FAITH is the story of John Ward, a priest adrift in the paranoid American hellscape of the 1980s Satanic Panic. Haunted by past failure, he holds his cross against a horde of infernal interlopers. With the release of its first chapter in 2017, FAITH instantly stood out – and it still does – with eerie 8-bit stylings that recall the Atari 2600 or Apple II. Developer Airdorf created a nightmare at 192 x 160 pixels, stoking dread and unease with the help of ethereal text-to-speech voices and a devilish dose of unearthly rotoscope.

Drawing from hours of interviews and access to never-before-seen notebook pages, writer Steven Nguyen Scaife excavates the history and influences of this seminal cult horror classic, tracing its humble beginnings plundering Pokémon cries to its full release under the New Blood Interactive banner as FAITH: The Unholy Trinity. Airdorf tells all: is John Ward a good Christian boy or an imposter to the collar? Is cult overlord Gary Miller a normal human being just like you or me? Why does the Martin family have such an enormous bathroom?

Dive deep into a surprising spread of influences from P.T., Francisco de Goya, and The Blair Witch Project to The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Spongebob Squarepants, and a New Orleans painting no one can find. Learn the makings of the “Mortis” screen, and trace the design process behind John’s unspeakable nemeses. In these pages, FAITH is contextualised against the Satanic Panic setting and the technology of that era, its monsters rigorously chronicled and its level design probed in exacting detail. This authoritative history from Lost In Cult goes to show that you can never have too much FAITH.