A screenshot from 'F.E.A.R.'
Advertisement
Advertisement
Alma. Creepy. Kinda.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Upon release, reviewers mostly praised F.E.A.R., but had issues with its repetitive environments. The offices were bland, the industrial work sites and urban environments likely a result of a raw computer processing power over aesthetic sensibility. Its later underground labs and future-tech reactors were hardly any better. Where was the variety and storytelling that made Half-Life 2 so enthralling? The outdoor combat? The fire level or platforming puzzle?F.E.A.R. didn't need any of that. It got by on the pure rush of its combat, which admittedly now feels a bit dated. But it managed to create a startlingly real sense of doom in those saccharine, carpeted offices. The haunted office buildings, bland as they were, were a perfect stage to dredge up memories; to create an even scarier phantom by making me believe the outlandish things that happened in video games could happen in my own life.For someone who's always seen video games as a way to visit other realities, facing the "scariest fucking game ever" meant facing something worse than virtual ghosts. It meant revisiting my own.Follow Suriel Vazquez on Twitter.New on Noisey: Watch Lionel Richie Get Curved By Adele