Game Title: The Holy Gosh Darn
Platform: Windows / Steam
Release Date: 26th September 2024
Developer: Perfectly Paranormal
Review copy supplied by publisher

What’s The Holy Gosh Darn about?

In this 2D Scroller, you play an angel called Cassiel who is sitting chatting to her fellow angel Puriel and notice a issue with their soul meter and must stop a catastrophe from happening when a lot of human souls like phantoms are trying to get into heaven and you’re informed by peter at the pearly gates that them entering heaven would be a paradox and bad thing. He tells you that you must go find a weapon called the Holy Gosh Darn to stop this happening and thus your task begin with that agenda.

Unfortunately heaven does blow up and you die but the angel of death Azael takes you back and informs you that you must use time travel to go back and forth and fix the problem and gives you 5 hours to do it. You must then use a watch to jump between these 5 hours to solve puzzles, gain entry to new areas and more. There is 4 worlds to visit with also past, present and future to take into account also.

This timer keeps running the whole time you are trying to solve puzzles so a lot are time sensitive and can be hard to figure out because of this restriction. Like there is a part where you must get someone a cup of coffee before he closes up but also be aware that you must do all this before heaven blows up too. You also need to pick up items again as if you go back in time, you do not take items back with you so you must re-do these parts also within the time restraint so does add another layer of difficulty.

What’s the controls and Graphics like?

The controls are pretty straight forward in The Holy Gosh Darn it being a 2D scrolling game, with directional sticks on controller and WASD controls if you’re using keyboard. You use shoulder buttons for time jumps and X and A for prompts on screen. Makes jumping around the 6 hour time jumps a breeze. Rumble is also supported if your controller supports it.

The graphics in The Holy Gosh Darn are about as expected for this type of game, and outputted to `920×1080 on my PC running a RTX 3080 without any hassles. There was minimal graphics settings as you can see in the image above. You could toggle a rewind quality option that lets you choose between off, medium and high, which i kept at high but wasn’t very extensive at all. The game does great for what it is though and been 2D it adds to the charm. You can check out the first few hours gameplay on our Youtube Channel Page or below.

Progression

As you progress through The Holy Gosh Darn, you meet up with many different characters from the bible whom depending on how you speak to them can be your friend or foe. From angels to mystic creatures thought to belong to heaven and religious lore. You can pick up various items you can use like keys and even use the coffee maker in your room to butter up other NPC throughout your playthrough. If you’re rude, you may not get the help you need and hinder your progression along the story so at times you have to be patient.

The puzzles and side quests you must undertake in the game can be either real easy to real hard and you must figure out a way to be in two places at once at times due to the time travel system Azrael has bestowed upon you. I was stumped a few times as to how i was to use the time device to get access to a particular area and near pulled my hair out before getting there in the end. There does seem to be a game plus feature that I’d imagine is unlocked when you clear the story mode.

Conclusion

The Holy Gosh Darn is a solid title and it’s narrative is quite amusing for the most part and the audio is crisp and the story while been totally mental was structured into the game well. It does perhaps look a bit dated compared to most AAA title with their high-end graphics in 2024 but for a 2D title they’re fine. Been a almost linear game bar it’s time mechanic, it can however get to become more of a chore then fun bouncing back and forth and it’s re-playability with it’s static puzzles may prove non adventurous. As mentioned, there does seem to be a game+ feature but doesn’t mention anything about it and with the nature of the title and it’s static content, i don’t know how it could sell this game+ mode to me. I enjoyed my playthrough on The Holy Gosh Darn but just don’t know if I’d ever go back to it.