Due to this game's nature as an Episodic Game, all spoilers not connected with the endings of Chapter III are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Abide with me! fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me!

— Lyrics of the hymn "Abide with Me", the game's menu music

Describe FIDEM: Profana Trinitas hic.^note Describe FAITH: The Unholy Trinity here.

FAITH is a Retraux Religious Survival Horror game developed and published by Airdorf Games and released in 2017.

Connecticut, 1986. Amy, the daughter of the Martin family, has been acting strangely, and her parents fear that she might be possessed by a demon. To save her, they turn to the Catholic Church, who send a pair of exorcists, Father Allred and John Thomas Ward, to investigate the case and, if necessary, exorcise Amy.

It ends badly.

One year later, Ward, the Sole Survivor, returns to the house. His goal: to put an end to the horror he failed to stop. What might otherwise be a simple exorcism, however, becomes a life-threatening nightmare, and Ward must search for answers while braving the wrath of a demonic presence, all to save a single soul... or so it seems.

Gameplay has you navigating throughout the Martin household and surrounding forest, collecting notes that reveal the backstory and keys to open locked doors. John's only means of defense is a crucifix he holds in his hand — deploy it in whichever direction you hold it in and it will repel any demonic entity coming your way. It will also harm the various bosses you will encounter. But you will need to stand still for it to work, so be sure you aren't leaving yourself vulnerable.

A sequel, FAITH: Chapter II, was released in February 2019. Trailer. Weeks after his return to the Martin house, John has traveled to Gallup Cemetery to investigate suspicious activity, and finds things relating to activities of a Satanic cult, the Eternal Order of the Second Death, who seem to be connected to Amy Martin. John finds himself having to exorcise another woman, Sister Miriam Bell, who is haunting the nearby church.

The demo for a third Chapter was released in Halloween 2019, and released as part of a bundle with the previous two games on October 21, 2022. The bundle, Faith: The Unholy Trinity, can be purchased via Steam and Itch.io^note the first two chapters used to be released individually, but has since been removed, and was published by New Blood Interactive, where one can download the first game and demos for the sequels. Halloween is approaching, and John has gotten a letter from Father Garcia that the Eternal Order intends to summon a powerful demon, Malphas. John must travel around the city to discover where the summoning will take place and thwart it, coming face-to-face with cult leader Gary Miller and learning the truth linking everything together.

In July 2024, New Blood confirmed a Nintendo Switch release of the trilogy the following October, and it was also released for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S the following year (October 23, 2025), and for PlayStation 5 on April 9, 2026.

The following Tropes have not been approved by the Vatican:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The "Candy Tunnel" in Chapter II is a massive sewer system in Snake Meadow Hill where stoners and vagabonds would hang out, although it was plagued by a string of murders that they never caught the perpetrator of. John re-explores it and encounters a number of demons and cultists lurking inside, at one point having to navigate pitch darkness with nothing but a flashlight. (It's also hinted that the real Candy Tunnel was smaller, and that this is an illusion of it caused by John's dreaming.)
• Achievement Mockery: There's an achievement for being killed by the Airdorf Truck in each chapter.
• Ambiguous Ending: The Multiple Endings in Chapter II suggest a couple of different resolutions to the story. Is Amy actually possessed by a demon and is the player actually a priest, or are they both just mental cases who belong in either prison, or an asylum?
  • In ending 2, Garcia dies in John's nightmare, but still sends an encouraging letter to John. However, trying to review the letter in the menu brings up a "You can't seem to remember this note." message, the same message you get when attempting to review the news excerpt written by the cultists, implying that John may have hallucinated the letter.
• And the Adventure Continues: In the Golden Ending, John can either accept Garcia's offer to continue the war against the Unspeakable and its minions across the country, or continue his own investigations with Lisa. This is also the case in Ending 1, but on the more ominous note of Garcia threatening John into coming with him.
• Answer to Prayers:
  • The final flashback in Chapter III has then-amateur exorcist John Ward, having escaped the Martin household and the demon-possessed Amy, pray to God for help. God answers and personally speaks to John, who expresses his fear and desire to save himself even if he has to leave poor Amy behind. God gently cautions that he is acting in cowardice, but otherwise helps him leave after making him swear an oath. However, the figure in question is heavily implied (and confirmed via Word of God) to actually be the Devil himself tricking John into a Deal with the Devil.
  • In the final phase of the True Final Boss, God (definitely the real one this time) empowers John to fight Super Miriam, allowing him to take ten hits instead of the usual one.
• Antepiece: In Chapter III, the player goes through a scripted event where John gets possessed by Alu and starts moving on his own in random directions, seemingly serving no purpose other than to have a Jump Scare. This mechanic makes a return in the main boss battle against Alu in the apartments, and a pop up reading "FIGHT IT, JOHN" appears when the possession happens again just in case it wasn't obvious what happened the first time, as John now has to prevent himself from killing Lisa.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game autosaves just about every time you make progress.
  • In the final segment of the game, if you waste the one bullet you were given with the rifle by not shooting one of the five valid targets, the loaded rifle will respawn in the Martins' living room where you first found it. You're able to take advantage of this by using the rifle to shoot the mirror in Mr. and Mrs. Martin's bedroom. You have to go back to the main room to pick up a new rifle each time and after shooting the mirror enough times, you encounter a secret boss.
  • Version 1.1 added a visible pentagram in the attic during the boss fight with Amy's demon to make it easier to predict her movement pattern and get out of the way.
  • In Chapter II, a few of the final boss's attacks, including the infamous pentagram attack, will completely ignore Garcia, making keeping him alive much more manageable.
• Apartment Complex of Horrors: The New Haven Apartments in Chapter 3 are a living space for members of the Eternal Order of the Second Death, including Tiffany Robinson. Unfortunately Lisa is also living there, meaning John has to go rescue her and explore its many floors in order to find her and protect her from the multitude of demons the cult has summoned.
• Arc Words:
  • "Gary loves you" pops up in certain notes, and all over the game's marketing. GaryLovesYou.com even acts as a redirect link to New Blood Interactive's website.
  • "Gary is a normal human being just like you and me", along with its variants, is repeated throughout Chapter III.
• Art Shift: Many cutscenes are rotoscoped, which contrasts unsettlingly with the rest of the game's second-gen appearance.
• Ascended Meme: The "Mortis" Game Over screen has been jokingly compared to Morbius (2022) due to the similar spelling. The Steam release includes a file in the goodies folder of a similar screen, but this time actually saying "Morbius".
• Asshole Victim: The cop from Chapter II whose whole squad was wiped out. He's perfectly fine with sacrificing other human beings that he regards as lesser — drug addicts, the homeless, child prostitutes, and AIDS sufferers — as long as his squadmates are safe.
• As the Good Book Says...: The instruction screen quotes Psalm 116:9 ("I will walk before the LORD in the land of the living") when teaching you how to move, and James 4:7 ("Resist the devil, and he will flee from you") when teaching you how to cast out spirits with your cross. Psalm 91 is also repeated in many endings from Chapter I, and said in full in a Chapter II boss fight. Darkly invoked in Chapter II, in which a message from the Satanist leader Gary mockingly paraphrases Matthew 7:21: "Verily, not everyone who says LUCIFER, LUCIFER will inherit His kingdom."
• Badass Boast: Father Garcia in the prologue of Chapter II after Michael escapes from his exorcism.
  Father Garcia: You can't hide from God, hijo. You shall drink the wrath of the Almighty.
• Bad Boss: In Chapter III, you can find a note in the apartment building where Gary instructs his fellow cultists how to keep themselves safe during the visit of the UNSPEAKABLE. A note you can find elsewhere in the same building, implied to be from another cultist, reveals that Gary is lying to them and that no one is safe, instructing others to run if they see the demon. He also acts dismissively towards everything Tiffany did out of her love for him, showing how little others actually mean to him despite his Affably Evil persona he has been putting up in front of the cult. There's also the fact that Gary has been keeping the money meant to cover the apartment building's utilities payment.
• Big Damn Heroes: Father Garcia appears to save and help John during Chapter II's final boss. He does the same for Chapter III's final boss, arriving to pump Gary full of lead and cover John's back.
• Bilingual Bonus: Spanish and Latin are both used in various points of the game, Latin moreso.
• Bittersweet Ending: All of the endings are bittersweet, which tend to skew more towards bitter. Only in Chapter III does it lead more towards sweet.
  • Chapter I:
    • If you kill Amy, you're arrested for murder. If you shoot the shadow (revealed to be a priest that is trying to stop Michael) in the woods, you're killed by Michael. If you shoot that fox corpse on the pentagram, you're jumped by the local satanic cult. If you kill a deer, nature strikes back. In fact, the best ending is to give up your pursuit of Amy after the incomplete exorcism, and shoot Michael when he attacks you as you try to leave. And even then, the hosts of both demons are dead or dying, the demons never expelled from them.
  • Chapter II:
    • Best case scenario, John is still haunted by his failure to exorcise Amy, and can only hope that her death leads her to Heaven; meanwhile, Amy's siblings are being targeted next, and John needs to hurry to spare them the same fate.
    • If you couldn't protect Father Garcia during the Final Boss, John's final speech and self-reflection will be a lot less hopeful, and a red figure is shown tailing him.
  • In Chapter III, failing to unlock the Crucible will have John and Father Garcia successfully prevent the Profane Sabbath. However, Gary is still at large, and John is shaken by his experiences and lacks closure. He follows Garcia on the latter's war against the demonic forces, but it's clear that he isn't doing it of his own convictions, a fact that is reflected by the two leaving in Garcia's car instead of John's with him in the backseat. It's even worse if John failed to protect either the police officer in the hospital or Lisa in the apartments, in which case he's so broken by everything he's endured that he hesitates to join Garcia's crusade, only to be forced to at gunpoint.
• Blackout Basement:
  • In Chapter I, the only "dark" area is the house's basement, but there's a bloody pentagram there, and finding it is what triggers Amy to appear and start attacking you.
  • In Chapter II, there's an entire segment set in a series of dark tunnels. Trying to blindly navigate your way through them will just get you killed by monsters. You need to find a flashlight — driving off the demon guarding it — before you can proceed. And there are still monsters lurking in the dark you'll need to watch for, as well.
  • The basement of the Church is pitch-black. John needs to study a glyph on the floor carefully, then solve a tile puzzle to safely advance. If he steps on a wrong tile, he'll be torn apart by an unseen monster.
    • In the deeper reaches of the Candy Tunnel. John is forced to find a flashlight to light up where he's going, and it goes from bad to worse when a demon decides to take advantage of the limited visibility to harass him.
  • Two instances in Chapter III.
    • There is a segment in the apartments where John must temporarily discard his crucifix to proceed. A camera is found shortly thereafter, and then the lights go out. The flash of the camera is the only way to navigate the pitch-dark building until you find the crucifix again in the basement. And, naturally, there are monsters lurking in the dark that will chase you when you flash the camera.
    • Inside Moloch's navel, John proceeds through a hallway where the lights go out behind him as he passes. Further on, there is a darkened forest brimming with bird-head demons with broken necks, which can only be seen by the light of a lantern John finds.
• Blatant Lies: "Gary is a normal human being just like you and me" is a phrase thrown out a lot... after really demonic events related to Gary have occurred. Uh huh, sure.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The third ending of Chapter I: "The Offering" where John shoots the sacrificed fox ends with him driving away and being stopped by a group of cultists led by Gary. While the other endings (save for the true ending) have John arrested or killed, this one fades to black before we find out what happens to him. Either he was killed or captured by the cult or he managed to turn around and get away.
• Bookends: Chapter I opens with John telling himself to finish what he started and exorcise Amy. In the Golden Ending of Chapter III, Amy asks John to finish what he started.
• Border-Occupying Decorations: The game is played in a 4:3 aspect ratio in the style of old C64 games, which leads to there being two large black sections on either side of the play area if you play the game in fullscreen. By default these are occupied by a drawing of John confronting the UNSPEAKABLE, but you can change it to a black background in the options menu as well as unlock a variety of alternative border images by acquiring new endings or completing the various challenge modes.
• Call-Back:
  • Father Garcia says "Do not be afraid, John" when he saves you during the final boss of Chapter II. His real-life, non-dream counterpart says the same thing during the climax of Chapter III, emphasized with a Dramatic Shotgun Pump no less.
  • During the first fight against Gary, he will summon demons that John has previously encountered to attack him.
  • There is a portrait of the nun from Chapter II in the school basement of Chapter III. Makes sense, considering said nun is actually Gary's "mother".
• Canis Latinicus: "Pandemonium regnat" doesn't actually mean anything in Latin — not only should the verb "regnat" come first, "Pandemonium" was coined by John Milton in Paradise Lost as a name for Hell's capital city, from the Greek "pan" meaning "all" and the Latin "daemonium" meaning "demon". As such, it could be interpreted as either "the demons reign," "Hell reigns," or "chaos reigns." Given the accuracy of the Latin in the first game, this was probably chosen deliberately for its ambiguity.
• Canon Welding: Late in Chapter III, it's revealed that this game takes place in the same universe as DUSK. Inside a shack, you find a letter from Gary to Jakob, the Big Bad of that game, as well as a photograph of the two along with the killer from Fallen Aces. As soon as you leave the shack, you are chased by a Horror, an enemy from DUSK that Jakob had gifted to Gary as a pet. Even before that, an Easter Egg in Chapter II has the symbol of Jakob's cult appear in the sewers.
• Cat Scare: In a later area Chapter III, a bird can be seen flitting behind the wires of the basement with a loud sound playing when it appears. This happens three times. The third time, however, serves as your introduction to the bird demons in the area.
• Color-Coded Characters: Since the game is running with an Atari art style, the three most prominent characters are colored differently from generic characters: John is blue with a single white pixel representing his clerical collar, Michael is sickly-white with red eyes, and Amy is a dark purple. In addition to these three, there's Father Garcia (grey), Gary and his cult (red), and in Chapter III, Tiffany is purple, (but more of a lavender, as opposed to the dark purple Amy was in Chapter I) and Lisa is a pale yellow. Dialogue from and notes left by these characters found throughout the game also have corresponding colored text.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Demonstrated in Chapter III: Father Garcia fends off both cultists and demons on his own with barely a scratch, whereas an entire squadron of police gets annihilated in the process of killing off several cultists.
• Creator Cameo: Of sorts. The truck that kills Michael in Chapter I (or John if he loiters in the road) has "AIRDORF" written on it. Airdorf Games are the developers of the game. The truck shows up again in Chapter II as an easter egg, this time possibly running over John if the player decides to make him backtrack and kill innocent civilians. And again in Chapter III during the lead up to the birth clinic segment which can kill John if he is unfortunate enough to be in front of it.
• Crisis of Faith: According to John in Chapter II, he "turned [his] back on the ministry, and broke [his] vows with God" between Amy's first exorcism and the events of Chapter I. He has had a change of heart and come back to God, whether it be out of guilt or genuine belief. Averted by Father Garcia, who actually has found a renewal in his faith from the events of the game.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: It's hard to tell due to the game's deliberate low-poly look, but John can die in some pretty gruesome ways, including being squashed into a red smear, torn to shreds, or mangled beyond recognition. At one point, during a Rotoscoping cutscene, John appears to visibly melt alive, as well.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Chapter II confirms the Golden Ending, where Amy is left for dead and Michael is shot and splattered by a truck, to be the canon ending of the first chapter.
• Danger Takes a Backseat: In one of the endings, which you get if you shoot the shadow, Michael hides in your backseat and jumps you on your drive home.
• Deal with the Devil: Obviously, what with the Satanic cult trying to bring on the end times and all. Specifically, however, it is heavily implied that John was tricked by Satan into abandoning Amy to Hell's clutches after the demon possessing her murders her parents and Father Allred. The vision of "God" he sees preys on his fear and cowardice to prevent him from completing the exorcism, only willing to grant him safe passage out of the house if he verbally forsakes Amy's soul.
• Death Cult: The Eternal Order of the Second Death has absolutely no qualms about murdering anybody that gets in the way of their plans, but a core doctrine of their beliefs involves applying something called the "Second Death" to their followers, a mysterious ritual sacrifice that allows their body to become a vessel for Gary.
• Death of a Child: Occurs a lot in the backstory of the game due to the cult's activity. Well, you wouldn't expect a demonic cult that's really gung-ho with killing people to draw the line at children now, would you?
  • The first known instance of this is the Cornfield Maze Incident, where the dismembered body parts of six orphans under the care of Snake Meadow Hill Church were discovered by their caretakers. What had happened was that the orphans ignored their caretakers' warnings to not go into the nearby cornfields after a dog that was also being cared for by the Church was discovered to have been killed by something hiding in the cornfields.
  • Miriam Bell is heavily implied to have either killed or had a hand in killing four of the six orphans who were under their care during their time in Snake Meadow Hill Church after it was restaffed. While there's no clear indication how many years have passed between the events, this one chronologically occurred after the Cornfield incident.
  • In the very first game, Michael Davies is essentially dead by the time you encounter him, as his body has been used as physical vessel by a demon, which is why he now has a really grotesque look.
  • One of the steps that you must do to Earn Your Bad Ending in Chapter II is to offer an innocent child to the red figure in the confessional booth.
  • As it turns out, this has been happening long before the events in the game, both the ones that John experiences (sorta) firsthand and the flashbacks we are treated to, since the Cult of the Second Death has been practicing a ritual in the form of offering newborns to the portal to Hell that they carve into a vessel's face. It's for this ritual that the cult runs a childbirth assistance clinic in order to gain access to newborns.
  • It's Played With in the case of the Martin twins, Amy's younger brothers. They seem to have disappeared after the exorcism performed on their sister and no mention is made of their fate in Chapter I. Then in Chapter III, Father Garcia says that he's been unable to find them even after searching and trying to track them down extensively. But as it turns out, the twins were actually a Tragic Stillbirth that Cindy Martin suffered, and to cope with it, she pretended that they were still alive.
• Demonic Possession:
  • Amy Martin is a victim, and the player controls an exorcist trying to handle it. He fails. From then on, though Amy apparently "dies," much reference is made to the fact that the demon is still running around wearing her face.
  • Chapter II confirms that Michael is also a victim of possession, whose body has been demon-ridden for so long that he's no longer recognizable as having ever been human. Something similar happens to John during the game.
  • In Chapter III, John must be possessed by Alu at least once. Also, Lisa is used by Gary's cult as an unwilling vessel for Alu. The final encounter involves the demon surfing between John and Lisa multiple times during the battle, trying to bait John into killing Lisa. If he does, the demon possesses him permanently.
• Denser and Wackier: In a fashion. Although Chapter III contains some of the most horrific moments in the series yet, it also has by far the greatest ratio of comedy-to-horror moments in the trilogy as a consequence of the Channel Hop to New Blood Interactive, sometimes bordering on Mood Whiplash from the nightmarish to the comically absurd.
• Developer's Foresight: Exorcising Amy enough times on the second floor will have John comment about a door opening. If this is done on the first floor, or in the basement, he will instead comment that he heard it from upstairs. Do it at the attic door, and Amy will float to the door, opening it with no comment.
• Devil, but No God: invoked There are countless verifiable demons that John encounters throughout the story either possessing people or haunting areas, and of course the ultimate evil that he encounters is a demonic Eldritch Abomination that Gary is trying to manifest on earth in order to bring about the apocalypse. By contrast, the only evidence that God exists whatsoever is that crucifixes and prayers genuinely work to dispel and exorcise demons. It would seem that it was revealed in Chapter III that John was approached by an angelic figure after failing to exorcise Amy, but Word of God is that that white figure was actually Satan in disguise, continuing the theme of demons tricking John or leading him astray.
• Doing in the Scientist: Chapter I portrays its supernatural elements in an ambiguous light, leaving it up to interpretation whether Amy is actually possessed and even hinting that John may just be insane. Chapter II completely abandons the ambiguity and goes full supernatural, confirming that Amy was possessed and that demons are very real.
• Don't Go in the Woods: John has to trudge through a desolate forest in the middle of the night to get to his destination. Said forest is haunted by another possessed victim resembling a Chupacabra.
• Double-Meaning Title: The title of the full release, Unholy Trinity, refers to both the fact that the game is three chapters, to the three secret bosses in Chapter III that power the seal to the Profane Sabbath, and the in-universe Unholy Trinity: the Mother, the Daughter, and the Unclean Spirit.
• Downer Ending: In Chapter III, John can give into his despair or lack of faith and refuse to investigate the Daycare Center on the final day, driving back home instead. Without his interference, the Profane Sabbath goes off without a hitch and causes The End of the World as We Know It, with some of the thralls surrounding his house. He enters a previously locked room in his home and finds the possessed Amy, asking what the cultists want from him and wanting the nightmares to end. She declares him "UNFORGIVABLE" and transports him to the ruined Martin house, where he despairs that it's all his fault. John eventually surrenders to the UNSPEAKABLE while the possessed Amy and Martin hold his hands up and a giant hand snatches him away to become its new vessel, with the Martin house disappearing as well. The ending text also makes it clear that John was subject to Damnatio Memoriae, being erased from existence, as punishment for him being a Dirty Coward at the eleventh hour.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: The entirety of Chapter II, outside of the very beginning with Father Garcia and the very end, hints at things John will deal with in Chapter III as he dreams about them in his sleep.
• Dual Boss: At the end of Chapter III, if you satisfy the requirements to access the final boss battle, Gary will be joined by Malphas midway through the first phase of the battle.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Getting the worst ending in Chapter II is way more involved than the others, as it requires you to carry out three obtuse actions throughout the game only vaguely hinted at by one early note. Chapter I, by comparison, is choosing to shoot things you probably shouldn't at the end, and Chapter III is significantly more lenient by comparison, only requiring that you refuse to do your job and go home from the final area before you've even done anything.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Chapter III can be completed by simply investigating and trying to fight off the cult's machinations in the three main locations, but you'll get incomplete endings that don't resolve everything. You have to dig deeper and seek out every Secret Boss to be able to really face Gary as a True Final Boss once and for all instead of him getting away, and finally free Amy's soul.
• Easter Egg: Pausing whenever Michael is present will trigger a set of rotoscope animations featuring him.
• Egopolis: The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in Chapter III, the underground base of the Eternal Order of the Second Death, is called Garyland.
• Eldritch Location: Anywhere that seems to suffer from demonic influence suddenly seems to stop obeying the laws of natural geometry, as there's many an Unnaturally Looping Location, and the environments start having implausible layouts or straight up reality-breaking abnormalities. Combine this with John's Sanity Slippage and it might be hard to tell if any of it is actually happening or just his mind's interpretation of what's happening.
• The Elevator from Ipanema: The apartment building's elevator in Chapter III has catchy muzak playing over the speakers as John is riding the lift. At several points, the music will become distorted and demonic, only to return to normal after the main threats in the building have been taken care of.
• Episodic Game: The game is split into three distinct "Chapters" that all tell their own individual stories but together link up and combine into an overarching narrative. You can access any individual chapter separately from one another in the main menu, but if you want, you can play the game in "Marathon Mode" which links all three chapters together into one continuous playthrough.
• Escort Mission: The final Boss Fight of Chapter II locks the Good Ending behind protecting Father Garcia as he attempts to drive away the demon in the shape of Miriam Bell. The boss can be fought if Garcia dies, but this leads to a Downer Ending. Thankfully, you only need to block one specific attack aimed at Garcia, as the rest will not affect him.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Invoked in one of Gary's notes addressing the order's Tier II members, where it's described how cultists who have reached this stage of damnation will be met with hostile reactions from pets and other animals.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: How John describes his encounter with Amy in the attic in 1986, with the place feeling like it was "freezing" when he found her there.
• Evil Smells Bad: Aside from the hostile reaction from animals, one of the initial signs of a cultist reaching Tier II in their order is the emitting of foul odors that turn away their loved ones and friends.
• Eye Scream: John gets the brunt of this in Chapter II. In order to create a pentagram in the forest, John stabs himself in the eye with a key and uses the blood to draw lines, and in one of the endings, he bleeds from both eyes after being taken by the red-robed cult.
• Facial Horror:
  • Towards the end of Chapter I, when you encounter Amy in the attic, you find she has a gaping bloody hole where her face should be. During the third round of the boss fight, the demon possessing her sticks its arm out through the hole.
  • In Chapter III's apartment area, you get a trippy visual of a demon staring John in the face, before his face seems to melt as he is seemingly possessed by the demon also possessing Amy. Later, every time he is possessed during the Boss Fight, his face seemingly explodes inside out. It's quite gory.
  • It's implied in Chapter III that cutting off the face is what lets the demon inside. Tiffany willingly did it to herself to try to win Gary's favor, and she can be found in the full game as an Optional Boss. Asking the right question to Gary will have him tell John that the way to open a portal to hell is by carving off one's face and inserting a newborn in it.
  • As you ask him more questions, Gary's face becomes more and more distorted.
• Failure Is an Option: The end of Chapter I provides numerous alternate Downer Endings for the player to take down after acquiring the Rifle; ranging from being jumped by Michael Davies to being mauled by deer. In only one ending does John survive; however regardless of the one taken, the player will always be able to continue into Chapter II.
• Foreshadowing:
  • You can see a spirit behind you in a mirror in the house, but you cannot exorcise it. When you get the rifle, fully breaking said mirror starts a Secret Boss fight.
  • The Chapter II demo has a note mentioning how one can open the Gate to Hell by putting three followers of the dragon into an effigy and setting it on fire. Cue Chapter II where John kills three followers of the dragon and then turns into a demon after setting the effigies of them on fire.
  • The family portrait in the Martin residence only shows Amy and her parents, with Nate and Jason excluded. One might think that this is due to the portrait being from before the boys were born. However, it is revealed that Amy really was an only child and the twins were miscarried, with any mention of them being the delusions of a grieving mother.
  • In II, there's a puzzle where you must walk on a set of symbols in the proper order, and if you make a mistake, you must reset the puzzle before a demon kills you. That demon is the UNSPEAKABLE, the Big Bad of the trilogy, letting its true appearance slip in John's dream.
  • In III, in the alley outside the clinic, a dead purple bird can be found and a cultist runs away after being spotted. This is the same alley where the cop (who is the same shade of purple) is ambushed and killed by the cultists later on.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: From the few details we get of the attempted exorcism of Amy, it was an absolute disaster. One of the notes has blanked-out text that goes into a bit more detail: Amy killed Father Allred with her bare hands, and strangled her parents with their own intestines. In Chapter III, you get to see it, and it turns out that Father Allred had everything in hand until Amy's parents came down to the basement in response to her screams. John has to escort them back upstairs, and then everything falls apart.
• Gorn: There are some gruesome things in these games. The fact that said things are rendered as a smattering of indistinct red pixels arguably only makes it worse.
• Gratuitous Latin: The menus are full of largely accurate Latin: menu options are written in Latin until you scroll over them, and collected items are listed with their Latin names. For example, the "Extras" option on the main menu is "Additicia" (literally "alongside"), John's cross and the key to the Martins' house are labeled "crux" and "clavis," respectively, and if you're killed during gameplay, the game over screen displays "mortis".
• Gratuitous Spanish: There are a few Spanish words mixed into the dialogue during the prologue of Chapter II with Father Garcia, as well as Michael having a few Spanish voice lines in Chapter I.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The only way to learn what John was up to after Amy's failed first exorcism is to abuse the gun's respawn mechanic to shoot the mirror three times and fight an Optional Boss. There's no indication that you can do this or that the gun respawns in the first place.
  • The secret third ending in Chapter II. You have to complete a bunch of secret Satanic rituals throughout the Chapter, the clues of which are only conveyed obliquely through various notes lying around, and if you miss even one then you'll have to redo the entire Chapter to get it again.
  • Acquiring the Golden Ending in Chapter III requires you to locate and defeat a series of powerful demons known as the Unholy Trinity in each location that John investigates in order to break the seal protecting Gary's inner sanctum. The only problem is that these demons have incredibly hidden requirements to fight them, with the most intuitive and easy one (walking past the portrait of Miriam three times in the Second Death hideout) still having almost no in-game clues about its existence, and it is highly unlikely that a player will naturally figure out how to reach them outside of looking them up.
• Gutted Like a Fish: After coming down from the Gary-induced Mushroom Samba, you'll find yourself returned to the beginning of the basement. Moving to the next room will reveal various cultists dead with their guts spilling out, with one poor sap trying to crawl away. John's terse silence contrasts with the "REPENT" written on the wall in blood. Talking with Gary later reveals that John tore apart all of those cultists with his bare hands while drugged.
• Happy Rain: Rain falls in the Golden and Neutral endings of the third game, washing out the blood stains from the final battle on John in the former.
• The Hero Dies: In several endings of Chapter I, John is killed by Michael, a Satanic cult, or a pissed-off deer.
• Hey, You!: Most demons and enemies do not call John by his name and just refer to him as "Priest".
• Historical Villain Upgrade: The following of the contemporary Santa Muerte religion is a full-blown demonic cult.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the Golden Ending path of Chapter III, after failing to unite the Unholy Trinity, Gary is called a failure by the UNSPEAKABLE and pulled into Hell through the portal he had created on Amy's face.
• Hollywood Satanism: There's plenty of demonic rituals and pentagrams and all that jazz littered about, and the primary villains are a satanic Death Cult that have infiltrated a number of small-town businesses and locations in Connecticut and are using them to conduct occult rituals in order to bring about the biblical apocalypse. Their hideout in the daycare center features an Elaborate Underground Base filled with terrifying paintings, giant statues of demons and rapturous cultists with warped bodies. Airdorf Games has stated on Twitter that one of his many inspirations for the game was the 1980s "Satanic Panic."
• Holy Burns Evil: John's primary weapon against the horrors he faces is a good, old-fashioned crucifix that damages unholy entities just by raising it up near them.
• Hopeless Suitor: Tiffany did everything she could to win Gary's love, including willingly undergoing the Second Death ritual.^note It's implied that her willingness ruined the ritual, making her the Rejected Vessel instead of a portal to Hell. Unwillingness is a requirement for the Second Death. Not only did her gestures go ignored, but Gary flat-out thanks John for killing her after her boss battle.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The Profane Sabbath takes place on Halloween of 1987.
• Idiosyncratic Menu Labels: The games have menu items written in Gratuitous Latin that get translated into English whenever they're highlighted. The first installment for example has "Initus" (Begin), "Catechismus" (Instruction), "Additicia" (Extras), and "Abitus" (Exit).
• If I Do Not Return: John's letter to Molly in Chapter I ends like this, with him wanting her to know that he loves her, should anything happen to him in his quest to exorcise Amy.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: John's motivation for exorcizing Amy, and therefore the subsequent boss battle, of the first game. She isn't. She's fully controlled by her demon. John's attempt to save her is doomed from the start.
• Immune to Bullets: Downplayed. Demons can take a fairly meaty helping of lead and still keep going, but they really do not appreciate the pain of being shot. Jeffrey can be killed by the cop without John's intervention at all, and Gary is severely weakened by taking four shotgun blasts to the face.
• Insistent Terminology: Gary and characters associated with him often insist that he is "a normal human being, just like you and me". He is actually the demon Astaroth, who first appeared on the Eternal Order of the Second Death's radar as an infant who was sent back to them through the Hell portal they had sacrificed many other newborns into.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: While the first two chapters did have bad endings, the bad ending of the third chapter really rubs your face in how badly and thoroughly John Ward failed. If you don't even attempt to stop the cultists (justified in-story as John's complete loss of faith), you wake up during the Profane Sabbath, when everything has literally gone to hell. It gets much worse once John ends up in the ruins of the Martin House, where everything started (and went wrong) for John. You move through the decrepit house while John narrates how much of a failure he is, and how everything is his fault while incredibly somber music plays. At the end, instead of displaying "MORTIS" like it does for most deaths, the game ends with "DAMNATIO MEMORIAE".
• Jump Scare:
  • Prevalent throughout the game, but not super ear-piercingly loud… at first. By the time Chapter III rolls around and almost everything you encounter is genuine demon threats, you should probably not play with headphones for certain encounters.
  • Probably one of the more effective ones is in Chapter III's apartment building, where you've lost your cross and only have a camera with flashes to guide your way through the lights going out. It's almost inevitable that the demon possessing the building is going to briefly appear in all of its rotoscoped glory across your screen briefly after you've flashed the camera too many times. This comes with a Delayed Reaction of a sound cue to boot.
• Just Between You and Me: When John finally comes face to face with Gary in Chapter III, Gary admits that since John has come so far in uncovering the truth he deserves some answers. He then allows John to ask him exactly three questions about his cult's operations or what's really going on (which the player gets to choose) before he launches the player straight into his boss fight.
• Lampshade Hanging: In Chapter I, John's second letter mentions how Amy was being restrained in the basement, then says that Amy was in the attic in the next paragraph. In Chapter II, a note from John's psychologist uses this as an example that John couldn't keep his story consistent. In the intro flashback of Chapter III, it's revealed that John briefly had a vision of Amy in the attic while they were in the basement.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: In the Golden Ending path of Chapter III, after Gary is pulled to Hell and John successfully exorcises Amy, John is offered a choice between settling down with Lisa or continuing to hunt the Unspeakable alongside Father Garcia.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Some of the statues in the daycare's basement are stated in a note to have been donated by the Save family and to approach them "whenever [...] in need of rest". Sure enough, the game autosaves when you go up to them.
• Lemony Narrator: In the Golden Ending path of Chapter III, if the player hesitates to exorcise Amy after Gary is defeated, text will appear stating (You can use the cross now), (Seriously just use the cross), and (But, you know, take your time or whatever).
• Lighter and Softer: After getting the "Good Christian Boy" achievement, you unlock a new option to disable demons from the options menu. Considering that demons were a core aspect of the trilogy, this drastically alters and shortens the game to an average Saturday morning at John's home in "a world that could never be". The screen will be blue instead of black, happy music will be playing throughout, Lisa and John are presumably living together, and John can move faster since his childhood leg injury never happened. John is generally more confident and sociable, the door that John can't enter until Chapter 3's bad ending doesn't exist, kids are playing catch outside, Father Garcia is walking his dog, and the atmosphere is a lot more cheerful in general.
• Loading Screen Message Gag: The game boots up trying to replicate the look of a Commodore 64-era boot screen, and says "loading scriptures", "loading blessings" and "loading hymns". Once the "hymns" reach 100% the screen says "Summoning Unholy Trinity", and after a moment it says "Unholy Trinity Summoned", followed by a string of the words "GARY LOVES YOU".
• Look Both Ways: There's a Running Gag in each game where, if you step onto a road, John will be hit and killed by a truck with the Airdorf logo on its side. [In the first game, if you shoot Michael at the end, he staggers onto the road and is reduced to a red smear by the same truck.
• Lucky Charms Title:
  • The game's title replaces the "T" with a cross.
  • The "mortis" screen replaces the "O" with a sun cross, the "R" with a Sinister Scythe, and the "T" with a cross.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Michael's fate in the good (or rather, least bad) ending in the first game, where he goes splat when he's hit by a truck.
• Marathon Level: The aptly-named Marathon Mode, being a back-to-back run of all three chapters that has to be completed in a single sitting. Quitting the game or dying will wipe your save, so it also doubles as a Final Death Mode.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: According to Chapter I's endings, Amy may be either an actual victim of Demonic Possession, or just a delusional escapee from a mental institution. Subsequent chapters settle into the Demonic Possession being real. And even before that, in the first chapter, a note acquired by killing Michael is of a news article about police and animal experts trying to identify a strange, deceased creature that sounds exactly like Michael.
• Mind Screw:
  • Because Chapter II takes place entirely in John's dreamscape, it features a lot of symbolism and imagery that appears to just be demons messing with his head and the deeper meaning of which is a mystery.
  • After being drugged by Gary, John is bombarded with a series of strange visions rendered in more lifelike detail than usual, such as an exterior shot of the Snake Meadow Hill Church, some dogs eating a cat and a beached whale.
• Missing Floor: The apartment complex in Chapter III is missing its 7th floor, and trying to access it using the stairwells only ends in brick walls where it should open into the floor. Approaching it from the 6th floor only gives you the message that there isn't a 7th floor, but approaching it from the 8th reveals that there is a 7th floor. You can try accessing it with the elevator, but it only gives you an Ominous Visual Glitch. Pressing the 7th floor more than once triggers the appearance of a strange demon in both the Ominous Visual Glitch and in the hallways of the complex.
• Mood Whiplash: Happens twice during the final battle:
  • Right after defeating the second phase of the final boss, Gary, Malphas, and Miriam all convene on each other and fade away, seemingly dying there and then. Out of nowhere, the game gives you a goofy A Winner Is You screen ("CONGRATULATION"), complete with fireworks — before the True Final Boss, Super Miriam, manifests with a digitized snarl.
  • A goofier version occurs as an Easter Egg should you let the third phase of the final boss proceed long enough. Super Miriam momentarily vanishes, the intense final boss music is once again replaced with goofy 8-bit celebration music, and Anti Poop-Socking messages start to appear on the screen.
    "TIME TO TAKE A BREAK"
    "DO YOU HAVE LIFE INSURANCE, JOHN??"
• Multiple Endings:
  • A whopping five in the first chapter, surprising for such a modest game. If you kill Amy, it turns out it was all a schizophrenic episode and you're locked away for murder (or you really did kill a possessed girl and the schizophrenia is how the church covers it up). If you kill Michael, you simply drive away, your job complete (although Chapter II confirms that you killed a possessed boy). If you kill the shadow (aka Father Garcia), Michael kills you. If you kill a deer, the deer kill you right back. If you shoot that fox carcass in a pentagram, a Satanic cult jumps you.
  • Chapter II has three: the normal ending, the bad ending if Father Garcia dies during the final boss but you defeat the boss anyway, and the secret, really bad ending that has John Ward inducted into the Eternal Order of the Second Death.
  • In Chapter III, there is a bad ending, a normal ending with two variations, and a Golden Ending that has minor variations depending on the Last-Second Ending Choice.
• Mushroom Samba: Whatever weird substance Gary injects John with causes bizarre and distorted scenes to flash across the screen, ranging from scenic views of natures, demonic imagery, and John with a Slasher Smile.
• My Greatest Failure: John deeply regrets not saving Amy, something that haunts him for the entirety of the trilogy. The Golden Ending of Chapter III has Amy forgive him and he is finally able to save her, thus allowing him to atone.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book:
  • A crude drawing of a cultist and a demon by Nate is hung on the Martins' refrigerator.
  • The 4th Street Daycare Center in Chapter III is being used by the Eternal Order of the Second Death as a secret base of operations as well as a place to create Tyke Bombs, so most of the children's drawings littered about the place contain horrific crayon illustrations of strange demonic creatures menacing them or their family members.
• No-Gear Level: There is a part of Chapter III that combines this with Blackout Basement. In order to advance, John needs to let go of all his current possessions, including his cross, essentially leaving him defenseless against the demons.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • A different Game Over screen can appear on the way to the secret third ending in Chapter II. While John is transformed into a demon and on top of the overpass to kill the two bystanders, the player can get run over by the Airdorf truck that strolls by without warning. Instead of the standard MORTIS screen, the player is greeted with a huge red splatter, followed by an untelligible voice and a distorted foreboding sound. It may catch any curious player off-guard.
  • In one of the demos for Chapter III as well as the full game, the police have surrounded the cult-run daycare, necessitating John to sneak in through the back way. If he then tries to leave via the front entrance, the cops will mistake his crucifix for a gun and promptly blow him away, triggering a rare rotoscope cutscene of John being shot to death. It then cuts to the usual "MORTIS" screen.
  • During the first fight against Gary, getting hit will actually not immediately kill John, but rather knock him to the ground and force him to drop his crucifix. The player has a short window to recover the crucifix; if Gary catches up to John first, it cuts to a short rotoscoped cutscene showing that John has become the new vessel for the UNSPEAKABLE. Cue the "MORTIS".
• Noodle Incident:
  • The previous exorcism is never gone into detail, but it was bad. In Chapter III, the game flashes back to the exorcism, showing that it got so bad, the only reason John was the Sole Survivor was a Deal with the Devil in the guise of a Divine Intervention to save himself in exchange for Amy.
  • Chapter III mentions something happening at a previous Halloween party that traumatized a little boy named Timmy. This led to the invention of what his parents assume to be an imaginary "elevator friend". On the path to the apartment's secret boss, you will see a child holding hands with the elevator demon as the both of them walk away. You never catch up with them. Afterwards, you can visit 7A to find the remnants of a ritual with a nearby note expressing the writer's desire to bring their child (implied to be Timmy) back.
• No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom: There are only a very small handful of sections throughout all three Chapters where John has to explore an open-ended area and find something in order to progress (such as the Snake Meadow Hill woods in Chapter I or the Gallup Cemetery in Chapter II), as otherwise most of the game is very linear and primarily consists of walking into the next room and dealing with whatever is inside before moving on into the next room.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The game really leaves quite the impression thanks to the soul-rending paranoia it induces in the quieter sections, where you're just waiting for something to pop out.
• Number of the Beast:
  • The fake DOS-style loading screen you see when booting up the game contains a line reading "666k RAM".
  • In the Chapter II Prologue, there's a points system where doing certain actions will earn you points. This is the only section of the game that uses this mechanic. The max score you can get is 666.
  • In the main game of Chapter II, the note John reads right before turning into a wretch contains an ascii image of an inverted cross made of 666's.
  • One of the build versions of the game was referred to as "v1.666".
• Off-Limits Room: There's a room in John's house that has a door covered in crosses, almost like they're sealing something inside. Approaching it has John simply remark "I'm not going in there." The bad ending of Chapter III has him go back inside it one last time, revealing that it's a storage room where Amy is waiting for him.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: The screen will slightly distort whenever there's demonic activity taking place.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: John's crucifix has the power of God to exorcise demons, but John himself is only a man, and the many, many horrible things in his path are more than man. The demons will eagerly turn the source of their distress into a red smear on the floor the second they touch him, and that's if you don't get particularly grisly death cutscenes from certain foes. On the flip side, John can't do the same to any of his foes, making his mission all the more daunting.
• Optional Boss:
  • If you abuse the infinitely respawning gun to shoot the mirror in the southwest room three times, you can go through the mirror and fight… something. Afterwards, you get an additional letter to read revealing why John has been away for so long.
  • In Chapter III, there is a secret boss hidden in each of the three locations (the clinic, the apartments, and the school basement). Defeating all of them is required to access the Golden Ending.
• Police Are Useless: Though not for a lack of trying on their part in Chapter III, being massacred by the cultists though not without taking a good amount with them. A single one does manage to help out during the hospital section, untying John when he's stuck on a gurney and even helping him defeat the boss of the area despite blatant Genre Blindness. Said blindness gets him killed anyway not a minute after you leave the hospital together and he chases after some "hippies" who burned his car. And later on in Chapter III, an entire army has surrounded the daycare that serves as the cult's headquarters, but the only things they manage to accomplish are murdering John if he tries to leave and getting massacred in most of the endings.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child:
  • Powered by a lot of them, turns out, since the Second Death ritual involves cutting a person's face out to make a portal to Hell and then feeding babies into the portal until a demon pops out. Specifically, Amy is only 17 when the cult targets her for this ritual, and John and Father Garcia spend much of the game trying to prevent her younger brothers, who are 6-7 years old, from meeting a similar fate. Sister Bell murders nearly a dozen children over the course of her influence over the orphanage, and the cult is generally not above inflicting the ritual on small children.
  • Taken to an extreme by Tiffany. The Second Death ritual requires 7 newborn babies to be passed through the hole in the face, but Tiffany, who was rejected by Gary, decided that she could still succeed if she used seventy times seven (490!) babies. Which she did. When you fight her boss battle, she'll release an insane amount of souls to reflect the sheer number of babies she consumed.
• Precision F-Strike: When repelled by the crucifix in Chapter I, Michael might swear at you in Spanish.
• Production Throwback: In the school in the Chapter III demo, a drawing referencing Airdorf's games SUMMER NIGHT made for the Dread X Collection and Earl's Day Off can be seen on a wall.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The menu screen plays a rendition of the hymn "Near the Cross", and the outdoor section plays Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Chapter II plays Erik Satie's Gnossienne No. 3 in the first half before entering the church, while Chapter III plays Chopin's ''Revolutionary Etude" once you finally confront Gary.
• Purple Is Powerful: Purple is associated with Amy Martin, the demonically possessed girl.
• Random Encounters: There's no indicator when Michael will show up in the forest of FAITH, or from which side of the screen as well for that matter. Not helping matters is that he gets faster the more you repel him. If you're really unlucky, he'll spawn right next to you when you're at the edge of the screen, a guaranteed Game Over unless you have incredible reflexes.
• Real After All: Chapter III clarifies that yes, the exorcism and John's return was real, but Chapter II was All Just a Dream. The entire final chapter takes place in a proper suburban setting where John lives, and the cult of the UNSPEAKABLE are prepping the final steps of their god's summoning, with at least the core events being very real.
• Redemption Quest: The entire trilogy is essentially revealed to be one for John Ward himself; after failing to finish the botched exorcism and fleeing in terror (condemning Amy to her fate), he lost his faith and became wracked with guilt and nightmares. The games see him overcome his fears and doubts to not only attempt to save Amy's soul, but also confront the source of the demonic evil that targeted her. While the outcome is dependent on the ending obtained, in the best ending he succeeds, redeeming Amy's soul, seeing Gary cast into hell, and either joining Father Garcia on a demon-hunting crusade or settling down with Lisa for some much-deserved peace and quiet.
• Red Herring:
  • In Chapter III, in the school basement, there is a puzzle involving the positioning of chairs and three demon masks. The masks control the chairs, but are in a different room, requiring the player to go back and forth between the mask room and chair room to solve the puzzle. The masks don't do anything. Going back and forth enough times will trigger a Jump Scare where Gary injects John with… something, which will then change the layout of the basement; the player never returns to the chair or mask rooms and thus never needs to solve their puzzle.
  • Nate and Jason aren't real. It turned out that they were never needed to summon Malphas... because they never existed, and Gary had tricked John and Garcia into a fruitless search for them while he summoned Malphas elsewhere.
• Religious Horror: According to Word of God, the game was inspired by the "Satanic Panic" of The '80s, and it shows.
• Retraux: This first two games look straight out of the Atari era, and game 3 is styled after MS-DOS.
• Rotoscoping: While the game usually uses very primitive graphics similar to Atari-era video games, during cutscenes the characters are represented by jarringly life-like rotoscoping. Combined with the primitive text to speech, FAITH burrows its entire experience deep into the Uncanny Valley.
• Rouge Angles of Satin:
  • A child's drawing in Chapter III says "Thanks Satin."
  • Graffiti in Chapter II reads "Satin lives."
• Sanity Slippage: The further you go, the less it becomes clear how much is reality and how much is some sort of psychosis John is going through, as yet another Unnaturally Looping Location throws you off, or some weird changes occur. Or a demon comes flying at your face. A large amount of the game generally seems inspired to make you wonder if you're losing it. Not helping this is how even the notes might screw with you.
• Schmuck Bait: If you go too far into the grated-off section of the tunnels in the second game, you'll find a note about murders that occurred in them. As soon as you try to head out, a man wielding a pair of scissors rushes up and kills you.
  • In the Blackout Basement segment of the apartments in Chapter III, you come across a secondary path that leads to a dead end full of sinister robed figures. It's a good idea to flash the camera at them.
• Self-Made Orphan: In the original exorcism, Amy killed both of her parents thanks to Demonic Possession.
• Sequel Hook: By the end of the trilogy, the cult is defeated and the Profane Sabbath averted, but the UNSPEAKABLE is still out there, and Father Garcia fully intends on hunting it down. Depending on the ending, John can join him in doing so.
• Serial Escalation:
  • Each subsequent chapter gets worse and worse in the demonic incursion. The first is an isolated part of Connecticut with two major threats and an Optional Boss. The second starts having more overt problems, run-ins with cultists and unexplainable happenings which isn't helped by the fact that it's all Dreaming of Things to Come. And then the third and final chapter is straight up hunting to find the demons in key locales they dwell at so as to stop them from causing Hell on Earth. The scares ramp up accordingly to the threat level.
  • Also seen in gameplay; the first chapter consists of 2 relatively short exploration areas and a single boss fight, while the second and third chapters are larger, more non-linear, and have multiple fights against various different demonic enemies.
• Shoot Him, He Has a Wallet!: In the school area in Chapter III, going outside of the front doors of the school has the police surrounding it mistake John's crucifix for a gun and shoot him to death. In a bit of a Black Comedy moment, the cops will resume firing even after John has been reduced to little more than red paste on the floor.
• Shout-Out: Many that can be seen here.
• Snipe Hunt: It turns out that Nate and Jason Martin never existed. Any evidence of their being real was actually a symptom of Mrs. Martin's delusions in an attempt to cope with a miscarriage. Gary knew this and led John and Father Garcia on a wild goose chase, as evidenced by his taunting messages found after defeating an Optional Boss and him personally confirming it if you ask him about the twins.
• Story Breadcrumbs: The basic plot of the first game is very simple, but if you want more context on the backstory, you'll have to go out of your way to hunt down notes by exorcising various objects. The sequels take this up to eleven thanks to the increasing Mind Screw. You'll have to get many notes to understand what the plot even is, and sometimes they just raise more questions than answers. Confronting Gary in the third game's finale will give you the option to ask three questions, which will give some answers, but there are many more mysteries that are left unsolved.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option:
  • In order to achieve the secret ending in the Chapter II prologue, you must set yourself on fire using John's burning car.
  • If you try to touch fire at any point, it will lead to a quick death as you control a fast-moving, flaming John before he falls over dead. However, defeating the True Final Boss in Chapter III requires you do this to set fire to the boss while it's vulnerable by touching it while you're on fire. Although miraculously, in this instance you'll extinguish yourself by doing this.
• Symbology Research Failure: Predictably given the subject matter, there are a number of places around the game's three chapters where inverted crosses are used to represent demonic worship. The inverted cross is a Catholic symbol, not a Satanic one, and its usage in anti-Christian contexts is relatively recent.
• Synthetic Voice Actor: All the characters in the game are "voiced" by the Software Automatic Mouth ("S.A.M") text-to-speech program, just with different settings applied. John's voice is achieved by the program's default settings.
• This Is a Work of Fiction: Chapter III and by extension the whole game's credits end with a disclaimer from Airdorf that it's not suggesting anything in it is real or plausible, as Airdorf is a practicing Christian himself.
  "Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this game in no way endorses a belief in the occult."
• Toothy Bird: Malphas in Chapter III appears to be a humanoid bird-like demon, missing the upper part of his beak while the bottom part (and interior of his mouth) is lined with sharp teeth.
• Uncanny Valley: The minimalist art style, extremely smooth rotoscoped cutscenes and distorted, almost inhuman text-to-speech voices that all characters have give the game a creepy and unsettling vibe. Of course, given the dreary tone of the game, it's appropriate.
• Unexpected Shmup Level: The True Final Boss, Super Miriam, launches John into a much more chaotic battle than any other in the game with dozens of complicated projectile attacks being thrown around that require much more careful dodging than most demons' attacks. Tellingly, John is given the ability to receive 10 total hits throughout the fight when he's normally a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Chapter III has Garyland, the Elaborate Underground Base of the Eternal Order of the Second Death, as the last of the three big areas in the game. It is a massive labyrinth patrolled by Gary’s cultists and guarded with several puzzles.
• Weaksauce Weakness: While scriptures get brought out for more serious threats, generally anything demonic can be warded off with a mere cross. Or at least the crosses that priests like John and Garcia wield. This can exorcise certain beings so hard that they outright die. John will still have to shoot Michael the old-fashioned way, however, as he is too far gone and far too physical to be put down through exorcism.
• Wham Line: When you finally meet with Lisa in Chapter III, it quickly becomes apparent that something is not right, and she quickly reveals that she's been possessed by Alu.
  John: Lisa, thank God you're alright!
  Lisa: John, what took you so long? It's so dark, I can't see the light anymore.
  John: I got here as fast as I could... Let's go, Lisa.
  Lisa:    I'M NOT LISA   
• Wham Shot: The bad ending of chapter 3 begins with John waking up in his bed as usual… except the crucifix on the wall is inverted, indicating there is no hope left as the Profane Sabbath has been completed.
• Where It All Began: In both the bad ending of Chapter III and at the end of Garyland prior to facing Gary in the final confrontation, you wander through the Martin Household.
• Who Forgot The Lights?: Chapter I has unlockable extra modes where the entire map is dark save for a flashlight or lantern held by John^note the extras are literally called "Flashlight mode" and "Lantern mode". As can be imagined, this makes Michael and Amy much harder to fend off.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Amy's possession is the entire catalyst for the plot, but it gets worse when Chapter III has an entire daycare raided by Gary's cult, with it being shown that they sacrificed everyone inside as well. The same Chapter implies that Gary's clinic was a front to acquire newborn sacrifices.
  • Taken to the extreme once you ask Gary what the Second Death is… and learn it basically entails casting newborns through the mutilated face of a sacrificial victim into Hell itself.
  • Miriam Bell murdered nearly a dozen children at the orphanage she worked at and later ran, all for the sake of the Satanic cult she founded. She also developed the Second Death ritual, so offering babies directly to Hell was her idea.
  • Tiffany performed the Second Death on herself, and Airdorf stated that 490 souls will be exorcised from her over the course of the boss fight. How did she even get access to that many newborns?
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Asking Gary about Malphas in Chapter III will have him reveal that they have already summoned the demon to the mortal plane. Fortunately, John defeats Malphas and Gary in the Golden Ending.
• You Have Failed Me: After being defeated in the Golden Ending route, Gary is dragged to Hell by the UNSPEAKABLE, who simply utters "Failure" as Gary tries to plead with Amy who's being used as the portal. Judging by Gary's expression as this happens, whatever awaits him on the other side won't be pretty.

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