We reviewed Hades back in 2020, and it’s one of those titles where it was definitely not the first game of its kind, but it still became massively popular for being accessible, having a great difficulty curve, and its stellar visual design. And as I mentioned in one of my Save State columns, all of that played a part in making it a memorable roguelite experience that everyone loved. There have been many games that incorporate Hades’ boon system into their mechanics to try and make something more memorable through iteration. Nunholy is the answer to those who have asked for Hades but wanted it more cultured. That is to say, it’s for those of us who really like anime art and heroines with big boobs.
While it’s all in good jest, this is your disclaimer that Nunholy isn’t actually a pornographic game in any capacity. The pinup style sexualization is a stylistic choice made by the developer to differentiate this title from its competitors, without any actually pornographic content present in it. With that said, let’s continue.
Nunholy, very similarly to Chowbie’s last game, Wedding Witch, lets you pick a well-endowed character that’s beautifully rendered before going off to fight the forces of hell. While Wedding Witch was a bullet heaven like Vampire Survivors, Nunholy emulates Hades by giving you control of one of three buxom church ladies who are also conveniently half-vampire. Each of the three characters actually play differently from one another, with two that are melee attackers and a ranged one who uses a variety of firearms.
Being heavily inspired by Hades, Nunholy has you take your chosen Sister through a dark castle with loads of enemies to defeat. Upon entering a room, you’ll have to kill all of the undead creatures within, after which you’ll receive a reward and the choice of which room you’d like to tackle next. Every room you can choose has an icon that indicates what the reward for clearing it will be, so some rooms may just yield blood stones (currency) while another can give you items that will make shopkeepers more friendly with you, etc. You’ll be able to choose your own adventure while you’re fighting undead, dodging their attacks, and knocking out bosses in this isometric action roguelite.
The characters you select are what you have for your save, and there’s no switching in-between. That is to say, if you pick the nun with the golden gun Sister Marie, you have to start a new save file for one of the two other characters if you decide that you don’t like her ranged gameplay. The nun Preiya uses a gunaxe for her primary weapon, while Sain fends off the undead using dual blades. Using one of these three holy women, your primary goal is to make your way through a castle filled with undead creatures and defeat the vampire queen who lies in wait in the deepest quarter.
Each of the three characters has three different attacks: A main weapon, a sub weapon, and a skill that differs based on which character you pick. As you play through Nunholy, you can encounter alternate weapons that have different attack ranges and elements. All three of the nuns have a physical, fire, and holy weapon of each of the three attack types, and players can buy an upgrade that lets them have access to all of the different weapons right from the start of the run, which can let the players focus on building for specific elements.
There are two major ways to make your chosen holy woman stronger as you progress through Nunholy: you can absorb vampire’s essence and level up, increasing your chosen nun’s vampiric side to gain new, powerful abilities. Absorbing the vampire essence will let you unlock new skills, which are fundamentally like the boons in Hades, which allow you to do things like create a damage pool of blood where you dodge, or they will increase the range and damage of some of your attacks. The other major form of improvement will come from the relics you find during your runs, which will provide strong passive abilities to you while they’re in your attache case. For the most part, you’ll often be using both of these methods to grow in strength while you slaughter vampires all throughout the castle, but there are some caveats with each.
Vampiric essence can be broken, rather than absorbed, which will give you blood stone currency that you can use with the sellers in the game. You can’t buy relics, garlic, etc., without currency, so you have a very valid reason to forego a level up in order to get some cash to buy a powerful relic that will make your build even stronger. You can get currency from a variety of rooms, but if you really want to go on a spending spree, skipping a level up or two is a great way to buy things from the traders you can find in the castle.
For relics, they all tend to give some kind of useful passive buff, though you have to be able to fit them into your case to really make use of them. Normally, space in your attache case isn’t an issue, but if you’re chasing the good ending, you’ll be avoiding all vampire essence anyway, which means your case will be stuffed fuller than a turkey on Thanksgiving. The size of the artifacts doesn’t necessarily correlate to how powerful or useful they are in boosting your damage, so don’t just throw away your 1×1 stones that boost fire damage to fit in a giant cross that uses one-sixth of your attache case, thinking that larger means stronger.
As you progress through your runs with the nuns, you’ll collect silver that can be used for permanent upgrades for Nunholy’s meta progression system. Many of the upgrades are simple things like increasing move speed or attack power by a small percentage, and buying more upgrades increases your hunter rank, which can allow you to start your next run with random relics or your weapons of choice. The meta progression in Nunholy is slow but powerful, and you’ll start to notice considerable damage gains by just putting a few points into relevant attack boosts.
Nunholy is a title with reasonable replayability, but you’re not going to be exposed to new story beats after each defeat like you would in Hades, since this is remarkably light on story. You have to beat Nunholy three times in order to unlock the path to the Vampire Queen boss, and your further runs after that can have you showdown with her in the final area. Your endings upon defeating the Vampire Queen are entirely contingent on whether or not your nun absorbed any vampire essence along the way to level up, though the largest difference between the good and bad endings are just a single well-drawn piece of artwork and a couple lines of text.
It is worth noting that, while beating Nunholy without upgrading vampiric powers a single time was somewhat challenging, it was interesting how the title was still able to be beaten just by carrying a museum’s worth of relics around. In most runs, you have to balance purchasing new items with leveling up, but when you’re aiming for a true ending, your pockets will be overflowing with cash, and you’ll likely have so many relics that you can’t fit any more into your attache case by the time you reach the final boss. It’s mostly just fun to see how strong the relic system is- don’t sleep on all those little doodads you can stuff into your suitcase.
When it comes to visuals, Nunholy has both its highs and lows. The artwork is absolutely mesmerizing, and all of the backgrounds are designed well with a kind of gothic flair. The music is fine, though I’d be lying if I told you that I could remember any tracks from this even after playing it for 10 or so hours. On the sound design side, it’s interesting because some sound effects are great and very fitting, but then other things obviously lack sound, such as how only one of the nuns actually has footstep sounds when running. I don’t think this is a plus or minus, I just think it’s strange how Preiya is the only one whose walking sounds you can hear.
It’s also worth noting that this is a pretty short game, with runs taking around 45 to 60 minutes at the start, so it took around five hours to do both the good and bad endings for Marie, with the rest of those 10 hours spent playing Preiya and Sain. There are a variety of different bosses you can encounter, though it looks like some of them can be clones of each other, like the gargoyle and werewolf, but the environments you travel through change very little run-to-run. Though maybe that’s par for the course since Nunholy is really just trying to be a cheaper version of Hades with a nun fetish.
There are some things that feel unfinished. You’re told that the reward for reaching S rank is unknown. Sure, because there isn’t one programmed in yet. There’s also a “mode select” when you make your next run attempt, but there’s only one option on that menu. That makes it seem like there’s either going to be an update of some kind to add a new mode, or there was going to be another mode at some point, and it got cut to meet deadlines.
Overall, I enjoyed Nunholy. It has a strong visual identity what with the buxom nuns and all that, the controls were responsive enough, and the dodge generous enough that any time I took damage I understood the blame lay with my motor skills, not the design of the game.
Nunholy is a cheap purchase at just $8 on Steam, and it would be worth buying even if you only really played one of the three characters. Just don’t play it in public or in front of your mom and dad. Or do, I don’t know, I won’t tell you how to live your life.
Nunholy earns 4 GiN Gems (out of 5) for being a fun roguelite that just about anyone can play and enjoy.