Cry of Fear starts off really strong. The enemies are fast, make horrific noises, and are extremely good at coming out of nowhere. The atmosphere is tense, with murky darkness all around the player. Combat is quick but dangerous. Then, around halfway through the game, it all starts to come apart as the game becomes less frightening, turning into something more akin to a shooter with horror monsters. It’s still an extremely good game with a lot of well-constructed jump-out scares, but its flaws and problems keep it from being as good as it could be.
Once you’re in control you get to walk around some uncomfortably empty city streets. The atmosphere in these areas really works well, as despite the primitive graphics the city still feels abandoned but lived in. The houses and apartments you walk into are still full of beds, computers, and other furniture. Unlike in a game like Silent Hill, none of this stuff looks decayed in any way. It gives the appearance that everyone just disappeared not too long ago, and it gives the world this sense of unnamed menace. I get this feeling that everyone else in the world saw the bad stuff that was going on in town and took off, leaving only my dopey character behind.
They also strung out the time between starting the game and when you run into your first enemy. I was equipped with a switchblade pretty soon after I was given control so I knew some sort of enemy was coming soon, but I didn’t know what it would be. Before I get to see the enemies in a horror game I’m always wound tight, wondering what they can do or how I fight them. I could guess a couple of things based on the game’s shooter controls (since this is a Half Life mod), but beyond that I had no idea what to expect. Would enemies be really hard to kill? Would they come in large numbers? Would I see them coming? Those moments are key to setting the atmosphere of a horror game’s combat system, and Team Psykstallar did a great job keeping the tension high.
Having the game play out mainly in dark, claustrophobic corridors kept me wound up as well. Games like Dead Space shifted to using a lot of large, open spaces for some reason, and they don’t really work for horror because it gives you a wide viewing angle. Even if the enemies are going to come from the floor or vents, there’s no place for them to hide once they enter the area. In Cry of Fear, there are all kinds of twisting hallways that shoot off of many of the main paths. Yes, it isn’t realistic to have that many halls to nowhere, but they give the game lots of places to keep enemies out of sight. More importantly, they keep the player from getting comfortable with the surroundings and knowing what’s nearby. An enemy could be a few feet away around a blind corner and the player wouldn’t know it, whereas in an open room you can feel safe knowing that you can see the enemies in any direction.
Darkness also helped keep the player in a smaller bubble. This game is really dark, and purposely so. It’s built that way to keep your sight line from getting too far ahead, again keeping the player from getting comfortable with the surroundings and danger. You can remedy that a bit with your phone’s light, but if you bring that out on its own you have to put away your weapon. You can dual wield it with a pistol, but choosing to do so means that you can’t reload because both hands are tied up. It forces the player to be deliberate and careful in the meandering halls, taking out the light, checking to make sure the path is safe, and then moving up to the next spot. It also means that, again, an enemy could be a step or two ahead and you’d never know it.
Well, not never, I guess. The sound that comes out of most of these creatures is just blood-curdling. The enemy cries are loud and make the monsters sound like the most ghastly things on earth. There are these things that look like zombified housewives with bloodied blades for arms, and they let out a horrible shriek when they see you. There are also humanoid creatures that seem to be wearing wire strait jackets that let out their own awful scream, usually making me jolt in my seat if they catch me before I see them. One of the worst is this smaller enemy that lets out this mangled baby’s cry as it gets close. The sound these things make just make them impossibly scary in the darkness around you.
That’s probably for the best, as again this is a Half Life mod and the game’s graphics are pretty primitive. It’s better than the first Silent Hill, but at the same time there are quite a few enemies that shouldn’t been seen up close in good lighting. You get a lot of rough edges and graphics that look a little laughable when you can see them up close, so it was smart to have the enemies moving too fast to really look at or skulking in the dark. There are many decent enemy designs in the game that look good for the engine they’re built in (the floating woman that makes you try to kill yourself looks awesome), but this game can look really dated at times.
Enemy movement speed is ridiculous. To balance out the fact that you’re using first person shooter guns against a mainly melee-based set of enemies, they made the enemies move fast. Not only does this make them extremely dangerous in tight tunnels, but it also made them quick enough to dart in during the game’s open areas (which let the game have some more variety). It’s really jarring to see most of these creatures move (although one type of enemy just looked silly crawling along the ground), especially at the speeds they’re coming in at. They can literally be on you in seconds, and they weave from side-to-side so that it isn’t that easy to hit them. I would waste a lot of bullets trying to hit the fast enemies while my mind was screaming that they were going to be on me in seconds.
If the regular fast enemies weren’t bad enough, there are frequent points where you get chased by a zombie with a chainsaw through a maze of corridors. These segments play a little bit like Hell Night on speed, as the chainsaw zombie moves really quick (if you don’t believe me, turn around and watch him some time). These sections typically aren’t long enough to be frustrating (unlike being chased by Frankenstein’s Monster in Castlevania 64), but you do have to pick all the right turns to get through them. You also have to be sprinting as much as you can to stay ahead, but sprinting drains your stamina meter really fast. Drain it all the way and you’ll be moving slower than a walk for an agonizingly long time, so these segments are very high stress. Adding on the sound of a chainsaw revving pretty much beside your ear and you probably shouldn’t be playing these sections if you have a heart condition.
There is one difficulty that shows up periodically during those chase segments, one that becomes a bigger issue over time. The game can be extremely finicky about what constitutes something you can’t walk past. It’s almost like some of the game’s objects stick out a little farther than they appear to, so your character will get caught up on things that looked like they are just beside you. This means a couple of cheap deaths when you get stuck on a corner while running from the chainsaw creature, but otherwise wasn’t so bad.
I couldn’t say that when I hit Chapter 4. There is a sequence during that chapter where you’re supposed to jump across a bunch of platforms to get to a room that’s high up a building. Now, I don’t like platforming in first person to begin with, but there were a lot more issues at play here than just that. For one, the platforms are all really small. That alone might not be so bad, but the game only lets you save in specific places, meaning if you screw up a jump you’re repeating all the jumps again.
None of those problems are that bad on their own, but it’s combining them with the game being picky about what is and isn’t an object that makes this area so awful. I could spend a couple of minutes doing just fine climbing up the structure only to not quite line up my jump with what the game felt was open space and then plunge down to the bottom. Barring that, sometimes I would get caught on a piece on environment while sprinting to do a jump, losing all of my momentum and then doing a clumsy jump off the side. There aren’t many sections where this clipping issue becomes as aggravating as this one, but when it is it’s more than frustrating enough to taint the entire game. I had a very hard time not punching my keyboard into a tiny pile of letters and numbers.
That bugged me because I had enjoyed the save system up until that point. Games don’t often force hard save points on players any more, and while this system isn’t as restrictive as Resident Evil, it often means you have to do quite a few things before you can save. It forced me to do enough stuff that I really didn’t want to die and lose all my progress, and the game can be really bad for making you go long periods without saving after difficult parts with the chainsaw zombie or things like that. It really makes death meaningful and something to be afraid of, except for the sequences where I had to do some stupid jumps and maneuvers without failing.
Things feel better when you have to get back to combat; as at least that’s challenging in good, fair way. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but your health doesn’t regenerate. You have to pick up syringes if you want to heal yourself, which is a nice touch. Taking damage is far more stressful because of it, and the fast enemies typically get in a dig or two before you can down them (Especially when they tear down a door to hit you).
Another fun issue is that you might not have room in your inventory for those healing syringes. You have six slots in your inventory and that’s it. If you see a gun you want, or even worse a key that you need and your inventory’s full, you’ll need to toss something. Luckily the item you drop will appear on the ground, but the game often blocks off old paths so you should get it as fast as possible. The really good part came with choosing what weapons to throw away, though. Do you throw away the handgun to pick up the sniper rifle, knowing there’ll be less ammo for it? I had to make some really hard decisions about what to keep, thinking about my ammo stockpile (I wouldn’t say ammo isn’t rare, but it does show up infrequently) while I made a decision. Should I keep the knife since it’s always free and can be relatively useful? I loved having to make these calls, as it feels like every decision you make is going to be wrong.
As good as many of the aspects of the game are, I still feel like the addition of these powerful guns took a lot of the tension away. I know that adding better guns let the developers add tougher enemies, but putting shotguns and machine guns into my hands starts to make me feel stronger. I began to run into enemies in groups, feeling superior to them as I took them out. Quick bursts took care of enemies that used to scare me, and over time I just felt like some of the fear drained out of the game. It could still get the drop on me with its constant jump scares, but being so well equipped just didn’t make me feel afraid any more. I probably should have at some points, but I just didn’t.
I liked a lot of things about the game, but again it feels like its annoyances and the addition of overpowered weapons really take away a lot of the game’s steam in the later half. There are a lot of great ideas and design decisions, but putting more powerful weapons in my hands just took away a lot of my fears. Adding clumsy object detection during precision first person jumping and you have a game that I couldn’t like as much as I wanted to. Given the fact that it’s free I can hardly complain about it, but it was so good at frightening me early on that I can’t help but walk away a little disappointed.
Cry of Fear is available for free on Steam.
