The video game called F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon gets a bum rap, even though everyone knows it rules. The bum rap is that everyone thinks it’s just the AI and the guyshoot that rule in F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon, when actually a ton else about F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon also rules.
You’re on some kind of little X-Files XCOM squad, which is a great idea, and it’s called F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon), which obviously rules, and this whole idea isn’t taken seriously by anyone not on the squad, which is perfect. The intro is super succinct. It’s got, I reckon, the best largely-audio-log-based story in any game, where the “audio logs” are all voicemail messages left on landline telephones, the least contrived approach to this ever taken. They’re genuinely good performances of out-of-context tidbits from which you can piece together several stories of relatively mundane capitalist evil that frame the supernatural horror stuff really nicely.
A lot of folks reckon the horror stuff is clumsy or naff, or the occasional jumpscares are not scary, or they are scary in a cheap way, but I see it as pretty well-executed, and what I suspect is actually happening is that people have a hard time switching gears from awesome-feeling shootouts into spooky slow stuff. A horror experience is something you have to fully cooperate with, sort of the opposite of a challenging shooter. A game with basically the same horror stuff but none of the action movie stuff is Condemned, by the same folks, and that scared everyone.
One of F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon’s side stories is the minor mystery of an entire part of town being abandoned (it’s been poisoned by runoff from the corporation the game is about) and I always thought that would have been a perfect tie-in to Condemned (a game about a city full of ultra violent people being affected by something which might as well be the same runoff stuff), had Monolith decided they wanted a Shared Universe Situation, but Shared Universe Situations are a nerd-impulse best resisted, so this, too, rules.
F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon does the Silent Protagonist Who The Twist Is They’re Central To The Plot thing, which doesn’t rule now, because everything did it, but it sort of did rule at the time. The Twist is almost exactly the same in its content and delivery as Bioshock’s, but earlier; I have a hard time thinking it wasn’t an influence. It’s also a story where the evil supernatural force thing turns out to be totally justified in its boundless wrath and rage, which always rules.
Besides all this, it really does have the best FPS AI and guyshoot ever devised, and constantly when you play it you see very cool little VFX or design touches that you don’t see anywhere else, plus you can slide kick a guy so hard he goes through a wall, and it’s like two bucks on Steam or whatever.
I really wish Steam Deck had a Shadowplay equivalent… a guy pushed this shelf over to take cover behind it, then when I threw a grenade behind him, he frantically crawled underneath the shelf to escape and got blown to bits. FEAR never stops surprising me.
I mean this is a set dressing shelf, which is actually a cover object that a guy can push over, which is then also a contextual traversal thing for him?? Get absolutely fucked this was 2005
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