RE:Play – F.E.A.R.
I’ve made no secret of my disdain for Blockbuster Video.
When I was a young man and down on my luck, I could count on their brutal return policies to leave me surviving for a week on Cheez-its and Value Star Bean Dip. The company’s insistence on leasing rather than owning their property cut the Blockbuster’s own throat when they were down on their luck. There was a reason Family Video survived for a decade after Blockbuster went under.
Nonetheless, there were occasionally times that its existence was tolerable to me. When I was stationed at Camp LeJeune, the Jacksonville Blockbuster had a surprisingly good selection of early 1990s anime. A decade later when The Ring became a hit, I was curious enough to pick up a rental—and discovered that the clerk had put the wrong copy behind the box. I had Ringu (1998), the Japanese original. I shrugged and fed it into the DVD player. When I finally compared it to the American version, there was no comparison. The American version was far too overblown and special effects-laden, with a weird horse fetish thrown in, (as was the style at the time). The original was much better. Horror tends to thrive on a small budget. The fiscal restrictions imposed by the budget create a sense of familiar intimacy. Probably because you are having to shoot in someone’s real world apartment. “To make something truly nightmarish it has to have an element of the familiar. “It has to be Mom eating snakes on the kitchen floor.”
The elements of horror are fear, dread, and shock.
Ringu was exceptionally good at all of these. Fear: You know that Ryuji’s week is up when he starts the videotape and sees the well Sadako was thrown into. Dread: He sees the creepy little Japanese girl with wet hair covering her face climb out of the well. Shock: Sadako CLIMBS OUT TO DAMN TV SCREEN. I still remember how skin-crawling that brilliant scene was.
The creepy little Japanese girl became quite the “as was the style at the time” kind of thing in the early 00s. We weren’t as good at it as the Japanese but before it went from trope to cliche it created one of the best FPS horror games of all time; F.E.A.R.
Monolith Studios (Glob, it makes me sad just typing that name) had a justly deserved reputation for producing top-flight horror games like Blood and Condemned. Blood 2 wasn’t their fault, it was an undercooked beta that GT just chucked out into the wild. Regardless, when I had heard they were launching a new horror IP my ears perked up.
FEAR clearly had three major influences. Creepy Little Japanese Girl films, John Carpenter and John Woo. The funny part is that for once, Monolith hadn’t set out to create a horror game, they were focused on Hong Kong action films like Hard Boiled, where every single prop on the set exists solely to be blown up by stray gunfire during slow-motion gunfire.
Bullet time had existed in games before F.E.A.R. Truthfully, it was feeling a little worn out by the time F.E.A.R. came along but Monolith was the first studio that really knew what to do with it. This was a game where jumping off a second story, going into bullet time, and firing your pistols two-gun mojo style was absolutely mandatory. Sure, you took fall damage but it was worth it to be doing super-cool John Woo shit for those few seconds.
So they absolutely succeeded at that but today it’s primarily remembered as being one of the top two horror games of that decade (if it hadn’t been for Deadspace it would own the crown in a walk away). The reason why is simple, the elements of horror are expertly crafted into the game.
Monolith’s choice to make Point Man silent was deliberate. The intent from the beginning was to make the POV character immersive.
The game starts with a passive animation lock, opening credits scene like Half-Life (as was the style at the time). It did give you a sense of tone by establishing a sense of dread. The first two characters you see are Paxton Fetel and the Creepy Girl in a Red Dress.
There is now some green screen text announcing you’ve been assigned to FEAR and are now the Point Man.
Jankowsky isn’t happy about this, although putting the new guy on point is pretty standard. It’s safer than you’d think. Experienced bad guys will let the point go on by and fire on the mass of men behind him. If the point draws fire at all it’s likely panic-fire. Mostly it lets the rest of the squad find out if the new guy has stones or not. And if he gets hit by panic fire he either can’t remember the basics or has really bad luck. Either way the squad needs to know those things.
The set up is that Armacham Technology Corporation (ATC) is creating a bunch of cloned psychic soldiers and Paxton is their mental controller.
Training mission commences. After a few scenes of psychic horror residue, while you are reminded how to walk, duck and jump, you get thunked in the face by your asshole of a brother Paxton. You wake up and he says weird shit to you before you pass out. I forgot to mention that he is your brother and Alma is your mother. The foreshadowing is so heavy-handed you know what your relationship with these characters is before the training mission is over. This cannot be considered a spoiler, especially after 20 years.
Training mission is over so you and the team head off to some warehouse. You find some powerup injectors. They give you more health and all important bullet-time. Finally, you run into some bad guys and find out that this 2005 game has an exceptional AI.
Up to this point in FPS the bad guys were pretty predictable after a few moments of play. The only thing that would make them challenging was the ever-present, pain-in-the-ass hit-scanner NPC. Not so with F.E.A.R. The enemy NPCs would appear to be working as a team, performing flanking maneuvers, laying down suppressing fire, and attempting to retreat when under heavy fire. This was the first game to use Goal Oriented Action Planning. Here is a really, really dumbed-down explanation of it:
The NPC has a goal to achieve, this goal is to shoot your ass, he accesses a plan for that. But, oh shit, the human shot me first. Is the plan still viable? If no, then access a plan to survive, usually by taking cover or maybe retreating. After that, it assesses the situation and if possible goes back to the first plan of “kill the meat bag.” Important note, none of the enemy NPCs know collectively what is going on, they only know individually but are never deliberately acting as a team. However due to the restrictions of the environment, some dialog, and some very clever level design planning, it felt like they were. This was first-generation group tactics that kind of worked if you gave it time to work. Cautious gameplay on your part was NOT rewarded. If you fought aggressively it would interrupt the AI’s OODA loop. The result kind of caught the machine intelligence in a fog of war and made for a much more exciting game for you.
If you’re interested in an explanation by someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, take a look at this video.
The other excitement factor was provided by the John Woo exploding props. Hit an electrical box in the real world, and you might get a pop sound before the power goes out, but in F.E.A.R. the box would explode in a shower of sparks, shrapnel, and flashing current arcs. Hitting a concrete wall created a dust cloud. Nail an NPC and the blood spray would be an absurd red geyser, but you could see that you hit the NPC from a long way off.
The sound design was chef’s kiss perfect, big, meaty, and chaunky. The music was sound design in and of itself maintaining as it did the atmospheric dread. It starts with a Japanese flute solo against a synth background all in flat notes. Then it throws in some Middle Eastern vocals, again in flat notes and finally ends in a crescendo of string instruments. A brilliant and still criminally underrated soundtrack that did fantastic work of setting the tone throughout the whole game.
There were some downsides to the game. Since the enemy NPCs were clones there wasn’t much variety to them. Soldier, sniper, armored, and mech were about it. There were cosmetic differences between the types but that was it. Given the quality of the AI, it was a tradeoff everyone was happy to make. There was also an invisible ninja that never killed me once in any run-through of the game. Paxton did not get his money’s worth there.
In deference to that section of the subhuman populace known as the console-peasant, the game only lets you carry three weapons at a time. And it quickly became obvious which weapons it had to be. Two-gun mojo pistols, the Penetrator, and (you were waiting for this one weren’t you?) the FEAR VK-12 shotgun.
Ever since DOOM Ep 1 level 1, the most critical acid test for any FPS game was how good is the shotgun? Fail that and the entire game is a waste. If I ever get around to making my retro-shooter boomstick listicle this thing is going to be in the running for number one. Monolith made two of the best FPS shotguns of all time. It was absolutely devastating. Pull the trigger at close range and the NPC would ragdoll away in an amazing manner. It had more power than the grenades. It was OP as all AF, totally broken. Shattered the game like a Faberge egg hit with a rocket-powered baseball bat. Reload time for TWELVE rounds is two seconds. Mash bullet time and Wade into the ATC clone troopers blasting away with the shotgun that is tossing your enemies out of your way without breaking stride, and the prophecy of Harlan Wade comes true, “You will be a god among men.”
Although the grenades were a lot of fun too. The mines however were a waste, the NPCs were too damn smart to go anywhere near them. You could, however, use them to create a fatal funnel. Towards the end, you get a Particle beam gun that I happily ditch the Penetrator for. It leaves charred skeletons behind which I loved. Especially with a particularly troublesome enemy. If Point Man could speak he would be saying, “Sucks to be you, asshole,” as he laughs at a smoking pile of blackened bones. Look the Wades are NOT good people. You know that.
The narrative is the kind of audio drama I’ve always preferred to a cut scene. Hit a flashing button on the phone, the message plays and you get a bit more of the plot. It feels a lot more immersive than a scripted animation lock. No face is always better than zombie face. The intonations of the actors’ voices do a much better job of conveying the story to you. And bonus, you aren’t removed from the story so a frustrated director that couldn’t make it in Hollywood displays his under-appreciated brilliance in a cutscene.
Darklings: But F.E.A.R. has animation locks too.
The Dark Herald (growling): Yeah. I know.
Most of those come towards the end of the game. The one everyone finds the most infuriating is that you are not allowed to kill that red-haired, Cheeto dust-spewing, hyper-obese asshole, Norton Mapes. Not being allowed to kill Mapes is one of the worst gamer-cock blocks in the history of gaming. There is a story out there that Monolith had an IT guy who was a godawful king of the Gamma Males and they put him in the game. I’m still mad I wasn’t allowed to kill him.
As the game progresses you find out just how horrible ATC really is. Your mother Alma was experimented on by her father to turn her into a psychic supergirl. She was imprisoned at ATC for years and then they decided to put Mengle to shame and forcibly impregnated Alma with a genetic cocktail that her father contributed to. Twice. Your cannibal brother Paxton was the firstborn.
Later you find out that Grampa Dad was capable of normal paternal affection. He and his other daughter Alice Wade are quite close. At one point you rescue your worryingly hot Aunt Sister Alice and then you are stuck on escort duty. Credit where it’s due, at least she isn’t the kind of escort who has a suicidal personality type. Although she does stupidly run off repeatedly while you try your best to extract your only non-monster family member from your pissed-off mom’s clutches. It doesn’t work. Eventually, Paxton eats her while Mom watches. Apparently, she was mad about Alice being Dad’s favorite.
You put a bullet in your brother’s head for it, which is what you would expect from a family with as much drama as the Wades. Being killed didn’t seem to bother him that much long term, so all good I guess?
The end kind of sucked if you want the truth. Harlan kills Mapes, and then Alma is released, even though she’s been dead for a long time, she burns Grampa to ashes. You shoot your Mom in the face a bunch of times before escaping as the ATC facility explodes. So basically, everything happened the way it would have without Point Man being there. He had no effect on the outcome of the story at all. Except for killing his asshole cannibal brother, who was back in the third game so Point Man got nothing out of this.
F.E.A.R. was the last of Monolith’s great IPs. Monolith Games had already been snatched up by Warner Media when this game was in late development. It was allowed to exist for a while but was finally sent to the Warner IP mines to make Middle Earth and Justice League games.
Now, I’m sad.
F.E.A.R. spawned some good DLCs and two sequels. The Wade Family saga ends with Paxton and Point Man raising the baby their Mom had made by raping the POV character in FEAR 2. Also, they* ate Mom to gain her power. The Wade story finally ended and that’s enough really.
Armacham was later acquired by Weyland-Utani, where the asset integration was unusually smooth due to an identical corporate culture of unrelenting evil.
Okay, I’m done here.
*The plural pronoun is quite applicable in that ending.
