F.E.A.R. - First Encounter Assault Recon

In celebration of Halloween, Adam and Austin revisit Monolith’s 2005 horror-FPS:  F.E.A.R.  Join them as they dissect the Alma induced nightmares, heart-pounding slow motion gunplay, and the GOAP-driven AI that made enemy soldiers feel eerily human. 

References:
AI and Video Games - Building the AI of F.E.A.R. with Goal Oriented Action Planning | AI 101
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaOLBOuyswI

--------------------------------------------------------
Follow us on social media @thegamesgonebypodcast
Contact us at podcast@gamesgoneby.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro and Overview of F.E.A.R. (Bullets, Brains, Blood)
• 13:10 Bullets - Slow Mo + Melee
• 18:01 Bullets - The Arsenal
• 24:26 Bullets - Miscellaneous Combat Elements
• 26:11 Bullets - Damage Feedback
• 28:40 Bullets - Environment Design
• 32:16 Bullets - Set Pieces and Enemy Encounters
• 39:33 Bullets - Exploration
• 41:45 Brains - AI Overview
• 43:39 Brains - GOAP Details
• 53:05 Blood - Horrifying Horror
• 59:19 Blood - Story Summary *Spoilers*
• 1:10:06 Blood - Atmosphere
• 1:11:40 The Legacy of F.E.A.R.
• 1:19:19 Final Thoughts
• 1:25:28 Outro

Transcript

0:00

I really, I really had every intention to go a little bit deeper into the story, but the more I thought about it, I was like, but what is there even to say? All right, he's in the next room. Go get him. Right, right. Paxton got away again. Go find him. All right. And welcome back to another episode of the Games Gone By podcast. It is Sunday, October 19th, at the time of this recording. I'm your host, Adam, and joining me today, as always, expert and enthusiast. Austin, are you ready to discuss the first spooky game we've done, provided that Alan Wake doesn't count? You know, Alan Wake was kind of spooky, but I don't think it counts. I don't think this is our first horror game, perfect for the month of October. I'm excited. Let's do it. Absolutely. And in that spirit of October and Halloween, we're going to be talking about the 2005 horror FPS First Encounter Assault Recon, or simply put, Fear. Now, I know you haven't played this before. And the main reason I know that is because in the notes, you said like, you thought you played as the little girl on the front of the box, which I thought was very funny. I, you know, I don't know why I thought that. I just, I've always like, I feel like she is synonymous with fear to me. So it's like, I just assumed that's who you play as. But like, you don't play as the big daddy in Bioshock 1. So like, oh. Or the devil in Diablo. Right. Or, you know, the Colossus in Shadow. So like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's whatever 2005. So Fear was developed by Monolith Productions. I think a studio these days is best known for the Shadow of Mordor games. You've played those, right? Yeah, I played the first one. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But back then they're much smaller, much scrappier team. And they, they didn't really make like a huge name for themselves yet, but they'd gotten a little bit of buzz with a couple of games called No One Lives Forever, which I would describe as a quirky spy comedy shooter. I assuming you've, you've never played these much less even even heard of them. No, no, not at all. Not until I didn't even realize that Fear was developed by Monolith until we did this, like recording, you know, all the prep for this. And I realized that I put the pieces together. I was like, oh, Monolith. Okay. Shadow of Mordor, Nemesis System. Okay. All right. Yeah. And who knows how many of that team is even around anymore. That was 20 something years ago. Sure. And, you know, it's, it's, it's, they've been acquired by Warner Brothers. And that's actually why No One Lives Forever is not like available digitally anywhere because there's been a rights dispute with it. Maybe one day I'll figure out how to download that shit and we'll play it. But the games are interesting to me because it was like someone looked at GoldenEye 64 and said, yeah, that's cool, but it's supposed to be James Bond, not Rambo. Where is all the James Bond shit? Interesting. Instead of just a shooting gallery of, you know, 18 levels of an assault rifle to random. So this game was pretty cool. I played it with a friend of mine back in high school. And there's a lot of like stealth and gadgets and you're trying, it's very like a mission-based or objective-based missions. And you can kill stuff, you can fight stuff, but for the most part, you're trying to like complete objectives and be stealthy. And, you know, there's even like a snowmobile scene right out of like No One Lives Forever. So very, very James Bond. I think they're all British too. So really fun games. Haven't been able to play them in 20 years because they don't exist digitally anymore. But, but that was really what they had had kind of in their resume up to this point. And I think to really understand fear in context, we have to remember where these two genres were period back then, shooter and horror. So 2005, Halo 2, Call of Duty 2, these were the games at the top of the genre. Loud, linear, full of scripted set pieces, big explosions, which is not a hate on them at all, right? Not a dig at them. Who doesn't love the Normandy Beach scene in Call of Duty 2? Of course. Like straight out of Saving Private Ryan, awesome. Who doesn't love Halo 2, which is like the third level, second level, where you have to jump on top of the scarab and like kill the guy on the back. It's so good. Great, right? So nothing wrong with these games, but that is very much the direction they started to head. They started to move away from some of the more like old school PC style games. And similarly, horror, Resident Evil 4 had just come out earlier this year and it basically turned the entire genre into like an over the shoulder action blockbuster. Now again, Resident Evil 4, awesome game, not a horror game, not scary for one second at any point in its entire run. Silent Hill 4 had done something very similar. Now I hadn't played the Silent Hill games, but just looking this up, Silent Hill 4 came out and got a lot of the same criticism as Resident Evil 4 where it's like, yeah, it's fun, it's actiony, but where's like the psychological horror that this was known for? So that's kind of where the state of horror was at the time. We're still at least five years out from that sort of indie horror renaissance that starts with Amnesia and Slender Man and Outlast, which might be why you kind of thought you might play as Alma, because that would be what these games would do, right? A little girl with no guns. Yeah. Yeah. And those are horror games that I was never able to really get into. I've never been able to really get into like the first person, slow, very tense horror. Like I don't like those. The Amnesia games never worked for me. Slender Man didn't really work for me. So I was glad that this was a more like action heavy FPS horror game that we were going to take on because those I was like, oh God, I don't like those. Yeah. I'm like way too much of a pussy to play those games. So I think I've gotten like a few minutes into Amnesia and Outlast and I was like, this is not going to work. But so fear drops at this time and it kind of manages to thread this needle a little bit. The lead designer, Craig Hubbard, he was basically saying like, I want a game that combines like a Hong Kong action flick, like a John Woo film with a Japanese slow burn dread of like the ring or the grudge. So I think that's why you kind of end up with this game where you go from diving through the air, actually jumping through the air, shooting headshots in slow mo. You can see your individual bullet casings bouncing off the wall right after having just crawled through like a vent where a creepy grudge girl crawls at you like a spider and there's all this industrial noise. So it's a great blend there. Narratively, it's not complicated. You play as a special forces operator that's just referred to as the point man and in like the fear fan base, he is just point man. Like that's his name. That's what people call him. I don't think that's his actual name, but we never get his actual name. And you're sent to stop a rogue psychic commander named Paxton Fettle. There's this op, there's this like a project where these psychic people are being used to control clone soldiers and like, who would have thought that one of them would go rogue? And you're basically hunting this guy the entire game. That's like 10 of 12 chapters. It's like trying to find this Paxton Fettle guy and you keep seeing visions of this little girl named Alma, who we mentioned earlier, and you kind of just slowly uncover that you're connected to both of them in these kind of unsettling ways. Also, this is your first time playing this game. How would you say that some of those narrative and horror elements hit, just brief, like thumbs up, thumbs down? Yeah, when you say slow burn, like you're not kidding. I think for most of the game, like horror wise, I think it strikes a pretty good balance, right? Like I think there's a good amount of tension and scares and there's like a few jump scares, but it's not like heavy on that stuff. And like there's the right amount of tension mixed with action. So the horror elements, I think work pretty well. The narrative elements for me, up until like the last two missions, I was kind of like, I don't think I care about what's going on right now. Yeah, there's a lot of little interesting details that you can find out through the audio logs and stuff. But overall, it just feels like the plot is like you're chasing Paxton Fettle. He got away 10 times in a row. It's like every mission ends with like, we got to chase Paxton to the next place because he's not here. And it's like, okay, yeah, sure. You know, last episode we were talking about in Sunderfolk, how the story kind of stays out of the way. It does the same thing here, but maybe to like too much of a degree at times. Yeah, like for a lot of it, I was just kind of like, what am I even like, and you know, we'll get into a lot of like, I think this game has one major problem. And I think that one major problem doesn't help the narrative much either. So yeah, fun fact, I didn't know where else to put into this. Rooster Teeth, one of your favorite media companies, produced a four short Machina episode series called Panics, People Acting Normal in Crazy Ass Situations. It was part of the official marketing for this game. Like it was commissioned by Vivendi, who had owned one at the time, I think, before it got sold to Warner Brothers. So that's pretty interesting. Had you ever heard of those? No, no, I'm a big Rooster Teeth fan. I, you know, obviously, if you know Rooster Teeth, you know that they started with Red vs. Blue, the like Halo machinima, where they, you know, take Halo characters and move them around and make funny jokes about it. Knowing that they did that with fear is really interesting. And it's still up on their website. I almost watched them, but I held off in case I wanted to, you know, do some fun reaction video or something. But yeah, that's that's super interesting to me. I'm a big fan of their brand of comedy. So I definitely want to check that out. Yeah. And to listeners who don't know what machinima is, it was fucking huge in the 2000s. And it started off with just basically people like acting stuff out on Halo or similar games and recording it, but would eventually evolve into like people being able to import these into various programs and really doing a lot with moving the in-game models around. But the whole idea was that you were mostly trying to make little short films with like in-game video models. There was a bunch of like World of Warcraft stuff at the time, too. Just a very big thing in the early 2000s. Yeah. I mean, like Red vs. Blue predates YouTube. I think the first episode of Red vs. Blue was 2002. So like, yeah, they were posting that shit on their own website. Like people were downloading it by the millions. Like, yeah, it was huge. But perhaps the most like enduring part of fear's legacy and certainly the aspect I see talked about the most. I swear just this week, I got another YouTube video recommended to me about fear and AI. It's the enemy AI and how they designed it in this game. And I shouldn't have to say this, but just off the top, when I say AI, we're not talking about generative AI or LLMs, right? No chat GPT here. Exactly. We're talking about a catch all phrase. It simply means the code and processes for controlling the non-player characters in the game, right? And Monolith was able to create these squads of enemies who genuinely seem to coordinate with each other. Like they flank you. They shout orders like, take cover. He's over there. Where did he go? They toss grenades to flush you out of cover. They push you into corners. They flank you. They put you in choke points. None of them are actually communicating with each other, but it's a bunch of clever smoke and mirrors to make it seem so. And we'll get into more of some of that later. But this was really apparent to me playing it this time around, especially because a few months ago when we were playing Black Ops 6 Zombies with one of your friends, I think, so I still had it installed and I decided to play the campaign because I'd heard some decent things about it. And yeah, from the standpoint of it's got this cool narrative going through that's trying to connect it to real world politics and it's got a really cinematic aspect and it's kind of doing that thing where it flashes back and forth to people being interrogated and then goes to what was the thing they're being interrogated about? And it was cool, but dude, I couldn't get into it because ultimately the gameplay in those campaigns sucks. I don't know how else to describe it other than it feels like garbage. And it's not because the gunplay is necessarily bad, it's because the enemies just feel stupid. They sit in cover. They pop out to shoot you. They might occasionally sprint across to another piece of cover, but they never feel like they're intelligent enemies trying to outsmart you. And God, that is what fear does so well. Did you get that feeling from fear as you played it or am I exaggerating here? No, I mean, one of the first things that I even put in my notes before I had even known that fear was known for its AI and that that was a thing that people thought about fear is like, oh, it's the AI game, right? Before I even knew that, one of my comments is like, man, enemy AI here feels really good for a game from 2005. And even by modern standards, it holds up really well. I was like, man, these enemies are tough. I think one of the first experiences of that, me feeling that way, was one of the flushing out of cover with grenades. I was hiding. I was like, okay, we're just going to hold up here for a second. And the dude throws a grenade at me. I'm like, oh God, now I got to move. That doesn't happen in a lot of games. So yeah. I mean, immediately, even in the earliest levels, I was already starting to feel those AI things. Yeah, absolutely. And ultimately, in a year where shooters were increasingly bombastic and over the top and action oriented and horror was losing its edge to the same kind of philosophies, Monolith really found a way to elevate both horror and shooting, I think, proving that you can do a lot with the balance of bullets, brains, and a little bit of blood. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Those three categories. We're going to start off with bullets. Another thing this game is really known for, Austin, that we somehow went the whole intro without mentioning is the slow mo. I mean, it's one of the early games to do that. I think maybe Pain 1 might have done it first. But this is just a couple of years after the Matrix films had blown up. Slow mo is a really cool thing. How did you feel about the slow mo aspect of this game? Yeah. So I mean, that's probably the thing that separates it from most standard shooters, right, is the ability to stop time practically. I mean, you move at 20% speed or everything else moves at 20% speed. You're moving at 40, but you can aim pretty much normal pace. So I think there's a lot of cool moments where you can kind of catch enemies by surprise or use it to get out of dangerous situations. And I thought it was a really cool mechanic that I don't necessarily think was like 100% necessary. Like, I don't think you had to use it necessarily, but if you didn't, it's like, what's the point? Yeah, there's definitely some sections where I feel like it's just completely too brutal if you don't use the slow mo, but they do give you like a good bit of health packs and ammo and stuff. So you could probably get away. And I mean, I was reading game facts post about this from 2005 and what's our people saying that the slow mo is useless and they played the whole game without it, which I think is a crazy thing to say, but it was more than one person, man. There's apparently a decent contingent of people out there who just play this game without the slow mo. I will say that like when I was, I was looking up things about the difficulty because there was a point that I was like struggling. And one of the opposite of what I was looking for was like, if you want to make the game harder, you can just not use slow mo. I was like, I don't want to do that. I need to go down. But so I mean, it sounds like there's a, like you said, a fair contingent of people that just like want to not use the slow mo, which to me is weird because it's one of the most fun parts of it. Yeah. And there's, I think it's an interval five, there's a sequence where you're in a lobby and all these elevators are opening up and squads are coming out of them a few at a time. And the only cover you really have are these like pillars in the middle of the lobby. And it felt just like that scene at the end of the matrix where they, where they walk in and there's all those guards in the lobby and they're just like shooting everywhere. And there's cause, Oh man, the particle effects in this game get like amplified when you're in slow mo. So you'll see these sparks. Yeah. Like the sparks fly off the enemies. The smoke is everywhere, dude. Like there's the amount of times I threw a grenade and then was like, I wish I hadn't done that. Cause I can't see anything anymore. There's just, just like dust, like it's a construction site, like all over the place. But yeah, I thought the slow mo was great. I probably used it more than most people. It feels like because I was, I was doing a lot of quick saving too. So I was just like, if I got into a room and I felt like I took too much damage, I would just load it and be like, no, no, we're going to try that again. It almost felt kind of like a puzzle game in that way. But yeah, overall, I think it plays well with the sort of more, it's a more old school shooter in a lot of ways, right? It's not the halo style or the call of duty style of regenerating health. You have your health and armor meters or numbers down in the bottom. You have a flashlight, you have the crouch, it feels a lot like an old school shooter, but it does have some interesting things, right? It's got this melee system, which is kind of wonky and other underdeveloped, but also fucking like awesome at the same time. You can melee while you're standing still, you do a little like, you know, pistol whip, nothing too crazy, but like if you do it while you're jumping, he does this like roundhouse jumping kick. If you do it while you're running and jumping, it becomes like the bicycle kick. You can do a sliding kick if you crouch at the same time. And these do an absurd amount of damage to the normal enemies, right? Like the bicycle kick will kill a normal soldier in one hit. So it's a lot of fun to just like sprint through a room, turn on the slow mo, get a few headshots. And then right as your meter is about to run out, you pull off like a slow mo flying jump kick and the body rag dolls. It's, it's just adds like a whole element to this game. I always found the melee pretty hard to execute for me. Like I found it hard to like line it up with the enemy and actually hit them or like sometimes I would, I would want to melee and I'd want to do like a normal melee, but I guess I was like mid jump. So I do like the weird jumping melee. Like melee for me was kind of hard to execute correctly, but when you did get it, it was like, ah, that was cool. It definitely feels like something I didn't quite nail down to the extent they want it, but it's, it's there in a way that's still pretty fun. I think it also could have just been like 2005 limitations too. Like that's true. But yeah, overall it doesn't, it doesn't feel like a gimmick, the slow mo and the melee. It feels like part of the game. You don't, again, both of them, you don't have to use, you can just play this like just a straight shooter, but I feel like this game is really, especially in the, on the harder difficulties in the more crowded shooting areas, you need both of those to kind of like really optimize your, your, your playing there. And I had a blast with both of those. On that note too, I think the guns in this game are awesome. There's not necessarily a ton and a couple of them aren't the best, but they all remain pretty effective right up to the end of the game. I felt, and I think the slow mo has got a lot to do with that. How did you feel about the arsenal? Yeah, that's actually one of the things that I think I was immediately impressed by is how fun most of the guns were. Unfortunately, I think like the two most common guns, the, the SMG and assault rifle, I feel like are the two guns that you find the most. I feel like both of those are like kind of mid, but, but, but, but, and it's probably on purpose, right? I mean, because it's so common that they wanted to make them a little less powerful, but I like, I still enjoyed using them and the shotgun is awesome. I think the pistols are really cool and I really found myself kind of gearing towards the particle laser. Like, like sniper rifle, essentially there's like a, you know, you know, a, a counter to a sniper rifle or something a little bit more interesting than just a regular old sniper rifle. So I really liked that thing by the end. Yeah. The, the SMG and the assault rifle, the best thing you can say about those is that when you're firing them in slow mo, they're coming out at a rate where you can actually adjust for the recoil between every single shot. And that is fun. That's something that you don't get to do very often in games with automatic weapons. So I had a lot of fun with them in that regard, but you're right that I still just like, if I did not have to carry either one of those, I wasn't going to, uh, the pistols are also some of my favorite because they have very good accuracy when you're not in slow mo, their rate of fire is just as fast as you can click. When you are in slow mo, they're still pretty, pretty fast rate of fire, uh, very accurate, pretty good penetration because there's a lot of enemies with armor in this game. Um, so I probably the best pistol since halo one pistol. Yeah. And I was actually, when you, you were talking about that before we recorded like a few days ago and I was like, man, I don't think I used the pistol enough. So like after you had said that I saw like two missions or two or three intervals left. So I started using it more and I was like, oh yeah, no, this thing is pretty sick. I just, I think it's cause it's a pistol. I was like, eh, it's probably not going to be that effective, but like, no, it actually really is. Yeah. You get to dual wield them. Um, they, they pack a punch, a lot of fun there. You have them. This game has some interesting weapons, right? There's a sniper rifle that fires a three shot burst because why not? I guess, uh, I, I had this great clip in a video I sent you where like, I was able to kill two guys at once with one shot because they pierce and there's three of them. So like, boy, was that a lot of fun. Uh, the shotgun is a pretty standard shotgun, but you get a lot of shotgun ammo in the game and it's very effective up close. So I found myself using that a lot, especially in slow mo. I have a couple of cool clips where like they literally blow up into a bloody mist and their organs go everywhere just from a shotgun. And, uh, yeah, I had a lot of fun with that one game and more blood than I expected. It was an emulated game, but like it had more blood and gore than I expected. Yeah. It was, it was awesome. Don't get me wrong, but I was like, dang. Okay. Like when I blew a dude's head off with a shotgun, I was like, Oh, okay. We're really gone for it. I was not expecting that exactly. That's, I guess that's it for kind of the main arsenal where there's the penetrator, which is like a spike gun almost. Yeah. And if you like, if you kill someone with a headshot or like stake them to the wall, which is really cool with the ragdoll physics. Yeah. I, I started to use that a little bit towards the end cause I was running out of other gun options. Uh, and I did enjoy it. I thought it was a cool weapon. Um, we both played this on hard, right? Like the second, okay. Yeah. It, it did feel not as effective as I kind of wished it was at times, but it was a cool weapon. Yeah. And then the rest of the weapons here are kind of ones that would appear very infrequently, but were really powerful. We talked about the, the particle laser from earlier that would literally just disintegrate, uh, weaker soldiers would turn into a skeleton. It was kind of cool. Yes. Yeah. There's the multi rocket launcher, which fires three rockets because just like the sniper rifle, one rocket's not enough. It has to be three per shot. Uh, that's a lot of fun, especially cause the first one or two might kill a weaker enemy. And then the third one will just send its ragdoll flying across the room. So I enjoyed that. And then the last thing was there was a repeating cannon, which was definitely like the like ultimate barely in the game gun. I think there's like three of them in the entire game, but that is a, it basically fires like a grenade at the same speed as like the assault rifle. And it's just awesome. That was but of course there's like none of them. There's like virtually none of them. And then, you know, you have a frag grenades pretty standard. Although I did like the fact that if they made contact with an enemy, they became contact grenades, which was awesome. You had the proximity mine, which was a lot of fun to play with. Then you had remote explosives, which I feel like I could have done something cool with, but just found myself really unable to do anything cool with most of the time. I just stuck to the grenades and proximity mines. Yeah. I feel like the remote explosive really suffered from needing to like replace your gun to detonate it. Like the other, the other grenades you could just use and then go back to your gun. But the remote, the remote explosive, like you had to either plan it out methodically to where you could then like hide and trigger it or something. It just, it was too hard for me to make use of because I just wanted a gun in my hand instead of like holding the detonator. So if they could have found a way around that, it might have been more useful to me, but I rarely use these. The proximity mine and the frag, I used a ton though. Those are both really fun grenades. Yeah. And so overall, I think Arsenal, A+. Like I just think that the weapon design in this game is fantastic. Even if a couple are maybe not the best, overall, I found that I was switching weapons a lot and enjoying experimenting with the various guns. Yeah. I was actually like shocking, like shockingly impressed by the, by the, the Arsenal because a lot of times in shooters, I stick to like two guns and it's like, all right, that's it. But I definitely found more of these enjoyable than not. Yeah. Compared to, um, another game from the same year, I think Gears of War that we played recently, these guns fucking kick Gears of War's guns ass, like up and down the hallway, with the exception of the chain gun, which is cool. Yeah, of course. I mean, come on. That's it. I think that's like the only gun in Gears of War. But moving on a little bit, we were talking about, uh, just other elements of, of the combat here that really add a lot. And we mentioned the particle effects and the physics. Another one of them is just the sound design. Like, especially when you're in slow mo, the voices of the guys who are always talking, the soldiers, you hear them get distorted and slow. And like, when you, when you throw a grenade and slow mo at a group of enemies and you just hear one of them say like, oh shit, boom, like that, that is awesome. It's so cool. The, the, the enemy banter is pretty, is pretty good. Like even outside of them, just, um, you know, directing and kind of calling out, oh, he's, he's over here or whatever. Like just their general coordination banter is fun to listen to. And it feels like immersive. It is. And I never quite put together like, okay, are they just talking loudly enough for you to hear? Do you have their radio or is it what's revealed later? You're also cyclically connected to them. And that's why you're hearing it. I never could quite tell which of those things it was, but I guess it's not that important. Yeah. It's like, who knows if it really matters, but it is cool. But, uh, yeah. So there's a, the sound design is awesome. I mean, whether we're just talking about like the enemies or even just the, the sound of the shotgun in slow mode, just this I mean, it, it just, it feels and it sounds so good, especially with a game that doesn't have any, like I was playing on a mouse and keyboard. I know we had found a way for you to play on a controller. It wasn't triggering like vibrations in your controller though, was it? No, no, I don't, I don't think so. I can't remember. So considering the lack of that, I felt that the guns had like a great sense of weight to them, despite like, you know, not having a lot of the modern things that allow you to, to simulate that. Right. Right. Now, on the other hand, I went some of the downsides of the combat, the, damage feedback is like something we're not used to in modern shooters. I think between those vibrations, between the indicators on the screen, you get a lot better idea of when you're taking damage in these modern games. There would be times and fear. Uh, all you really get is a flash on the side or the direction of the screen in which the bullets are coming from. And there's two, two problems with that in the modern era. One with wide screens, you almost just don't even notice the ones on the side actually started playing this game in a three, four resolution, halfway through like better see those. And then secondly, when you go into slow mode, the edges of the screen turned dark. So then you like really can't see the damage indicators. Yeah. So there'd be times where I thought I really dominated a room and then I looked down and I've lost half my health and I was like, God, when, when did that happen? Yeah. And, and there were, there were just times too. And I feel like I struggled to, to tell like, if I were doing damage to an enemy or like if I were, yeah, and this is always a problem in, in shooters. And honestly, just in a lot of games, it's hard to necessarily display damage to an enemy if they don't have like an actual health bar, but I would like shoot at a guy and I thought I'd kill him. And then he was just like totally fine and was shooting back at me. I was like, well, like, come on. So like, if not only was it sometimes hard for me to tell if I was taking damage and there were times when I thought I was like doing great, like you said, and then I looked down, I'd be like, oh, okay. I have 25 health left. Perfect. But it was also sometimes hard for me to tell how much damage I was doing to enemies. So that definitely was a struggle, especially at the beginning. I think as I got used to it, it became less and less of a problem. But early on, I was like, man, I wish I had better feedback here. Yeah. It doesn't have what a lot of modern shooters do where when you make contact with an enemy, there's like a little white flash around your crosshair or like a flash. If you kill them, there's nothing like that. In slow-mo, it's a lot easier to tell because you can see the sparks of when you're hitting them and the blood splatter, and then you can see them like drop their gun and ragdoll. But yeah, without the slow-mo, it's actually like remarkably difficult to tell if you were just hitting. Right. Right. Yeah. And you definitely use slow-mo more than I did. So maybe that wasn't as much of an issue for you, but I definitely struggled with that in the early parts of the game. Some of the other elements of gameplay here, I think one of the long-time criticisms of this game, like what you can see in reviews from 2005, which you can see in the video essays from 2025, are that a lot of the level design is like, it's great from a mechanical standpoint, but from kind of that environmental design, from the aesthetics, it does feel like you were shooting in offices and hallways for 12 missions. There's a little bit of a difference when you move to the corporate headquarters and then to the vault at the end. You can tell there's a little bit of different environment design, but ultimately it's all still the same colors and the same shape hallways. So that aspect feels very samey throughout most of the game. You'd agree with that? Yeah, I think this is my main criticism with the game and the thing that takes it from being like what I think it had the potential to be and brings it down to kind of being a strong game a good time and I enjoyed it, but I think this particular element, the fact that everything feels so samey really drags down the narrative as well. It was harder for me to get invested in what was going on when I was just exploring the same hallways. It felt like everything was the same every mission. You would go from one like, okay, this is a slightly bright hallway to now we're in a darker hallway. Now we're in a super hallway. Now we're in a different type of super hallway. It was just like, oh man, everything was brown. Everything was the same kind of shape and that was frustrating for most of the game for me. I think it's the thing that kind of brings it down a little bit, but like you said, I do think the actual level design, the structure of those hallways in a lot of instances, let you get like good positioning on enemies. It lets you like take high ground. There are good places to drop proximity mines or whatever. I thought the actual mechanical part of the level design was pretty strong. It just, it all looked the same. Yeah. And there would be times where I'm like loading back to a previous save and I'm like, wait, how far back was this? Because this looks like the last six rooms that I was in. And like even when you went to the office spaces, it was like, okay, these are slightly brighter hallways. That's cool. I guess interval two or three takes you to a water treatment plan. And then the whole thing is that like the corporation that made these soldiers, they detected something in the water supply and rather than, and they know it's their fault. So they're basically sending in their like forces to do something about it. And that's when Paxton takes them over. But like, that's why you're at this water treatment plan. And then once you go to the headquarters and like interval four or five, I was like, okay, well, there's no reason for us to go back there. I must be misremembering how often that stuff happens. No, they just find an excuse for you to go like into sewers and then all of the same models and architecture from interval two and three are just back. And I was like, come on, why? Right. Why are we doing this again? Yeah. And I think the end game, you get like slightly different hallways and corridors, but it's still more like which, you know, it's, it's Reddit, but I read a post that was like fear and exercise and monotony. And like, I think that may be a little harsh, but I do kind of understand the, like, it does start to feel monotonous going through the same hallways over and over again. I think what, you know, what helps is that the actual like minute to minute shooting mechanics are a lot of fun. It helps you get over that, but it's like, oh man, another set of hallways. Yeah. If you're not in love with the shooting mechanics off the bat, you will probably find this a pretty rough play. Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of that problem for me is that they don't do quite enough, at least in my opinion, to, to kind of create set piece moments and like big scale. And I know the game is supposed to be the slow burn, like, you know, more methodical structure, but there's no like big jump on the scare of moment. There's no Normandy beach storming, you know, and that's intentional by design, but it does, it does, I think, just like exacerbate those issues of the, of the hallways being all the same and all of the environments looking the same. Cause there's no like big bombastic moments or very few, like big bombastic moments to kind of separate you from those, those kind of monotonous areas. Yeah. The few things in the game you might call set pieces definitely lack the flair of like Call of Duty or Halo at the time, for sure. There's like a couple of the closest one I can think of is like, you're in that elevator that's going up and every few floors it stops. And there's like some enemies that you, but yeah, definitely like if you, if you don't enjoy the running and gunning in this, there's not a whole lot to break it up game gameplay wise. I did like that one, there's like, I think it's maybe like interval five or six. There's a, there's a, I think it's six. There's that section where you have to like kind of avoid the turrets, like turrets pop out of the ceiling and they're like hunting you. And a lot of it's like, use slow-mo take cover, like dash between cover, see if you can figure out how to disable the turret, like just different, different ways to methodically move around the map and like using the slow-mo mechanic. I thought that was pretty cool. It's not really a set piece per se, but it, it did break up the, the standard gameplay that I, in a way that I thought was really engaging. Yeah, because ultimately like the enemy variety in this game is not huge. I think there's like just enough to keep it kind of interesting, but a lot of it just feels like human soldiers, right? The vast majority of it, I would say there's a couple of like toward the end, you get these robot guys that shoot all these missiles at you, which are kind of tough. You get these flying drones, but up to that point, it's pretty much human soldiers and human soldiers with big shoulder pads that make you take a different angle to shoot them in the head, which I thought that's a cool enemy design because it looks, it looks pretty intimidating and it quite literally just puts a barrier between you and their head from certain angles, right? So you have to be directly facing them on or from behind. And so that's, I mean, that's a pretty simple thing to do to create a new type of enemy, I think, but it really doesn't ever get a whole lot more complicated than that. And I even found some of those stronger enemies late in the game to just not be that hard. I don't think I took a single point of damage from the ninja enemy assassins this entire game because there's only like five of them. And once you understand that, like you'll see the shimmer right before they pop out. And then if you just hit slow mo, they'll just die to anything. Like you can melee them, you can shotgun blast them. Yeah, they were pretty easy to kill, but God, they were kind of annoying. So I had played this game before, so I found them with like a total joke, but I'm curious, like what aspect? Yeah, I just, I guess like the first time you encounter them in interval five, it is a complete surprise. So like that wasn't an effective surprise to me because like you kind of hear rumblings in the ceiling and stuff. And then like you go into different rooms and you can see like ceiling tiles out and stuff. So it's like, you know, something's amiss. And then the next thing you know, there's like a ninja dude who's like attacking you out of nowhere. And it took me a little while to figure out like the shimmer and the slow mo and like the timing of it all. Cause like they're pretty quick. So it's like, it did take me a little bit to figure it out. You're right. They're like, once you do, it's pretty much a cakewalk from there. They do do some cool foreshadowing with some of the enemy designs. So I think it's in the interval right before this, you're like in the sewers again, and you're walking down and there's like a ledge above you where like a box gets kicked off and you see something like jumped down and land in front of you. And then it just disappears and you see a little shimmer run away. And I was like, what the hell was that? It's like, Oh, that's basically just trying to foreshadow that like there's some cloaking ninja bros about. Cause they, and you said then like after that, you see the tiles drop from the ceiling and then they finally actually reveal themselves. Um, which I thought was pretty cool. Like it's a, it's a pretty good introduction to the enemy and yeah. And I honestly, I thought, I'm not sure if I would have actually liked this or not, like from a, from a difficulty perspective, but like I thought they were going to like rope them into encounters more often and like mix them in with standard enemies. And they just really don't like, they kind of just show up once or twice throughout the game and they're isolated. You kill them and then you move on. Like you never really get to see them with other enemy types. And I thought that probably would have been an interesting challenge to have them mixed in with standard enemies. And they really just don't do that. I don't know if they ever do it. If they do, it's not much. I don't think they do so in this game. Um, I have, I think I played the expansion packs way back in the day, but it's been a while I never played the sequels. So they might do more with that there, but you're right in this base game, they just don't, they ambush you a couple of times, but never really with anything else. Uh, and it's almost like these are your like elite soldiers. Why are they so dumb? Like, like they really didn't think to work with the other soldiers. They were just like going to do their own thing and then die. Okay. They thought they were too good for help, but they're actually like the least threatening thing in the whole game. So yeah, enemy variety, not great, but I think like enough to keep it somewhat interesting as you go about. And personally, I loved the segments where you just fought the security guys who are just like unarmored or in a cops because you could just blow them away with anything. And it was so much fun to kill like eight of them in one room with just like the pistols or like melee three of them to death. I had a lot of fun fighting the weaker armored guys. Yeah, I would, I would agree with that for sure. I think the later, some of the later enemies, some of the big robots and stuff were a little bit challenging. Uh, they, there was one thing. I don't think I've given enough credit for set piece wise. Uh, it was a little frustrating at first, but there's that, that part, I think it's like an interval nine or 10. You're walking through this kind of like abandoned building, uh, and like a giant robot bust through the door and you have to like backtrack and run away from it and like kind of, that, that was a cool segment. I died like four times because I was low on health and just like, could not figure out how to get away from it quickly enough. But, uh, that was a cool segment of, of kind of, again, gameplay, a little gameplay variety and showing some enemy variety. They, they do a lot with building on these little things too. There's a part toward the end where like a van is coming at you down this alleyway and you have to get like, dip into a building, get out of the way. And then a couple of minutes later, there's another van coming in a building you're in and you might be thinking, why just have to dodge this, right? But then it crashes and like six guys jump out the back. Yeah. You're like, oh, okay. Um, and they'll, they'll do that a lot where they'll, they'll get you like used to a thing and then they'll just put a little bit of a tweak on it. That kind of catches you off guard as far as like what the enemies behave in a certain situation or like, does this water have a horror thing next to it? Or, uh, you know, I think the first five vents you crawl through, nothing happens. And then it's like one of the scariest moments in the game happens next. Yeah. Spider girl. Yeah. But we'll get to some of the horror aspect later. Just, just to finish up the bullet segment here, uh, the exploration is pretty old school in the sense that like you can go off the beaten path and find more grenades, more health and reflex boosters. You know, there's these items that boost your, um, maximum health and reflex, uh, grenades, the powerful weapons, pretty standard stuff there. Um, I, it led to me running in circles a lot in the, the aesthetics of the level design we were complaining about made this worse because I'd be like, Hey, I haven't gone down this path yet. And then after like 30 seconds, I see a door that's open and I'm like, okay, I have gone down this path already. Uh, that was happening to me a lot. There was definitely like, because the level design is so samey, it's hard to know like what's main path and what's not. And I know there's a lot of games that have that struggle, but like, I think back to something that we played this year, like a, like a clear obscure or something, it always felt like you kind of knew instinctively, like, okay, if I go down this way, I'm not heading towards main path stuff. And, and this game just all the time, I was like, I don't know if I should go this way or not. Like where, and at the beginning of the game, I thought the health and reflex boosters and stuff, and all the med packs were like really well paced. I felt like towards the end, that was less so, and probably intentionally. And maybe it was just me, maybe I just wasn't finding them, but like, I feel like I came across that stuff a lot less. And that's why some of the difficulty started to feel like it ramped up a little bit, but like, I thought they were really well paced in the early parts, especially where I was like, oh, okay, I find another health thing. And then I'd go, you know, a few more rooms, like, oh, a reflex thing. Okay, perfect. And like, they would balance those out pretty well, especially in the early game. And I think some of that might just be the level design because those, it felt like in the water treatment plant, whenever there was a little side office, there was usually like some ammo or armor or something in it. And then in the headquarters, there's just dozens of empty offices all over the place with nothing in them. And that's like, it's trying to make it seem like it's a big office building, like there's nothing wrong with that, but it did kind of like contrast to the amount of shit there was to find in the first part of the first three or four intervals compared to that middle part. Yeah, that's a, that's a great point for sure. So I think now I want to move into the brain segment. I want to talk about some of that AI we mentioned earlier, and I want to talk about how it blends into some of this level design and some of these other choices they make, right? So as we've, as we've mentioned, this game has AI that feels very impressive. The enemy's flank, they ambush you, they reposition intelligently and constantly. I mean, playing on hard, like you can not just run in, shoot all the guys and get away unscathed. I mean, you have to think about who you're going to take out first, use the slow mo, use cover. And all of that is, I think really aided by the enemy AI. Were you ever in a situation where you just felt like the AI was being stupid or, to me it felt like at worst it was call of duty AI. And then at best it was, you know, legendary. Yeah, I think there were a couple moments where I felt like I could hide and wait for an enemy to come around the corner and then just blow it away, right? There was a couple of moments where that happened. But for the most part, I think more often than not, you couldn't just wait for an enemy to come around. You had to go and seek them out. Especially if you've done any damage to them, they will hide. They will like, they will take cover. They will reposition away from you and you have to go find them now, which puts you in the back foot, right? Like in a lot of these years, you can just wait and wait for them to come around the corner and then blow them up. This one was like, no, you have to be the guy who they're waiting for you around the corner. So I thought that was pretty impressive. Again, like I said, a very few times I feel like maybe they would just like line up and like run out and be like, oh, shoot me. But for the most part, I felt like they were really smart and would hide away or like flank or, you know, get around in a way where I was on the back foot instead of them being on the back foot. And this is accomplished by an approach they took called Goal-Oriented Action Planning or GOAP or as some people were calling it GOAP. I'm probably not going to say that. That's a weird word. GOAP's fun. Come on. So basically it's a system in which the AI kind of picks actions by planning toward a specific goal and that's based off the state of the world, right? And it's not following a fixed script. So if you look at some of these older games, like Half-Life 1, Quake, Doom, it's mostly a bunch of scripted triggers, right? You have enemies sitting in a location. When you pass a certain point or the timer goes off, they move from one position to another. If they can shoot at you, they'll shoot at you. But there's not a whole lot of reaction to what you're doing. At best it's like, I'm doing nothing. Now the player's here. I'm shooting at them. And that was kind of the extent of it. And anything that seemed like it was reactive was pretty much just clever scripting, right? But GOAP does something significantly different. So first it starts off with the goal. What is the AI trying to accomplish? In a particular scenario, it might be eliminate the player. It might be stay alive. It might be defend this doorway. And then you have actions. And these are basically a set of steps taken to achieve this goal based on various conditions, right? There's like 120 of them in FEAR. And they cover everything from suppressive fire, throw grenade, get to cover, find player, retreat. And all of this is based off what's happening, right? And the plan is the sequence of actions based on the priority. And to give you an example here, right? You walk into a room. There's a soldier. His goal might be eliminate the player, okay? And he's going to have these different actions that are prioritized. Now let's say he hasn't spotted you yet. Then the highest priority is probably something like or find player. It's trying to find the player. It knows you're there, but it doesn't know where you are yet, okay? Now suddenly it sees you, okay? Well, that patrol priority is going to drop much lower down because it's not going to patrol when it knows where you are. It's instead going to elevate, get to cover, or fire at player, whatever. And maybe once you start shooting, it elevates get to cover over fire at player, right? So it's reacting to what you're doing in various things. And the way this game does it is it's constantly re-planning as this is happening, right? It's like every X number of frames, all of these plans that each individual soldier has gets rewritten, gets re-prioritized. Because the things that you do can put a wrench in their previous plan, right? Like they might be in the middle of a get to cover plan, but you've just thrown a grenade. And when it sees that the grenade is in the cover it was going to, it de-prioritizes get to cover and it prioritizes retreat, right? So it's constantly doing this. That's why it feels so good because it's not just like very scripted things. It's actually reacting to you and the environment. And like I said, there's like 120 of these actions and it all is tied to an animation. So some of these things might be, oh, go get to cover. Well, there's no cover. Well, I'm going to go over here and knock this shelf over and hide behind it, right? So there's various objects that they're allowed to interact with. And they also shout these commands as they're doing this stuff. So even though these soldiers are not communicating with each other, the fact that they both chose a flanking maneuver and one of them said flanking really makes it seem like they are, right? And there's another one saying, suppress a fire. There's another one saying, where did he go? And these are all just reacting to you and other things in the room. And they're not actually connected to each other, but it feels like they are. And this is just so fucking cool, man. Like I was telling you, I was playing Black Ops 6 a few months ago and all I could think of was like, why does a game from 20 years ago feel so much more interesting to fight enemies in than this? And that's because most games still aren't even using this approach, right? There have been some other ones, right? Killzone 2, Stalker, Shadow of Chernobyl, both used a GOPE system. In more recent years, the Hitman games and Deus Ex, Human Revolution. But for the most part, your shooters are just using basically the modern version of scripting. They're calling it behavior trees. So it looks a lot more sophisticated. It feels different than a Doom thing, but ultimately it's nothing like GOPE. They're not adjusting their actions based off your actions. And that is ultimately how all of the level design and the smoke and mirrors of GOPE come together to make these bastards feel like they know who you are and where you are, and they're coming for you. Yeah, it really does feel in a lot of parts of the games like they are hunting you down. And as someone who's not really into programming and programming language and all those things, like that's not a thing that I'm super familiar or comfortable with. You would link this cool video that we'll probably throw in the link here. Shout out to the channel, Video Games and AI. The name of the channel is actually AI and Games. We'll leave a link to the video in the description. Yeah, that video was a really cool breakdown of kind of how all this stuff worked. I think you summed it up really, really well here to kind of describe how these things take place and how it feels so dynamic, even though it's a game from 2005 and you would think like, oh, they couldn't even pull that off, but they did and it feels really good. I think there's a lot of really great moments. I was talking about the prioritizing the actions and things. I had escaped from a group of guys and I killed most of them and I knew there was one guy left and I just couldn't find him. So I dropped a proximity mine down and I didn't know how the AI was working at this point of me playing the game, but he had probably picked up a patrol command here and was now patrolling around trying to find me because I was hiding from him and he happened to step on my proximity mine and exploded and it felt so satisfying because I had already moved on trying to find him and he's trying to find me. And the next thing you know, I just hear in the background and my proximity mine go off and I was like, yes. Yeah, man. All the systems we've talked about so far, like the weapons and the level design and this AI, it just blends together to create such an awesome experience that just, it truly is different every time. And I mean, I was reloading fights all the time and every time they would play out very differently, right? And you know, the beginning might be the same and then from there they're going to react to what you do, but it's like if I threw a grenade early in the fight, everything played out completely different than if I like tried to stay in cover and take pot shots or if I like ran in with a shotgun, because just the way they react to what you do just really leads to a completely different like combat encounter every time. And that's something that a lot of these games really struggle with because they just become shooting galleries against people hiding in cover over and over. So yeah, man, I just, the AI in this game, I really can't overstate how much it does to make it feel like these guys are like almost human opponents, like coming at you, the flanking, the communication, the knocking over shelves to hide behind cover. There are a few times where you can sneak around and catch them off guard and you can tell that they have something loaded up. That's just like wait for player because they're just facing the wrong way. And they're like, yes, yes. Now I can like get the jump on them. And you actually do an increased damage when they don't detect you, which is not something that you have a lot of opportunity to do. But if you ever shot a guy with like one pistol and they went down because they were facing the other way, that's why it does like double damage. That makes sense. And there's a couple of moments where like, you know, crouching and walking around crouched is silent, right? So you can kind of get up behind somebody and melee them. But unlike a lot of, unlike a lot of shooters where I feel like you can do that for an entire room because they're all facing the wrong way. Like as soon as you melee that guy, everybody else is like, oh, the player's here. It's time to kill this guy. Like you will get one of those and that is it because they will turn around and they will start shooting at you and you better be ready to respond to that. And I thought that was like the stealth heart that I have of wanting to like clear a room just by, you know, bashing everybody in the back of the head with a assault rifle was like that I wanted that. But it was cool that you couldn't get that. Yeah. It was like, once the first one went down, it seemed like everyone at least noticed like, Hey, what happened to Bob? Right. Like, like someone is down where like, like in a lot of modern games and you know, it's a different design philosophy. A lot of them want you to be able to do that. But in a lot of modern games, you can clear a room, even if there's a dude like two feet away from you, you can stealth one dude, walk up behind the other guy and stealth him and he won't even notice. But like, if they're in the proximity at all of you, they will, they will notice their guy go down because he'll make a noise or whatever. And it's, you know, it's go time. Yeah. And they're really reactive to both sight and sound. So if you're not crouching and you bump into something, they'll be like, what was that? Yeah. Enemy sighted. Right. Some other couple fun things from that video. So every, like every NPC in this game is an object with this planning, except for basically the other like friendly guys you see. Right. So, you know, the NPCs that are at the start of the mission to give a few lines, they're not, there's no goat planning there. Right. But even the rats actually have this. And there was an interesting part of that video where you were talking about like early in development, they were having huge performance issues and they couldn't figure out why it's because like these rats that you saw at the very start of the mission were continuing to constantly adjust their plans over and over through the whole level, despite the fact that you passed them up 20 minutes ago. So killing the rats would actually increase your performance before they patched that. So I thought that was kind of funny. That is hilarious. So contrasting to all of this amazing dynamic planning, we have the horror moments in this game, which are like a hundred percent scripted. I think there's, there's a couple of scenarios I was reading where it's like, if you're moving too fast, they won't trigger. Cause I don't want to like cut off certain audio cues or things like that. But for the most part, these are all scripted and they play out the same way every time. I think that was the way to go though, because it, like I was kind of mentioning earlier, they do so many fake outs with it. Like the first three or four times you jump in a pool of water, you're bracing like, Oh God, like water and video games, you know, what's down there and nothing happens. And then like the fifth time you jump in, you get transported to one of those weird like hallucination sections where you're in like a bloody hallway and there's all this like loud noises. And I'm pretty sure it's all symbolic for a birth canal. Cause you're, there's like four of these that happen and you have to go to the end of it and there's like blood and you see a scene of when you were being born in this hospital. Um, but in that one with the vents and stuff. So I think they do a great job of like scripting little things to get you on edge enough times for you to let your guard down. And then Alma fucking pops off around the corner and it's terrifying. She crawls at you like the grudge spider girl and it's terrifying. There are definitely a handful of moments. I mean, right, obviously if you're playing this game, do it in the dark headphones on, you know, if you can do it at night, do it at night, you know, like you put yourself in the right head space for it. And it is appropriately scary, right? It's, it's not going to, it's not necessarily going to terrify you, right? Like it's not the scariest game of all time by any means. Uh, but there definitely are plenty of moments where like you'll be fine. You think things are fine. And then like you said, you jump into a pool of water or you round that corner. And the next thing you know, there's like, you start hearing like the static, like, like the radio comm static, or you see something in the corner. That's like, that doesn't look normal. And you make the turn and there's like almost staring at you or, you know, Paxton Fettle or will be staring there, like reminiscing about something over the dead body of, of some guy that he's decapitated or whatever, like some crazy shit happening like all the time. And it's, I think it's paced really well to be appropriately scary, but not like giving you scares every two seconds. You know, it's like, they give you some breathing room so that the scares hit whenever they hit. And it doesn't seem like totally random or cheap. In fact, in the beginning, there's a couple times and it really only happens toward the beginning, but you get like this, there's almost a little jump scare of like a face, like a bloody face that appears on your screen for like a second. And it's actually turns out to be, I think, foreshadowing that psychic connection that Point Man has with Fettle, because those faces are like the dead bodies you're about to see in a few minutes, right? The first one's the guy who he kills in that chair that you find with Janikowski and Jen at the beginning. And then, which, yeah, there's characters in this game with names, but it's like, it's not even. Sorry, none of them matter. If you're a big, like fear lore fan, like, sorry, I don't care about a single one of those guys. And it happens again, right before you come across another guy that Paxton has like brutalized and interrogated, right? So there's a little bit of foreshadowing going on. Some of the Alma scenes are really cool. God, I think my favorite one is, it's in that segment I was telling you about where it's like kind of a set piece where you're riding up the elevator. You get to a floor where the power has gone out and Alice Wade is who you're with in the elevator. And she's like, well, you go turn on the power, I'll wait here. And you go around to the station and you cut on the power, but you can see into the elevator from a window in this little office building. And as it's closing, you just see Alma come into frame for half a second. And you're like, oh God, like the elevator just closed and Alice is trapped on there with Alma. Like what's going to happen? But then you meet her on the roof and she's like, none the wiser. That was a crazy, that is one that definitely stands out for sure. Yeah. And there's another one where you're looking at a security camera and you're just seeing Paxton Fettle walk down the hallway, but then Alma's face just like is in frame and it goes to static. They just do some really great stuff with the scripted horror moments. And I think it's a real compliment to like the dynamic combat moments. I don't think I, I don't think I enjoyed them gameplay wise as much. Like the, like the having to shoot the, especially towards the end, when you're like having to shoot all the, the figures who are like coming out of the portals and stuff. Like I think gameplay wise, some of those horror elements, I didn't even know you could shoot them for most of the game. Cause like a lot of these horror things that as they come at you, you can shoot them. And if you don't, they'll do damage. I, right. I assumed that they were all kind of on rails scripted things and you couldn't actually interact with them at all. Cause the game never really makes it clear. And I guess I'm right. That's intentional. But for me, it was like, gameplay wise was kind of like, eh, okay. But they definitely really hit with the putting you on edge, getting you off balance. And then it would transition into, you know, another shootout shortly after. So it was like, it was riding this really interesting balance of like action heavy, you know, John Woo doves flying, slow-mo shooting, right. With this like tense horror atmosphere. That was really interesting. And I don't think I've seen in another game really execute even closely to what it tries to do. Yeah. And I think part of that is that they're trying to do the fake out thing again, cause I'd say through the first half of the game, none of those horror things can hit you. And then suddenly they just can. There's like these things coming toward you down these hallways. The problem there for me is just that that's not, those weren't fun. They just weren't very good. So it's like, suddenly these things are able to do damage to me and you just shoot them once with anything and they disappear. And it's not even like a cool animation. They literally disappear. And toward the very end of the game, there's these weird segments where you'll go in and you're like in a dark room with flames everywhere and all you have is your pistol and they're coming at you from different directions. And that's like a little more interesting, but ultimately I thought the horror parts where you had to shoot stuff were part, were the weaker parts of the game for sure. I have a story summary here. I don't even know it's worth reading, man. Cause it's like, I would say anything up until like interval, like nine is probably not even worth it. It's not, dude, because again, you're just moving from like location to location, one step behind Paxton Fetel quite literally until like the second to last interval. And there is some interesting things that happen as far as like, there's a lot of the audio logs in the game. This is very like Bioshock, System Shock, like inspired, have some cool details where you hear about like the origins of the experiments and how like the daughter Alma is actually like the daughter of Harlan Wade, who's a guy who worked on these experiments way back. And they, you know, they put her in a coma and forced her to give birth at the age of like 15. And the, the first prototype was a failure as they call it. And it turns out that was you and, or no, it was Paxton. I can't remember which one was first, but I think you're the first prototype. Okay. Yeah. And you know, you don't figure this out till late in the game, although if you know that going in, boy, there's just like very heavy handed hints all throughout. I mean, literally like in the first one, he's talking, he says to you something like, do you remember? Like just these little things like that, right? Right. Like it's probably interesting. It's probably more interesting to get all of that stuff on like a second playthrough. Like I can imagine a lot of that stuff being more interesting, a lot of the buildup, cause like, you know, what the reveals are, you know, the, the execution for me, I didn't find a mystery building all that engaging. Like I listened to a lot of the audio logs and like I listened to a lot of the phone calls, but like part of the problem, the audio logs are fine. Cause you can kind of step away from them and still hear them. But like all the like telephones and stuff is like, if you're not like right in the vicinity, you're not going to hear it. So it's like, you have to completely stop to get story stuff. And I was just like, I don't want to do that. So like some of that stuff didn't work for me a ton. And I wasn't able to like get drawn into the mystery as much, but I did like a lot of the actual reveals when you get towards the end. Like this time around, I was trying really hard to get into that aspect. So I did stand around all the phones and those scenes are like very well voice acted. Like I was very impressed with that. But to your point, it's like, especially the first time you play this game, you're, I don't think you're going to want to sit there and listen to all of those. So you're probably going to press it and then you might listen to the first one. And then when you hear next message, you're like, no, but it's like halfway through interval, like six or seven, you start to basically hear about this Genevieve lady and she's the head of this ATC company, the Armacham technology corporation. And you start to basically hear all these arguments between her and Harlan Wade, because Alma has been sealed in this vault for some period of time. And he's like, don't, don't do it Genevieve. Like, there's no reason to open that up. And she's like, no, we're going to clean it out. We're going to make everything right again. And then a few messages later, she's like, okay, you were right. But like, uh, there's no time for blaming here. We need to figure this out. And it's, it's just so funny because it's just, it's so many people being like Genevieve, no, stop. She's like, ah, it'll be fine. And before you know it, everyone's dead. And there's like paranormal forces everywhere, right? Um, but yeah, there's really, there's really not a lot more to it. You come across Harlan's, um, what is it? His other, no, wait, um, his other daughter is Alice. Like, I guess I was, so both Alice and Alma are Harlan's daughters. Right. I think Alice is the quote normal daughter, I guess. Yeah. For lack of a better term, the one that wasn't a psychic child forced to give birth while in a coma at 15. Yeah. The, the privileged daughter. Um, you find her at one point in, in your escorting her, you find this fat bastard name, like NAPES names. He had a really weird name. He's the worst. MAPES maybe? Yeah. It was like Albert MAPES or something, something MAPES. The worst. But he's like this technology guy in there who's like trying to help you get on the security systems. And he's like, but you have to disable all the local like security. And you're like, why? He's like, hey, do you want my help or not? And you know that you're not supposed to trust him, but you don't have a choice. And he's just like constantly one step ahead of you and like turning on turrets and crap and taunting you. Um, I do think eventually he, he dies or gets caught in explosion or something. I can't remember. Yeah. It doesn't. I think Harlan kills him. Okay. Right. Cause, oh wait, no, that's right. That's right. It's at the very end. Yeah. Well, we should, we should probably just, we should probably just go into like the, the finale interval discussion because like, if anybody cares about spoilers, I think we're, we're kind of there. So basically you end up at the vault at the, toward the end of the game where Alma is, I'm guessing her body is like still there, but her paranormalness has been leaking out into the rest of the game. Right. Yeah. And MAPES and Harlan are both there at the end. And you can hear a voicemail leading up to that from Genevieve. That's like Harlan, like, you know, I'm glad you're here. Hopefully you and MAPES can find a way to work together to figure this out. And then you come around the corner and you just see like out through a window and a view screen of Harlan, basically like telling MAPES that he's sucks and like shooting with that. Which I thought was pretty funny. I guess not in the head. Yeah. Cause you find him like dying and bleeding out when you get there. But, but what's crazy is like Harlan gets to there and he unleashes Alma from her like prison. And then she immediately shows up and just disintegrates him as if he's been shot by a particle laser. Right. Don't we also see, I think it's like Paxton, Paxton kills Alice and then, Oh yeah. And then like, you have this, like, you have the scene where I guess it's kind of where you discover that you are one of the experiments. You're one of the children and you're, you know, you have to shoot Paxton. Like that was a pretty cool scene. Yeah. It's a little weird though, because you see, you see him a lot leading up to that and various little hallucinations, but you can always tell it's like a vision. And then in this segment, it's like a dream sequence or another hallucination sequence that leads into this room with Paxton and Alice and Paxton is just there. And I thought like there would be more to it, but he just stares at you creepily until you shoot him or melee him. And then it suddenly like flashes out and no, that was real. You actually just killed him. And I was like, Oh, okay. That was a little like unexpected and kind of quick. But what's cool after that though, is you walk out the room and there's four super soldiers just standing there motionless because he was controlling them and now they're now they're gone. Unfortunately, that is like the end of the fun part of the game. Dude, in my head, the final escape sequence was so much more epic. Like I had this vision of like this exploding compound that you're getting out of, and it's really intense and you're fighting all these soldiers. You're not fighting any soldiers. They're all done being controlled. The ATC security is nowhere to be found. And it's just these stupid portals that open up with those ghost images and like, you know, props to making there be some gameplay variety you hadn't seen before at the very end, but it's just not fun. It's just not engaging compared to fighting the soldiers. And I really felt the whole last level is kind of a letdown in that regard. I would definitely second that it's just kind of the story revelations, I think are cool, right? Like knowing that you're the, you're the other experiment and seeing like Harlan release Alma out of this like sense of guilt of, you know, keeping her locked away. And it's like, ah, well, you know, you got to come out now. Like we've, we've tortured you enough. And then just her instantly vaporizing him is crazy. And then like the concept is cool. It almost feels like a like an ocarina of time, Ganon's castle coming down, you got to escape and get out of there before everything crushes under you. But I'm with you. It's just, I don't think shooting the things coming out of the portals was all that fun. It's not very hard. It's just like, every now and then, like one will come out from like a corner that you weren't expecting it to maybe. And it's like, ah, no, I have to turn around and shoot that one faster than I expected. But like, other than that, it's just, it's very like, it's very blatant what you have to do. It's very projected. It just shows you. It just doesn't, it doesn't add enough, you know? Yeah. And, and for a game that I, like we were saying, like the minute to minute combat is so fun throughout the vast majority of it. The last entire interval is just kind of a letdown from that perspective. And, and even like from the other perspectives, I mean, you don't, you don't really get the benefit of any of the level design because you're not fighting the GOPE enemies. You're fighting these scripted horrors. Um, you're not getting really a lot of the cool horror stuff from the early part of the game because everything's falling apart and you're trying to escape. But there's not even really any interesting set pieces with this escape. It's not like you have to jump over flaming this or crawl through that. It's pretty much just like running down a few more hallways and then you're out and the helicopter picks you up. And, uh, it's kind of anti-climactic in that way. You know, there's definitely a cool final scene where the whole place gets nuked, right? You blow up it from the inside because you're trying to stop Alma from escaping. But of course there's just this little flash at the end of her climbing onto the helicopter and then the game cuts to black. And that's an effective horror ending. I think a classic, like we liked that. But man, just like the actual gameplay of the last level is really kind of a letdown. Yeah. I really liked, like you said, I really liked that last moment where like Alma pulls herself up onto the helicopter. Cause like there's having a conversation. It's like, you know, what happened to Alma? Like, did we get her this kind of like energy of like, I think we did it maybe. And then like the, the last second before the game cuts to black, she just like, you see her reach onto the helicopter. You're like, oh shit. I think that's a really effective stinger for like the, you know, I don't know if it's addressed in the expansions or in the sequel or both or what, but I think it's a, it's a really effective stinger, but yeah, everything else around it. And then like the fact that the last interval is just like a cut scene is a little strange. Like why, why even frame it as an interval when it's like really just a cut scene? Yeah. It's a little weird. The whole like back half of the game goes by really fast. Cause I remember, I think I was looking it up around like interval seven and I was like, Oh my God, I'm only halfway through this game. Cause I was like, I was starting to feel the, okay, I feel like I've seen a lot of what this game has to offer. And I'm kind of looking for it to start to wrap. And I saw interval seven. I was like, Oh my God, there's so much of this game left. And thankfully, right. I think the, the pacing of the back half is done pretty well, but I think the, the structure, the structuring of the intervals is a little weird. Like the back four go by in like two and a half hours, whereas like some of the early intervals feel like they last an hour and a half on their own. Like, well, some of the, I think it's like five, six, and seven, I'll have multiple parts. Like you'll get to a new loading screen and it's still interval five, but then it has like a different subtitle, but then the last four, just one, one section. Right. So yeah, it goes by a lot quicker. Uh, it just, just rounding out the blood category here. We talked about a lot of the horror stuff, just the general atmosphere and the music and all of that is so well done. You know, we talked about a lot of that, whether it's like the flickering lights, the, uh, the way your interface gets like distorted for a bit, like you're losing the feed to an electronic interface, right. Um, the sounds, the amount of times I scared myself walking over like empty cans or whatever that would make a loud echoing noise. I was like, what was that? Yeah, I know that there was a lot of, there's a lot of really great sound design, a lot of great visual, like horror design, like, you know, we've complained a lot about the, the actual visual visual design of like the, the color scheme, but like a lot of the blood and stuff contrast really well. There's a lot of like really gory moments and like gory scenes where it's like, Whoa, like that is like, it surprised me how much they went into some of that stuff. Even though like knowing this was an inrated game, I never, I never thought of fear the way that it was when I played it, right? Like from, from my perception of it outside of ever playing it, this isn't what I expected from it in a good way. Like I was impressed by a lot of the horror elements for sure. This is one of those games that like, it's, it's one of my favorite games of all time, but it's not because I think it's a 10 10. It's because I think it's like an eight 10. It's just, it's the things that it does so well that I just haven't really seen repeated. And that to me is what makes it stand out and why I still think it's so fun to go back and play. And let's, and let's kind of round out the episode with that idea is like, how do we think all of these came together as a full package? Because it really is trying to blend three real key things here, the horror, the bullet time gameplay and the fancy AI. And, you know, do we think that the horror feeds into the gameplay? Do we think it enhances it? Do we think the gameplay enhances the horror? I would say that the horror doesn't do much to enhance the gameplay in that, like we said, when the horror does interact with the shooting, it sucks. It really feels like it's best on its own. And I say gameplay, I guess really what I mean is like the shooting, right? It, it's fun from the exploration standpoint. It's fun from the, atmospheric parts where you're just walking around trying to find out where to go next. But anytime it actually interacted with the guns, I thought the horror wasn't great. Whereas the other way around, it was like when the shooting was taking place, like right before, right after a scary segment, or when it's like, you know, an enemy burst out from a wall and that was kind of a jump scare, that worked well. But gosh, just the actual interactions between bullets and the horror segments were probably the weaker parts for me. Yeah, I think, I think it's the contrast that makes it work so well, because, you know, so many horror games, especially now, I know like Resident Evil and like some of the older ones back in the day, were a little different, but even those like with the tank controls and the kind of more puzzly and methodical nature of those games, like this is so much more action packed and so much more adrenaline based, like you're, you're kind of always on high alert. I felt like my heart rate was like up a lot playing this game, just because you have the combination of like, okay, I'm going to bust into this room and I have to like take down 20 guards. And that's going to be a tough, that's going to be a tough challenge. And then like right after that, you could end up in like a vent and like running through and seeing Alma do her scary spider crawl thing, right? Like it's, it's that balance, it's that contrast of like high intense action and the more like creepy slower paced moments. And while I don't necessarily think that works like narratively as much because a lot of the like narrative pacing and the slow burn didn't work for me as well, I do think the elements of the horror slow burn work, the spookiness, the Alma popping around the corner, the, you know, all of those things kept me on edge a lot of this game. And I wonder, I mean, this is kind of a sidebar, but a lot of the time playing this game, I felt sick and I don't know if it's like a motion thing or like, you know, some games every now and then I'll struggle. I'll kind of get a little dizzy or nauseous playing usually things like mirrors edge or like high intensity games of that sort. But the first person parkour is a little Yeah, that doesn't work for my motion very well, my motion sickness. But this one also gave me that feeling a couple of times, like I can only play it for like an hour or so before I had to kind of stop and take a break. And I'm not really sure where that comes from. But part of it could be because so much of the game had like my heart rate elevated and me on edge because of the mixture of the horror elements and the combat being very tense and like challenging and you know, those elements I think just work really well together. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. It really is the contrast because when you think about like typically what a shooter does is it's a power fantasy, it empowers the player. And horror is always kind of the opposite. It like disempowers the player and trying to combine those off the top is already kind of a dicey proposition. I think they do a good job with it because it's like, yeah, you feel like a badass killing all of these people in these rooms with the shooting gallery in the slow mo. But then you are just reminded of how powerless you are when you walk through a vent and fall down into a pit of water, which then turns into a pool of blood, which you're then being surrounded by like apparitions. So it tries to send you back and forth between feeling like the super soldier badass and also just like the completely powerless person in this horror fantasy, right? I think it does a pretty good job of that. And that's why I think the last level really kind of breaks down is because it's like, no, now I actually feel empowered to kill all the supernatural stuff too. So it's like, what am I supposed to be scared of this point? Right. So much of the appeal has kind of been taken away. And I think part of it is that narratively you've hit the reveals too. So you've gotten narratively, you've gotten the satisfaction of like, okay, I know, I know the mystery. I've gotten that satisfaction. And then gameplay wise, you don't have satisfaction. So it's just kind of like the last level is like, what am I, what am I still playing this for? Like, like what, like why am I still going through this? It's almost like, it's like one mission too long. If they could have found a way to maybe speed up that end or like make the revelations more of the end game. I don't know exactly what to do there to fix the problem, but it's like, I feel like you hit the peak a little bit earlier and then it's like, okay, now we'll just run and kind of do this like shooting gallery or supernatural things. And that's not as exciting as so much of what the rest of the game has given you. Yeah. And I think playing this again, it does kind of make me realize why horror games from here went into a very different route. Like all are we talking about the, the indie horror Renaissance, as I called it of the 2010s, all of those games are about you being a guy with like a camera at best, right? Right. You have no weapon. It's about like hiding and running and surviving. And those are really cool. But a lot of that I think also ends up just being more scripted stuff. I'm sure there's some like dynamic stuff going on in there. I do remember reading this really cool dev diary from the guy who made amnesia. And there's a part where you're like in the sewers and there's a water monster and there's these little platforms you have to jump across. And originally his plan was just like, if you miss and you hit the water, it like makes a sound and it detects and the monster detects it. Right. But the way the physics worked is even when you jumped across the platform, the little ripples in the water were giving a detection to the monster. And he ended up really liking this. So some of this stuff still comes across kind of like dynamically and somewhat coincidentally, but I think it's just this gop stuff is so hard to debug. Like reading some of the dev diaries from this development of this game, they're like, yeah, that was a fucking nightmare. This one guy was saying like the engineer called him and was like, hey, we're testing one of the levels. And it's literally just us and one guy in a room and the CPU is maxing out like what's going on. And he's like, oh God, like, who knows? There's probably a rat somewhere. So I think just between the fact that the gop stuff is a lot harder to do in a lot more time and resource intensive and the fact that horror started to trend towards just not having weapons or anything at all. There was just no reason for them, for most companies to kind of go down this route again. And I do think that's a little bit of a shame because I liked this blend and it would be cool to see something hit these notes while also having more compelling characters and more compelling level design and more compelling narrative. Right. So we'll see if that ever happens. But I feel like with the success of those games in the 2010s and the way, you know, even Resident Evil has gone back to being a lot less action focused. Well, I wouldn't say that it's going back to being a lot scarier. It's still, it's still a first person shooter, but it is, there's a lot more disempowerment going on there, right? It's not like a Resident Evil six where you're like roundhouse kicking zombies and stuff. So yeah, that, that is interesting to me the way horror went after this. It was kind of like, this went down its own path and no one followed. But that's okay because we'll, always have it here. No one lives forever. You can buy it on digital platforms. You can always go back and play it. And I think it is worth playing kind of to, I think to wrap up here to kind of get to our final thoughts. I think this is worth playing. Like it's, you know, I, when we talked about it right after, I think I said it's like, it's like a seven out of 10 game, but for me, but I think the seven out of 10 has a lot of creative elements. There's a lot of cool stuff there that I think is worth seeing. I think like the AI is really worth seeing. The revelations at the end are cool and it kind of brings a story that I thought wasn't giving much to a place where I was like, oh, that was a satisfying reveal. Like I enjoyed those last couple of intervals from a narrative perspective, like seeing the payoff of some of the mystery that was set up, even if I wasn't super invested in that mystery. I think the things that drag it down hurt it a lot. Like I think a lot of the similar environment design and the lack of enemy variety really drags down a lot of the other elements, but that minute to minute shooting is so satisfying and so worth being able to experience the kind of GOPE AI at its peak, arguably, and just kind of seeing how all of that comes together is a cool experience and I'm glad I gave it a go. Yeah. I think you're right there. It's like everything that was wrong about it in 2005 still feels bad, but everything that was good about it, I think still feels good. And it's just one of those games that did something so well that it continues to be held up as a standard for doing that kind of AI and doing that kind of gunplay and mechanical level design and all this. And I have not played the sequels. They typically are not talked about as highly, so I just never felt compelled to. Maybe there's some fun there because they put more enemies in and better level variety, like I'm not sure. But yeah, I think reading reviews from 2005, I was reading through some and I was just like, yeah, no, I think this is how I would review the game today. Everything still holds up or it doesn't. There's some aspects that feel more dated, like quick saving and whatnot was just something a lot more common in computer games back then because we didn't have the auto saves and the checkpoints like we do now. That screwed me over so bad at the beginning. I had to reload so much at the beginning, so far back, because it just wouldn't checkpoint. I went through four firefights and then I just was like, okay. But I swear that was inconsistent too. Like there'd be times where I'd go through something and I wouldn't save and then I'd go through it again and it checkpointed me. And I don't know what the difference was. Yeah. I definitely got in the habit about interval five or six. I definitely was like, okay, we're just going to be constantly quick saving. It was also harder because I was playing on with a controller patch and like using a controller to play through it. So I didn't have a quick save button. So I had to like pull out my keyboard, hit F5, put down my controller. It was more of a struggle to hit the quick save button, but I definitely got in the habit of it about midway through the game because I just kept losing too much progress from not checkpointing. Yeah. I can't decide what's crazy. Are you playing this with a controller or Jeff playing Jedi survivor with mouse and keyboard? Jeff playing Jedi survivor mouse and keyboard is psychotic. This is a shooter. This was ported to I think. So like it was, and those, those reviews were even worse because apparently it wasn't technically running very well on PlayStation. That's like a four out of 10. That yeah. There was a unique automatic shotgun for the PlayStation. Oh, there we go. Okay. Yeah, that would have been cool. I, like I said, I really do think that the things the game does well, it does do really well. So like hearing, you know, four out of 10 is like, and obviously if I was for technical reasons, that makes sense, but it's like, there is enough in here that's worth having it above that. Right. And even if, even if you want to give it like, right, I think in the games industry, like a seven is pretty like bog standard average, the way the games industry reviews games. So like even giving it like an average seven, I still feel like there's enough in here to make it worth experiencing and worth trying because it does unique things that we haven't really seen done again. I've never played a horror game that has the like speed and pacing. Yeah. And I, you know, I would definitely recommend you play this game in 2025. I'm sure there will be a steam sale soon where it's like less than 10 bucks, easily worth it. Um, didn't really have any real compatibility issues. I think you had one interval where it kept crashing on you, but you were able to just kind of restart something and then it worked. Yeah, I just reinstalled it and it worked like I did. It was interval eight to nine. I think I was like, or like it was in interval eight, I was going from one section to a different section and it would just like constantly crash. I just saved my, I backed up my save files, uninstalled the game, reinstalled it, the save file stayed there. So I didn't even need to back them up. And then the game just let me through. So I was like, Oh, thank God. Yeah. But you know, just comparing this to, I guess the call of duty six campaign 2025, despite the fact that that does so many like cool things with the atmosphere and the graphics and this and that, there's just something so unengaging about the gameplay of those games campaigns compared to this. And it's like hard to put my finger on it. I'm sure there's a lot of it as the AI. I'm sure a lot of it is the slow mo and the gunplay, but I just enjoyed killing people in fear immensely more, indescribably more than killing random terrorists and black ops six, like just infinitely more. I, you know, I haven't played a call of duty campaign in a hot minute. Maybe I'll need to give another one a go and see how I feel about it, but there is something very satisfying about the combat experience here, about the, the minute to minute gunplay, the walking into a room, taking down a squad of six people, using your slow mo, using your grenades, using whatever cool weapons you found. Like there, there is something really satisfying about that experience that I really liked. Yeah. So bottom line, two thumbs up from both of us as far as should you play this or not in 2025. Well, that about wraps up our discussion on Monolith's 2005 one of a kind horror FPS fear. You can find this episode as well as all of our other episodes on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can always find everything we've done on our website, games gone by.com. Signing off for games gone by. I'm Adam. I'm Austin. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you next time.