Unholy [Review]
Unfortunately, Unholy is a horror game that is best left unplayed despite having some beautiful art.
Unholy. Credit: Duality Games
Unholy is a first-person horror game from Polish developer Duality Games, released on PC in 2023 and available now on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. It’s an atmospheric adventure that suffers from gameplay issues that can’t be overlooked.
Dorothea interrupts a cult’s ritual as they sacrifice her son, but the high priest still takes the child’s spirit as he flees to the cult’s dark world, the Eternal City. A strange old woman offers help, saying Dorothea’s son could still be saved. Now, she journeys between reality and the cult’s dark Eternal City to find her child. Thanks to underwhelming writing and wooden performances from voice actors, I never felt engaged with the game’s story.
Unholy. Credit: Duality Games
Unholy features exploration, puzzles, stealth, and limited combat. Dorothea has a slingshot that can shoot orbs she harvests from dead bodies in the Eternal City; four types represent different emotions, each with its own power and effect. You use these to solve puzzles and handle enemy encounters. For example, the blue “shock” orbs can overload circuits, power machines, or blow up volatile gas canisters. These orbs only stun enemies. To kill them, you have to get them near an explosive and blow them up. Enemies kill you in one or two hits, leading to a very frustrating experience.
The game’s stealth is a miserable experience; most of the time, it’s your only option. Whether guards would see me or not always felt unpredictable. If I found a place to hide after being spotted, the guards would sometimes not return to their original patrol path, leaving me stuck inside wherever I was hiding, all the while spouting their poorly performed lines of dialogue to no one in particular. There was a point where a ghoul spotted me through a wall.
Unholy. Credit: Duality Games
Dorothea isn’t particularly agile, so getting out of an enemy’s way was sometimes difficult. Interaction in the game is often unpredictable; I would struggle to get the game to change the interactive “eye” icon into an interact button prompt, no matter how I finessed my position or the camera. No matter how I adjusted the sensitivity, the cursor would move at a snail’s pace on screens where I had to interact with objects, such as a segment early in the game where I had to operate a record player.
I encountered multiple bugs while playing the game, some of which required me to exit. For example, I once found myself stuck in geometry after completing a cutscene and had to redo everything I’d done in the chapter up until that point. At times, characters’ mouth movements lose sync with the dialogue in cutscenes. I had instances where the pause menu would stay onscreen after unpausing the game. When I initially started up the game, its default language was Polish rather than English, despite downloading the game from the US PSN. I discovered a level select debug feature was left in the game; it's not a bug, but sloppy nonetheless.
Unholy. Credit: Duality Games
Unholy. Credit: Duality Games
The best thing that Unholy has going for it is its environment art. The look of the dark Eternal City areas is striking. I just wish they were more fun to explore.
Unholy was a tedious, frustrating experience rather than a fun one. From what I had seen, the game seemed to have a lot of promise, but I was left disappointed.
Unholy is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam).
Overall Score: 3/10
Played on: PS5
