F.E.A.R.

90/100, spoilers

TL;DR: it’s incredible. Play it if you like single player shooter games.

Synopsis: Fettel, a psychic soldier, went rogue and attacked a corporation, and you are tasked with killing him.

I was under the impression that I had played all of the great single player, story oriented FPSs: Bioshock, Deus Ex, and Half Life, but I hadn’t heard of FEAR until a friend mentioned the game on twitter, so I decided to take a crack at it. Most of these kinds of games fail because of the shooting mechanics: the firefights too long, the guns too inaccurate, the mouse too sloppy, or some other weird thing is added to the game. Which is upsetting, as devs could easily make a game with good shooting mechanics by just copying the ones that did it well.

In this regard, FEAR did not mess up — the guns are accurate, the firefights are as long as they need to be, and most importantly, the the combat “feels right”. There are a few staple, stereotypical guns (e.g. pistol, AR, sub, shotgun), but there are a few avante garde weapons like a quake-style railgun, triple burst rocket launcher, explosive galting gun, and halo-style battle rifle. There’s a mechanic called “relfex time” that lets you slow down time in the game, but I thought it was cheap and never used it. Reviewers complimented the AI of the enemies quite a bit, for good reasons, though in the modern day its only above average in this regard. The graphics on maximum hold up and the game runs fine on linux. My only complaint is that the game does not distinguish well between surface reflections and objects under water, which confused me more than I would like to admit.

There are few, if any, cutscenes and almost all the time in the game is spent on the ground doing things. The story exposition is show, not tell — you have to connect the dots between the visuals, cues, and voices to get a sense of what is occurring.

What I understood from the story without checking Wikipedia or forums:

Fettel, a psychic soldier, went rogue and attacked a corporation, and you are tasked with killing him. You find him, he knocks you out, and decides to spare you for unknown reasons. Afterwards, you play hide and seek for a while, where you infliltrate a building that he’s in, but he leaves, and you have to find him again. Throughout the game you have paranormal experiences, where you are transported to a hospital (?) and have to walk through the corridors and shoot ghosts. It’s not clear how real these experiences are, but you burn ammo from shooting and lose health if you get damaged by ghosts. Sometimes you see visions of random people that turn to dust, who I shot a few times, resulting in no consequences. Occasionally, a girl comes by and sets people on fire, but ignores you for reasons that are unknown until later.

Through the voicemails, I picked up that the corporation’s activities were polluting a river and causing people to leave the area for reasons that could not be explained by socioeconomic factors, but it’s not clear to me exactly what these activities were. Later, you find a woman named Alice who is the daughter of Harlan Wade, a high ranking member of the corporation, who you have to escort to safety — an operation that fails due to the corporation’s security forces turning on you, resulting in her running away and driving to find her father. She is unfortunately captured by the psychic soldier, and now you have to find them in addition to her father.

Eventually, you get to the corporation’s vault where something (?) is stored, where Fettel, Harlan, and Alice are. My character went through a paranormal delusion, and within the delusion I found Fettel, shot him, and then found him and Alice dead in front of me. I was confused and puzzled for a while — I didn’t know if I accidentally killed them both, only killed Fettel, or if they were already dead. I reasoned out that I had only killed Fettel, which was a bit of a let down — I expected a boss fight. Eventually I found Alice’s father, who gets melted by the girl who melts people. After that, I then destroyed the facility and fled.

From what I understand, Alice, the girl who sets people on fire, me, and the psychic soldier are all siblings and share the same father, who was running weird experiments at this corporation. I suspect that the psychic soldier and the father teamed up to attack the corporation, with the father being the man on the inside for reasons that are not that clear to me.

How Accurate was my perception?

I misunderstood two things: Fettel (the psychic soldier) was not associated with FEAR, but the corporation that was attacked, and that the family tree was Harlan Wade (the father) giving birth to Alice and Alma (the girl who sets people on fire), and Alma gave birth to Fettel and Point Man (the person I play as).

I also didn’t pick up a few important details , notably, the girl was telepathically linked to Fettel and Fettel/Harlan were not cooperating in the end. An embarrassing misunderstanding; admittedly I didn’t pay that much attention to the opening cutscene.

Other comments

The music, audio quality, visuals, and the way they work together are excllent. I planned to play this game while listening to podcasts or other music, but decided against it about an hour or so into the game, as the atmosphere was just that good. The lack of a final conclusion or boss fight was a little disappointing, but was subversive in its own, weird way.

The story, for the most part, was ok. You being connected to the girl and Fettel was too predictable, given both of them spared you, it was expected that you were connected to them — during the game I was half-expecting to join forces with them and betray the organization I was working for.