Game EXP: The Unholy Society

 

The Unholy Society

System: Windows, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: CAT-astrophe Games

Developer: CAT-astrophe Games

My Play Time: ~2.5-3 Hours

I have mixed feelings about The Unholy Society by CAT-astrophe Games as played on the Nintendo Switch.  Unbeknownst to me, this game is only Act I of a larger story that is, as of yet, unfinished.  The game progresses as you meet characters close to the protagonist, hints of larger events than the one you are currently investigating, then after finding out information about the Unholy Society, you board a train for Poland and the game ends.  Very unexpectedly and it put a sour taste in my mouth because up until that point (and kind of the last battle which I will get to later), I was loving nearly everything about the game.  It was just sad that it had to end this way.

The Unholy Society follows exorcist priest Bonaventura Horowitz (Bon or BonBon to everyone in the game) through an event in his life involving his sister Susan who he has been avoiding for the past year or two and is now getting married.  Bon acts like a semi-unconventional priest although I have known at least one priest who smoked, used curse words, and drank, but none who rode skateboards, and thankfully none who actively had sex with demons masquerading around as prostitutes (not to shame sex workers); I just chalk it up to Bon's coping mechanisms at having performed exorcisms on humans and animals for let us say at least a decade or more.  The game plays like a visual novel adventure game with QTE-style fights.  Similar to other adventure games like Thimbleweed Park and King's Quest, in The Unholy Society you move through locations with Bon talking with other characters and occasionally collecting items to use, but there is no real puzzle solving.  All of the items you pick up are pretty quickly given to other characters or used during battles (see below), so there thankfully was never a time when I felt that I was inundated with items and wandering around trying to use them on anything with an interact button.

The battles in this game, all scripted in that they are not random, are one of the most unique mechanics in this game, being that I have not come across this type of fight before.  Before each battle, sometimes you may not even know that a battle is starting before the equip screen pops up, you decide on which spells you equip which are displayed on your phone during the battle.  Each spell is made up of sigils that appear randomly on the battle screen and you must select each sigil in the correct order before the timer in the top-middle of the screen reaches zero and the enemy attacks.  Or you know, something like this:

As mentioned above, you also have items that you can use during battle, but I did not know until the final battle that the items have a recharge timer, I thought they were single-use consumables and as I only came upon each item once, I did not want to use them on a run-of-the-mill battle; I also often forgot about them and even after dying during battles, I would just restart a battle and still not use the items.  One frustrating thing about the battles was that I could never tell exactly how much HP I had left, which would be important knowledge if I were to use either of the two attacks that also caused Bon damage.  One would do a whopping 45 points of damage back to Bon, but I could not tell you what Bon's starting HP was.  Was it 100?  Was it 150?  I ended up never using the "Final Attack" because I knew that I would probably only use it once and I would rather have what became my default set up:

One of the highlights of the game for me was the writing, probably because I grew up in the 80s and 90s and know most of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by heart (which did come out in 1975).  The references never felt like the writers were trying to cram in lines from movies and TV shows at every given turn, and the ones that were (frequently) pulled from Monty Python happened to fit with what was happening in the game.  The interactions too between Bon and his family and friends were also well written and amusing, but then I tend to find self-deprecating humor amusing in bursts and as long as that is not the entire schtick.  I guess a lot of the dialogue felt somewhat genuine, or at least as genuine as an alcoholic emotionally handicapped exorcist can be.

Without getting into story specifics, partly because the game was so short (HowLongToBeat has an average of 1.5 hours) and any additional hints past what I have already mentioned above becomes that much larger of a spoiler considering how few story points there are overall, I will say that I was very engaged.  I liked the characters, like Bon's priest friend Baracus and his sister Susan who were only in the story for a short time and felt like they were going to be fleshed out more.  The story ended with a boss fight that took me nine attempts using a different combination of spells but I ended up just going with the ones I have pictured above, and I lowered the difficulty from Normal to Easy; this made the time between enemy attacks longer which in turn made finding sigils to cast spells easier.  When the game went from a loading screen to a "Thank you for playing" and essentially a to be continued message, I was confused.  I genuinely felt like I was seeing something that should not have been there.  I was just getting into the story, "The Unholy Society" had only recently been brought up that was on the verge of being explored, our characters were about to jump off into their grand adventure and everything ended.  It felt like the sanity fake out screen in Eternal Darkness where the game stops after a scenario and brings up a "Thank you for playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, the story continues in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Redemption" (or something to that effect) and for a split second, you think that you just paid $60 for a six-hour game, or in this case $6.66 for a two-hour game.

Do I recommend The Unholy Society?  Maybe?  Maybe if I went into the game knowing that it was only an Act I.  Maybe if I knew that the game would only take between 1.5 and 2 hours (or slightly longer in my case) that I could have been mentally prepared for the "Thank you for playing" tag at the end.  I genuinely think that having this information beforehand would not have made me feel as let down as I was when I reached the end of the game.  Presently, CAT-astrophe Games has only a few pictures from Episode II of The Unholy Society and it does not look like it continues with the story that was going on at the end of Act I as there was mention of going to Poland, but it could be that it starts in Poland and then ends up in Spain or South America, I could be wrong.  It also looks like Bon has gone a bit greyer around the temples which could be a result of a powerful exorcism or that more time has passed.  Or this is a completely new story unrelated to the events that happened in Silent Virginia.  But I would be lying if I said that I am not eagerly awaiting Act II/Episode II whenever it is released, so I guess you could say that I would recommend this game, but with the aforementioned knowledge that it is only Act I of a larger and as of yet uncompleted story.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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