The Padre from Shotgun With Glitters and Feardemic is a voxel-based horror game that pays homage to the classics. Learn more in our The Padre review!

 

In The Padre from Shotgun With Glitters and Feardemic, you will take on the role of the titular Padre in a voxel-based release that pays homage to the old-school horror games of ages past – particularly the Resident Evil series on the original PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. This is a survival horror game with fixed camera angles, a creepy mansion, the undead and assorted monsters, items that need to be collected in order to solve puzzles, and more, in an adventure that is going to take you around 5-6 hours to complete depending on your experience with survival horror games.

Shotgun With Glitters first took The Padre to Kickstarter, seeking $25,000 in funding to make the game happen. That campaign was canceled, and a new one was done over at competing crowdfunding platform BrightLocker – a platform that shutdown back in 2019 and no longer exists. Long story short, the team had The Padre on Steam Early Access, continued to work on the game, and it then partnered with publisher Feardemic, which is why we now get to play The Padre on Nintendo Switch.

As for the game’s story, it goes a little bit something like this: you play as the titular Padre who does some demon hunting on the side every now and then. You have been called into action after the disappearance of a Cardinal, so off you go into a creepy mansion, following the one lead you have on his potential whereabouts. While this is a 3D survival horror game, Shotgun With Glitters and Feardemic decided to sprinkle The Padre with a good dose of pop-culture references and humor to make you smile as you destroy the unworthy.

 

You’ll be controlling the main character by using the left analog stick, with some proper 3D walking controls and not what has come to be known as “tank” controls from the Resident Evil series – and other survival horror games that released soon after the first one in the franchise. You can also rotate your character in place by using the right analog stick, which will come in handy when you’re battling the demonic forces you will face during your time with The Padre on Nintendo Switch.

You can interact with things with the Y, X, B, and A buttons, depending on how many points of interest are present in each scene. If you find any items that can be useful for your journey, you can take them by pressing the A button. These items will be added to your inventory, which you can open up with the R button. Your inventory will also include any notes you have found. The Padre will take some notes here and there as you progress through the game, which you can check as they’re inscribed by pressing down on the D-Pad.

 

Some of the puzzles you will find in The Padre will, as expected, be of the “find a key to open the door” variety – substituting key with the name of a variety of objects. You will also need to search every corner of each room, sometimes by changing the camera angle by pressing the L button, so that you can find some points of interest. You could, for example, find a chest that contains a box of matches, but if you don’t pay attention, you might not spot the prompt to interact with it after grabbing the matches. Said prompt will make it possible for your character to move the chest out of the way so that you can uncover a hatch. The hatch will be stuck, so you’ll have to find something to give it a good nudge, but at least you’ll have found the hatch!

 

When you get yourself in a fight, you’ll be attacking with the ZR button and defending with the ZL button, hopefully keeping you alive long enough to find the missing Cardinal and finding out what is really going on! You can cycle between your available weapons by pressing up on the D-Pad. Once you find yourself a firearm, you will take aim with the ZL button and fire with the ZR button, which is a good way of making sure that players always know that the ZR button is the one they need to bring the pain.

Other than some jumps in the game’s framerate here and there, I don’t have many complaints about The Padre. The game set out to pay homage to the survival horror classics, and it does a good job at that. While your first blind run with the game is going to take you a handful of hours, just like with the original trilogy of Resident Evil games, once you know what needs to be done, what is where and where each item goes, you can considerably lower your overall time, speedrunning the game in less than a couple of hours if you do things right. The Padre is out now on Nintendo Switch for a $19.99 asking price.

Disclaimer
This The Padre review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Feardemic.