The Inquisitor Review

"Jesus' Witcher"

Campaign

March 6, 2024 at 9:03pm
By Jason Stettner

There’s a rather interesting premise here with The Inquisitor. You’re the ultimate holy judge and jury in any situation, acting literally as Jesus’ Witcher. It’s got that look, style and concept but ultimately is let down by a series of issues.

This is an alternate history where Jesus got slightly angry when nailed to the cross and decided to go on a blood soaked path of vengeance. Centuries have passed since then and you take on the role of Mordimer Madderdin, an Inquisitor. You not only are tasked with carrying out the word of God’s service, but you’re also granted unique visions that help you decipher problems.

Gameplay wise these take the form of the Unworld which is an annoying ethereal plain that occasionally you find yourself in. These parts of the experience were tedious and bogged down a rather fast paced narrative. Anyways, you’re sent to this town Koenigstein in search of a vampire.

Along the way you stumble upon a series of seemingly random horrifying events that slowly start to build towards a greater mystery. A couple of murders, a strange jester of sorts and other bizarre happenings. It’s intriguing as there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye.

At the same time, despite being several hours long that’s all there is to the game. It’s a straight shot narrative that has fast pacing and events that take place. No side missions or activities, just the odd very openly placed collectible. When you’re done the game that’s it as well game wise.

This is fine, but it seems odd not to take the opportunity to flesh out the world by offering a side quest or two, just seems like a missed opportunity as I wanted to understand more of the world. I was rather tired of the game towards its ending as it kept getting too weird, and the Unworld was obnoxious but alas I did want to get a better understanding of this world.

The story is also branching here, but you’re never really aware of that nor the impact you make so the ending just is kind of random and different depending on your choices I guess. It’s a very confusing game at times honestly, from a story perspective it feels disjointed.

Gameplay

This is where the game truly struggles. I do honestly feel that if this had like an extra year of polish it would have been a generally solid game. Now, it didn’t really crash or anything but this game runs badly. The performance is all over the place constantly, there are quite a few bugs and the presentation is very mixed.

It’s trying to punch above its weight and fails in many situations. The combat is cumbersome, a bit confusing and somewhat random. Nothing here is inherently difficult, but sometimes a boss fight would take awhile just because it was slow. The Unworld areas were mind numbingly boring and took forever to do being somewhat stealth oriented. The environment while aesthetically pleasing and filled with NPCs did not run well and was very linear in setup.

It’s more a dressing for the story one might say. The mechanics of the game at times felt random. It’s a very strange experience quite honesty. You get the odd puzzle, the odd challenge but you’re also just sort of jogging along to each section of the narrative. There’s nothing deeper beyond that and at times I was confused by the setup of just generally what was going on.

It’s got some nice environmental elements but character models that are generations old. There are bugs there galore as well and in general it was hard to get around due to wild performance drops. It’s very janky. I played the game on Xbox Series X where it was running at 1080p 60fps with frequent deep frame drops and screen tearing. It was actually a bit nauseating at times.

The Conclusion

The Inquisitor had some real potential to it, an intriguing concept that’s let down by crippling performance issues among many other bugs. I actually kind of wanted to like this, finding the experience funny in some ways but as it continued along the game just got progressingly weirder and not in the best of ways.

The Unworld areas were horrible, I truly disliked doing them as the game felt like it crawled to a halt when that popped up. Otherwise it all paced itself really speedily which kept the action going. It’s got some over the top bits that were entertaining and some funny portions.

I liked making choices, but do wish there was more information in regards to what those choices would mean. You’d think it’s a straight forward story but I guess your choices do actually change things up in the world. It’s a neat game, but it certainly needed some more polishing. I would actually give another entry set in this world a go if it were an option in the future as I did have fun playing as this character.

It’s still all so very weird, not to mention the strange little girl randomly popping up constantly. They have fun with it at least I suppose. Nothing felt held back from being twisted and this story really does have some crazy stuff to it. I just wish it ran better.

Read our Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden Review
View our Game Hubs

The Inquisitor Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Kalypso

Rating Overall: 4.3