’t last as a leader of the castle, it’s true - she doesn’t. When he’s sent off to encounter the Big Bad, he smiles, because he’s already got everything figured out in advance. He seems to have planned everything far ahead, and everything he does works out, and by the end of it… he doesn’t even seem all that affected by all this.

He feels a bit invincible at points, not only physically, but emotionally. Especially indicated by the idea that when I was controlling Mia in a battle against Aeyr, I absolutely annihilated him and his whole party without almost a scratch on Mia. And yet, when he goes to Purgatory, there’s a remark about how much stronger Aeyr is than everyone else. It almost came across as if his brashness towards his colleagues was justified, just because he was right in the end, and that cynicism wins over idealism in a world of hate, and he learns nothing by the end of this game, and doesn’t seem to be hurt by anything that is happening in any big way. Which is a shame, because I feel like if Aeyr was forced to confront his inner demons, it’d pack a lot less… sting?

There’s a certain pain I feel when a person like Aeyr doesn’t seem to learn the consequences of his actions. For starters, I feel like he needed to confront the reasons why he doubted his father so much. Then from there, he can really start caring about something, which would enhance his efficiency a lot…

Because Aeyr is an edgy teenager! He loves to joke and laugh, but we never get the reason why he jokes and laughs. Perhaps He laughs because he’s sad and angry at his father? But I was wondering where we would resolve that. I suppose it says something that I thought initially the place we were going to go was to resolve Aeyr’s relationship with his own father, but it ended up diverting to the relationship between Aeyr and Mia, two characters who do not spend much screen time together at all.

Because the truth is that Aeyr, convinced in himself that he was right all along… was actually right all along. And this isn’t framed perversely, as if his not-learning was something harmful, and that he was an antihero - no. In the end, it’s Vanessa who was evil and harmful, and she got all the punishment in the capstone of it all, and Aeyr walks away unscathed without having to confront his demons or lose anything. Because of course Vanessa was evil: she was quite racist and made decisions based on her bigotry, hiding in a tower of an illusory Faith, broken and battered in the shambles of her illusions.

And well…




…this honestly makes Vanessa one of my favourite characters of the piece, if not my favourite.

She lived (bigotrously, I might add), failed to learn, and lost. And even then, at the end of the day… she was still offered grace. Why? It makes no sense!

And yet… that’s the shining idealism that can survive in the encroaching sea of the apocalypse. It’s probably a lesson that Aeyr needed to learn, too.

Vanessa’s is a fascinating story of tragedy and harm that really caught my attention…

…and also that of Paladin Amalie.

Both Vanessa and Amalie have something vital about their personalities they need to change, and they’re given many instances to test their willingness to turn it around. Vanessa treats Manna less than they should, even Amalie who was positioned as someone she should take care of. She experiments on Knights secretly, keeping them a secret from Amalie just because she is a Manna - meaning she harbours evil secrets, and makes excuses for her and the aristocracy. But during pivotal points in the story, she has full ability to change the story around for others… and she doesn’t. She just continues down her myopic self-destructive path, obliterating everything that’s in her way.

Amalie is harbouring a dark secret too, and she was tricked to believe that being honoured by Asala was an option that protected her people in the long run… yet she was cast out and mutilated, leaving her in an in-between place where she belonged in neither culture.

Many of these parallels highlighted the stark horror of colonisation, of oppression in a system, and how these things can break down under the pressure of a mass event. About how a token position like the one made for Amalie can be as effective as not having one at all, due to the lack of powers Amalie actually has over the situation.

And yet within that position, hard decisions had to be made, and… it’s all complicated.

It’s never quite so simple.

This to me captures the essence of the game, decisions made by people who were flawed and did possibly atrocious things in the name of what they thought was good… and yet the haunting shadow of their regrets ends up consuming them. These were brilliant moments that felt like a step towards the balance that the game thrives best from. The moments where people who have done bad things in the past, use the horror of the apocalypse as an agent to accelerate their growth… or demise.

The end of the world as we know it being a terrifying, brutal and all-annihilating force that… rather ironically brings out either the best and worst in people - no in-between.

And when it appears in-game… it just fires on all cylinders and blasts into the outer stratosphere, to the moon and beyond.

Whenever people are given the choice between two bad options, and have to live with the consequences… it’s brutally haunting and surreal.

Not to mention the irony that after Vanessa’s reign of terror trying to pursue an idealistic solution to the world’s problems, she ends up lying down, broken in the eggshells of her own beliefs, with the sole hope of being redeemed in the next life, in a Tower that… traps you in an endless death in a coffin. Which… feels like an analogy for devotion to a religion?

I mean, the game is called “Prayer of the Faithless”, after all.

I mean, the signs are there in the name of the game, the mentions of God, and the references to “chapels” and the like. In one particular scene, chests are arranged in the shape of a Cross. And then of course the final scenes where Vanessa has to grapple with her beliefs… it all seems very evident in the text here.

In the chapel of Kakuri, a book found in the depths of the holy chapel (or throne room) reads:



This rich inclusion of Christian lore in the concept of a “Rapture”, a prophesied event where all God’s people are taken up to heaven in the blink of an eye, in an unforeseen cataclysmic event, is a distinct and clearly drawn parallel.

The book continues:



Here, I believe that it refers to the events of Soul Sunder, where the main character was able to save the world by destroying the Miasma beneath Purgatory (which, cleverly enough, is where our protagonists need to go once again to make all things right).



Cue the Biblical Flood parable, where Noah got all these animals in a boat with the only good people left on Earth (his family) and the resultant divine flood, killing all remaining survivors, left the boat’s inhabitants unharmed and able to start anew.

I mean… “Prayer of the Faithless” has a boat too, right? With all the remaining survivors of the Earth?



To further drive home the point about the game’s insistence on exploration and chasing of divinity (heh, I accidentally quoted a unity game of the same game. *coughs*), in the icy fortress of Kakuri, Amalie posits that an ancient race believed in a being called “God”, stating that Vanessa denies explaining this. This also implies that Vanessa herself is aware of “God”, and yet for one reason or another fails to explain the concept - yet another example of Vanessa harbouring secrets due to unseen motivations.

And it seems that the mistreatment of Zero from the previous game of Soul Sunder might be the reason why this God became unhappy with the world, and designated its end.

But… does God exist? And who is He, anyway?

Because these prophecies are all coming true, but when Aeyr emerges from the pit of Purgatory, he becomes the Faithless, and he seems to have understood that at the pit of all darkness, there is… nothing. At least in his eyes. Is him who dictates the end of the world at the pit of Purgatory, indeed God?

We then learn that the Tower of Sinners that is revealed in this ice palace of Kakuri to be the fabled place where God “connects us to his heavenly realm”... or so the book says.

Now, I don’t think it’s ever fully explained whether this is entirely myth or not, but it’s clear that at the end of Vanessa’s journey up the Tower of Sinners, she doesn’t find what she’s looking for.

In fact, she doesn’t seem to find God at all. All that happens is that she’s woken up from a hibernation crystal, saying, “Wait, you’re not God, are you?” And in a way, Aeyr might in fact be her God. I don’t think we know that for sure.

Again, this is something that I’m purposely vague about because I could be proven wrong upon further textual reading, but I think it’s important to think about and I think it’s a question that the game poses to you, the player.

In another way, Amalie’s undying devotion to Vanessa makes Vanessa almost like Amalie’s “God”, in a sense. Amalie looks to Vanessa for guidance and help… surely Vanessa won’t let us down? And yet, in the cut-up state she is emerging from a glass canister… she certainly doesn’t seem like the God she was. And she looks up to another God for guidance, who… hasn’t seemed to answer her Prayer.

This is the final lynchpin moment - does Vanessa become Faithless too?

Is her prayer faithful? Or was it empty all along, the seeking of a promise that would never be fulfilled?

These things are all what makes her so supremely interesting to me, and one of the most interesting characters in the game. She’s a tragic figure, someone whose bigotry and ambitions led her to make brash and harmful decisions. And she’s broken by the end of it, only to be redeemed in what I can only describe as a beautiful moment.

And that’s where the beauty of it lies.

The game’s story is extremely well told. Red_Nova will always be a masterful director of the reversal, the strength of a scene, the ability to make a character shine in a moment… But it’s the scenes where they had to encounter the true reckoning of their flaws that have true and utter emotional impact.

And that is where all my favourite storytelling is. In the moment of realisation and recovery. The intention meeting the obstacle, seeing the sparks fly, and letting the character glide to their final destination.

We’re home now.

Let’s return to the surface.



WOOOOOO *GASP!!!!!!!*

Well that was a long time holding our breath under that bridge (sorry to force you through that).

The reality is that this game is good, actually. And Red_Nova is a masterful direction of a scene, knowing when to place a reversal, a line, and to balance the tension of a scene effectively to convey EXACTLY what the game wants.

He’s exceptional at knowing the right way to direct a conversation to keep a player hooked. He kept me on throughout, and the gameplay mechanics… they’re complex and rare and a fantastic monstrous experiment, and-





Yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, I probably should have talked about the tilesets by now (which are phenomenal - great job, Red_Nova), and the monsters which are well-drawn and make the world seem wonderfully spooky and gorgeous (big ups to Unity for helping out with that!), and the music which…

…oh yeah, the music is fantastic. It fits perfectly with the mood, and it complements everything at play. The main theme is gorgeously downbeat, and really excels at conveying the hopelessness that the characters feel.

But for some reason, I felt the need to jump right into the story, gameplay and thematic “flesh” of the piece, and the fact is, beyond that… I don’t have too much to say about it. Presentation-wise, it’s excellent. It’s everything you would like. It supports. It’s honestly not the thing I focussed on the most while playing, and I don’t think it detracts from the game at all. It’s just well-done, and it does its job.



Scenes are well-edited, well-paced, I feel in the moment while I’m in them, and they aren’t distractingly bad. They’re what Red_Nova has always put out - they’re quality street, baby.

I’m also very proud of all the hand-craftedness of the stuff that Red_Nova’s created, and it fills me with great joy. :)

It’s projects like this that are utterly ambitious that make me feel like I’m witnessing greatness in the making. Something wildly ambitious, something worthwhile that really makes me think about all the things that I hold dear in life. I suspect that’s what you like about it too.

And with that… all things have to end.


It is here we finish, dear Section-Header-Author. After all the hubbub. After all the uppity “theme-talking” that you’d hear in your average English 101, I’m leaving it up to you to decide. Cynical or idealist? Give in, or keep going?

If you haven’t, I’d definitely encourage you to play the game. Discover what you think about it. I dunno, this is just a review, I’m a casual cat just using his paws to play a game that someone soul-crushingly created over the course of 7 intense years… and it does feel reductive to finish writing about it without doing the same amount in return! I hope that I discussed this game in a way that highlighted all the great things it does with story and themes, and even in the parts where I bounced off it, I hope to have communicated that the experience was still good overall, and I wanted to return to it, which is always a good sign with these kinds of things. I actually kind of hate writing about something that has been worked on for so long that I have have the slightest bit critical to say about it.

But this is the consumer/creator dichotomy and- wait, you’re saying that this review is packed with asides and themes that it couldn’t fully explore? You’re saying that my writing is bad? You’re saying that I should stop writing reviews of games that people put their full self-worth into (righteously, of course), and instead make a game of my own inspired by my thoughts on the various games that have inspired me throughout the years, including Red_Nova’s own work “Soul Sunder”, among his other fantastically developed and written games that frankly, deserve more attention?

Huh…

…I never thought about it that way.

I mean, I am about to start making a game called “Paper Thin” myself that is so massive in scope that I think it’ll take around… 7 years to make. And it’s… so full of ambition and it… seems to want to tackle the religious aspects and romantic tensions in a balanced way. And… it does have prayer in it. And faithless people.

Wait… am I Red_Nova?

<3