Sinners has taken the world by storm over the past few weeks, and since Ryan Coogler’s latest film is an excellent period piece about fighting vampires in the American South, it’s especially caught the attention of supernatural horror fans.
Whenever I take a break from playing games to watch movies, I always leave the theater thinking about what kinds of games would pair thematically well with whatever I just saw. Sometimes it’s pretty easy to come up with a game. After seeing The Matrix in theaters for its 25th anniversary, I booted up Control, since it has an aesthetic to match and a similarly mind-bending plot about reality and perception.
Sinners, however, stumped me for the entire drive home. I don’t love a lot of the traditional vampire games that might be an obvious pairing, so I started thinking about other elements from Sinners that stood out until I finally found my answer: if you liked Sinners, you should give Faith: The Unholy Trinity a shot.
Feeling Out A Terrifying Vibe
Faith: The Unholy Trinity is an indie game told in three episodes. Using a mixture of Atari 2600 visuals and terrifying rotoscoped cutscenes, it tells the story of a botched exorcism and the fallout that comes from a priest accidentally letting a demon escape its doom. While there’s not much narrative connection to Sinners, there are a lot of thematic parallels between the film and Faith: The Unholy Trinity, such as doubting religion in the face of the paranatural, unknown entities disguising themselves as normal people, and how American culture of the past and present impacts a person’s social standing.
Despite their lack of shared narrative beats or monsters, Sinners and The Unholy Trinity almost feel as if they’re two parts of an anthology that tells stories of supernatural monsters and their place in American history. Sinners is set during the 1930s in the American South, while Faith: The Unholy Trinity is set in the 1980s in the American Northeast. Both feel concretely informed by American history and act as accurate period pieces embellished with supernatural elements.
Traumatic Horror And Action Horror
Before you run out and grab a copy of Faith: The Unholy Trinity on my recommendation, it’s worth pointing out that it leans much harder into horror than Sinners does. While there are a handful of intense scenes in Sinners, it’s not exactly a horror film. It deals with vampires, sure, but they still have a lot of humanity to them since the movie is trying to make parallels between the vampires and the not-yet-undead. The vampire-horror scenes in Sinners are pretty frontloaded, brief, and eventually dropped in favor of more action-oriented scenes.
Faith is horrifying for its entire six-hour playtime. It’s packed full to the brim with unsettling imagery conveyed using simple colors and rotoscoped animations that come straight out of the uncanny valley. The game’s atmosphere is oppressive and awful (meant as a compliment), and there are a lot of silent moments interrupted by extremely loud screaming. It’s a game that had me on edge every play session, and then for hours more after I put it down.
In that regard, Faith and Sinners don’t quite line up, however, the jump scares at the beginning of Sinners, when Sammie walks into the chapel and the shot of the preacher talking to him quickly cuts between his father and the image of a vampire, were what initially made me think of Faith: The Unholy Trinity. There are plenty of similar moments in the game, but it often takes things even further than Sinners does.
While there’s very little concrete connective tissue between Sinners and The Unholy Trinity, the vibes between the two are what solidify them in my mind as complementary. The recommendation is less of “if you liked this, then you have to play this because they’re exactly the same!” and more similar to a charcuterie board. There’s not much in common between a dried apricot and a slice of Havarti cheese, but that doesn’t matter – they complement each other.
- Brand
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Nintendo
- Operating System
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Proprietary, codenamed Horizon
- Storage
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32 – 64 GB, expandable via microSD
- VR Support
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No