Reviews
[Review] ‘The Padre’ is a Throwback Survival Horror That Needs to Exorcise a Few Demons
Survival Horror gets biblical. Find out if the Switch has a horror blessing on its hands in Bloody Disgusting’s The Padre review.
While Capcom has reworked the Survival Horror formula of its own Resident Evil series to suit more modern tastes, some smaller, often independent, developers are embracing the late 90s template in a bid to channel some of that nostalgic energy into something closer to the source material. See the recent The Glass Staircase for an example of how to do it right.
The latest entrant into the tank control Survival Horror throwback sub-genre is The Padre, a 3D pixel art trip to a haunted house full of monsters, ghosts, and ghouls. You certainly get a strong whiff of the typical 90s Survival Horror trappings, and there’s no shame in embracing the hits of the genre as it does, but unfortunately, developer Shotgun With Glitters leans a little too hard on the wrong parts.
You play the titular Padre, a priest investigating the disappearance of a Cardinal. The search inevitably leads to him entering a gloomy, sprawling mansion filled with enough demonic entities to form a new horror film franchise. With just his wits and smart acquisition of the right tools, the Padre embarks upon a hellish journey through the mansion, solving puzzles, banishing demons, and making jokes along the way.
Yes, the biggest deviation from the Survival Horror template The Padre has is its humor. The priest is a bit of a talker despite being on his own, and regularly pipes up to make a quip about a situation. It’s an interesting angle to take, and while comedy is naturally subjective, I felt the hit rate of The Padre‘s puns, quips, and musings were pretty low, and often contributed to diminishing the game’s horror aspect.
The important part of the package is the Survival Horror itself. The Padre fills the quota for intricate puzzles built into the mansion’s architecture, and the slow crawl nightmare of tank controls against the shambling threats roaming the halls is indeed present. There is a traditional fixed camera if you want it, but there’s also usually an alternate angle you can manually switch to in each area too. If only the fixed cameras were put to their intended use more often.
Back in the day, fixed cameras in horror games were good for building the fear of the unknown. What’s making that noise? Is it just around the corner? The Padre doesn’t utilize this nearly enough, putting threats in plain view too often, and the voxel art style doesn’t exactly create the kind of detailed terrors that this decision merits.
Movement and combat are understandably treacly, but there’s no real weight to Padre’s movement or weapon handling, nor the attacks by enemies. It’s difficult to get invested in the survival or the horror when you can nearly always see your threats, they aren’t intimidating, and there’s little satisfaction in dispatching them. You can see the damage done to Padre in a fairly clever manner though, via his cassock draining of light as he takes hits.
So there’s a fair bit of disappointment to be found in The Padre, but it’s not without some highlights. The mansion design is well done. The voxel art style works for it in a way the character design doesn’t, packing plenty of detail in and bringing a decent moody atmosphere, even if it is undermined by the aforementioned flaws. The humor is hit and miss, yet the strange delivery of the jokes is often the making of the better ones. The nods to old horror games are also nicely handled. The puzzles are the standout feature. The one thing that carries over from that era well is puzzles and by sticking close to that, The Padre finds its major strength. There’s cryptic clues and hints in the dialogue, back and forth trips to fetch items to combine, and more. It’s far more interesting than any of the fighting in The Padre.
The Padre means well, trying to offer players the kind of Survival Horror experience that has been missing (for good reason in a lot of ways) for some time. It does sometimes capture the spirit of that well, but misses what made the games that it was inspired by into such beloved favorites. Whenever you’re dragged away from puzzling and exploring the mansion, things take a turn for the worse, with tedium and annoyance robbing the game of its atmosphere. The effort is appreciated, it just needs refining.
The Padre review code for Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher
The Padre is available April 18 on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PC, and Xbox One.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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