#35 - Cry of Fear

Cry of Fear was originally a Half-Life mod that evolved into its own independent horror game.  And being that it's a Half-Life mod, the game is free to play on Steam!

Half-Life 2 poster!

I knew this was a Half-Life mod immediately, because it always gave me a "Half-Life Launcher" error and crashed when I tried to load it in 4K resolution.  Also, the pause screen was the old classic settings menu from the original Half-Life game.

I apologize that the subtitle in the first screenshot is so tiny.  This game wasn't originally designed for 4K resolution.  I normally run my display scale at 200% so text is easy to read, even at 4K.  But this game tried to launch at 4K, blown up to 200% display size, so I could only see a quarter of the screen.  Bringing it back down to 100% meant text, and my interface as a whole, was going to be really tiny throughout the game.  Good thing I have a 48" monitor; I could still see my interface and read subtitles while playing.

Just a note: These screenshots are automatically squished and blurred a bit to fit here, but if you click to view them separately, you can see the full high-def 4K resolution.

Cry of Fear takes place in a Scandinavian town.  You play a young boy named Simon who stops to help an old man lying on the ground... before a car drives right at you!

After some flashes of some creepy-looking doctor and a padded room, you wake up in a bedroom (with a Half-Life 2 poster on the wall!). You have blurred vision and are carrying a camera in your hands.  You leave into a dark room and snap photos on designated spots to find your way out.

After you escape, you find yourself in a back alley in a town, with text messages on your phone to guide you.  As you navigate the town, you run into numerous bleeding ghouls who attempt to stab you to death.

You also find creepy murder rooms and child-zombie-things that attempt to kill you too.  The more you wander through the streets, the more Simon descends into madness...

Cry of Fear has multiple endings and over 20 unlockables, including an extra campaign after you beat single-player.  You can also play co-op with up to four people.  And of course, this is a horror game, so there are plenty of surprise enemies and jump scares.  I actually scared my wife in another room when the first jump scare popped up.  I was so surprised, I apparently let out a loud curse that spooked her too!

The graphics may be outdated (and my game crashed several times just trying to get it to load on my 4K monitor), but the spooky atmosphere is there.  I actually got a lot of requests to check this game out.  It's not exactly my thing; I prefer a more defined storyline instead of flashes of horror scenes and aimlessly wandering around, trying to figure out where to go next or what to do.  But if you like dark atmosphere, supernatural horrors, and haunting music, this is the game for you.  Don't forget to play it after dark and turn out all the lights first!

#34 - Happy's Humble Burger Farm

That farmer dude is super creepy!

Happy's Humble Burger Farm is a game about working in a fast food restaurant, with all the standard horrors that come with a job like that.  The game opens with a couple surgeons chatting as they install a "Reality Fabrication chip" into your brain.

More morphine!  I'm waking up, doc!

You're then walked through the steps of cooking and assembling a burger, then bagging it and delivering it to customers.  With the added warning that making a mistake will summon Happy, the mascot cow, who will pursue you until you feed her a burger with a rotten patty.  She only moves if you're not looking at her, so keep your eyes on her while making her burger...

I’ll be honest, just going over training on how to properly cook and assemble a burger brought back PTSD from my teen years… 😭

You then wake up in your bedroom, with the goal of getting to work for your first night shift (you only work night shifts).  The game defaults to a "VHS filter" over your screen, making everything a little fuzzy and staticky, but you can change it to some other filter in the settings, or turn it off completely. I personally preferred to play it clear, without the blurry imagery.

I experienced enough "VHS filter" in my childhood through the '80s

You'll be working the night shift at Happy's Humble Burger Farm, alongside the manager Toe.  But Toe's brain has been turned to mush from all the experiments done to him, so he only mumbles incomprehensibly while standing over the grill.  Like in real life, you need to do all the work yourself because your manager is completely useless.

Toe, the brain-dead manager.  Typical of a night shift job flipping burgers.

As you explore and find more cassette tapes with audio logs, you learn that all employees of this restaurant have basically been test subjects for some sort of experiment.  But all of them either went missing or insane.  Toe is still hanging by a thread, but he's a shell of a human being at this point.  And you appear to be the latest subject, who still (somewhat) retains their sanity.

This mascot is seriously obsessed with death...

Remember this farmer dude?  All the various restaurant mascots have large plaster statues scattered around the dining area of the restaurant and will throw out a few catch phrases if you click on them.  The farmer, though, speaks with a horrifying deep demon voice and only speaks of death, murder, homicide, etc.

Also, he's the only mascot who moves.  When you're not looking, he'll move back and forth around his corner of the restaurant.  It's unnerving when he's facing the door, then you walk past and look back and he's suddenly right next to you, staring into your soul. (See first screenshot)

Then there's the weird fry guys.  I have no idea what these guys' deal is, but occasionally, the music will turn creepy and then one of these guys will just spawn randomly and scuttle across the restaurant floors for a minute.

Definitely gave me a WTF moment the first several times these guys scampered by me!

As the game advances, more of the town between your apartment and the restaurant will open up for you to explore.  There's this interesting "Steal & Sell" shop, which I guess implies you can steal things from your work to sell them for a profit here.

You can tell this is an edgy shop because of the goth girl hanging out on the counter.

Then there's a coffee shop with a live band playing in the front window.  Drinking coffee before a shift will speed up your burger-making process, so make sure to load up on that java!

I'd listen to this band

Finally, there's this Happy's Humble Burger Farm warehouse under construction that opens up after a truck crashes through the fence.  Be careful exploring within, though, because there's a massive pig inside that attacks you if you disturb him.  He throws something green at you (snot bombs?) while these creepy mannequin-like people stumble toward you and explode.

Goddamn living mannequins.  So creepy!

I'm not sure what to do here, but there's a burger station to one side, so I wonder if I can satiate him by feeding him burgers.  It's a little hard to assemble burgers while constantly under attack, though.  I was trapped in this building and struggled to make any progress, so that's where I left off for the night.

You might notice that I don't have any screenshots of Happy herself.  That's because I used to work in a couple fast food restaurants as a teenager, and also spent 20 years in the military where attention to detail was paramount to keeping people alive.  So I didn't make a single mistake making burgers, even with all the custom orders people requested, and Happy never made an appearance during my gameplay.  Although that giant pig kind of cut my gameplay short.

When the game starts, there's a loading screen where someone logs into a computer with a username and password.  When you get a game over, it shows a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).  So maybe part of the experiment is that this is all a simulation?  You're not actually at a restaurant?  I dunno; I'll have to play through the whole game to figure out what's actually going on.

BSOD due to "Dangerous Thinking." Hmm...

#33 - The Complex

And now for something completely different... The Complex is actually an interactive film!  Sort of a "choose your own adventure" kind of story.  You play as Dr. Amy Tenent (played by Michelle Mylett, of Letterkenny fame) as she deals with a medical science crisis.

The game opens with Amy spending lives in the war-torn fictional South-East Asian nation of Kindar.  Which feels like a stand-in for North Korea.  They even refer to the leader of the dictator regime as the Supreme Leader.

Immediately, you're given a choice, and choices matter in this game.  You also have a limited time to make your choice. (Although you can turn off the timer in the options if you struggle to make quick decisions.)

Fast-forward 5 years and Amy is now working for a large organization, developing nanocells that will help heal and repair people.  But one of the company's interns collapses on a public transit, having a bad reaction to the under-developed nanocells.

Amy is rushed to an underground complex, where she will attempt to save the young intern's life, while also extracting the nanocells from her blood.

But the complex suddenly goes into lockdown, and some mysterious terrorists attempt to break in.  Amy needs to figure out what's actually going on and survive the threat from outside - and from within...

Like I said, choices matter in this game.  There are 9 different endings and 196 different scenes to discover.  And there isn't a way to save your progress and go back to a previous decision.  If you make a bad call, you're locked in to the repercussions of that choice until the end of the game.  Just like real life.

I played through this game twice.  The first playthrough, I almost made it to the end and got a lot of people killed along the way.  I did my best to be kind to everyone - if you remember my previous post, I mentioned that I don't like to be cruel in video games.  I try to play as altruistic as I can.  But apparently, that didn't work too well in this game.  I had to be the "tough bitch" sometimes and make some harsh decisions instead of people-pleasing all the time.  They gave me a final assessment of "neurotic."  Damn, okay.

My second playthrough, I made a slightly different choice early on in the game... and died almost immediately.  At least I got an achievement for getting over 50% relationship status with everyone I'd met... which is called the "People Pleaser" achievement.  That hurts. 😖

I actually got this game in a bundle with other interactive film games, although I can't remember the names of the others.  I'll need to dig through my Steam library and track down some more of these kind of games.  I really enjoyed it.

For me personally, video games are basically interactive stories.  I want to have an entertaining tale to follow, where I get to influence the way the main character completes the story.

This kind of game is exactly that, except super heavy on the film side of it with minimal interactions.  It was fun to sit through once, but on concurrent playthroughs, I found myself spamming the skip button to get to the choices quicker.  And some (lengthy) cutscenes were unskippable because they went over important story details.  I would love to find all the endings to this game, but I don't think I have the patience to sit through it many more times.  Not when I have many more video games that need my attention. 😉

#32 - Duck Season PC

Officially, this game is called Duck Season, but the version on Steam without “PC” in its name is VR only. They’re both just called Duck Season in the game itself.

Old guys like me know the game this is parodying - Duck Hunt, for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).  The "Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt" cartridge was the first video game I ever owned and I had the original gray gun controller for it.  I spent a lot of time shooting ducks in that game back in my youth!

There are a few differences between this game and the original one.  Firstly, this one is a high-def simulation of a kid playing the original Duck Hunt.  Secondly, instead of an actual dog, it's a guy in a dog costume.  And finally... this is a horror game!

Strangely enough, I beat the entire game and was surprised that there were no horror elements.  Besides a couple slightly weird scenes, nothing out of the ordinary happened.  I beat the game, then the kid I was playing as moved on to "Final Fiesta II," a parody of Final Fantasy II.  It was the best ending!  I even got tons of food, like I was having a sleepover party with friends!  Definitely brought back some nostalgic memories of my childhood in the '80s-'90s.

Then the kid's mother mentioned that she would've shot the dog if she was playing, and it hit me - I actively avoid being cruel in video games!  That's why nothing bad happened; I wasn't mean to the dog.  Oops.

My next playthrough, I accidentally (read: automatically) dialed 911 when I picked up the phone, and I dropped the receiver instead of hanging up, which led to the "Best Men" ending.  I was mean to the dog this time, but instead of whatever horrors he would've brought to my house, I instead watched a live news coverage of a police helicopter pursuing him through the neighborhood!  I guess I need to play through it again and avoid doing anything logical this time if I want my horror ending...

Interestingly, the game opens like a stage production, with backdrops to tell the story leading into the game.  Which is an odd way to introduce a nostalgic video game simulator.

Also, the game itself takes you into the TV, where you're essentially on-stage performing.  There are props and boundaries to the stage, and if you turn around, you can see yourself sitting in front of the TV!

I enjoyed the nostalgic toy commercials.  Especially with all the blocks that the toys crash through.  Very much like old '80s/'90s commercials.  Personally, I always wanted those blocks so I could crash my own toys through them!  They made it look very appealing for young me.

Here's an amusing bit of trivia: The hunter guy in the shotgun tutorial video is Sam Gorski - someone I went to high school with!  He and his buddy, Niko Pueringer (the guy in white who yells at his mini dude in the game's Bootloose VHS tape) are the creators of Corridor Digital, and I knew them both when we were teenagers.

I wasn't super close with them; they were a few grades below me and we had intersecting friend circles.  But I've been following their CG film career on YouTube for the last 2 decades and I was surprised to see their familiar faces in this game.

Digging into the production details of Duck Season PC, I discovered that the writer/director, Brandon Laatsch, is the younger brother of an old friend of mine from high school!

And he's not credited, but I'm 99% positive the guy in the "There's No 'I' in Iowa" VHS tape is my high school's homecoming king.  Small world.

#31 - Alien: Isolation

Close encounters of the... wait, wrong film.

I was hoping to keep up daily Halloween-themed posts through all of October, but I had way too much on my plate yesterday and didn't get a moment to myself until almost midnight.  Who knew retired life could be so busy?  Oh well; at least I never promised to do daily posts.  Maybe I'll make a double post sometime to make up for it, or review an extra horror game on November 1st.

Today's horror-themed video game is Alien: Isolation.  This takes place in the Alien movie franchise (specifically after the first film), and actually follows Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda, as she tries to track down what happened to her mother aboard the Nostromo.

Amanda discovering what happened to her mother, the hard way

As you may remember from the original 1979 film (Spoilers ahead; highlight text to reveal) Ellen Ripley's crew responded to an emergency beacon and found an abandoned ship on a small planet.  During their exploration, they ran across alien facehugger eggs and accidentally bred an alien, which escaped aboard their ship and managed to kill the whole crew except for Ripley.  She managed to barely escape in a small vessel after blowing up their mining ship, the Nostromo.

This game takes place 15 years later.  Amanda Ripley, now an adult and working for Weyland-Yutani (her mother's company), heard about a remote trading station called Sevastopol that had recovered the flight recorder from the Nostromo.  She was invited along with the recovery team, only to find that the station was under duress and not responding.

No response coming from Sevastopol...

Amanda is split up from her team while trying to board, finds the trading station mostly empty except for a few panicked people running and looting for their lives, and eventually discovers what's happening... an alien is loose and hunting people.

WAY too close encounters!

Worse yet, the androids running the trading station have locked everyone out of the communications hub and are refusing to contact the outside world.  When you try to break in to contact your team on the orbiting ship, the androids mark you as a threat and turn violent.  Nothing worse than hearing kind words from an android while being strangled to death...

"I can't do that, Dave"

This game is mostly stealth, sneaking around and avoiding aliens.  But it definitely falls under the horror category and has its jump scare moments.  The aliens patrol certain regions of the ship and you have to find your way around them using various tools, such as smoke bombs, noisemakers, flash bangs, and EMP mines.  All of which you have to craft yourself using items you find scattered around the various floors of the trading station.

Never a good sign when lockers are only used as a hiding space in a game

Plus, it's everyone for themselves, so you have to be careful about the people you run into.  Some will help you; others will attack you.  Use your best judgment when approaching others.  And don't forget to use your motion tracker to see how close the aliens are to you.  They like to hide in the vents and surprise you.  But they can also hear the ping of the motion tracker, so use it sparingly if they're close by...

Should've used that motion tracker, dude...

Alien: Isolation faithfully reproduces the original film in video game format, with the same theme music from the film, as well as high-quality reproductions of the film sets.  The original film was a beautiful sci-fi spectacle, with incredible details on board the Nostromo.  You get to see that same level of quality applied not only to your own ship (the same type as the Nostromo), but to the trading station as a whole.  No corners were cut in the music and graphics department.  Check out these familiar scenes reproduced from the film:

The cryo sleep pods

Medical bay

The kitchen and dining area

The maintenance hallways

Mother, the AI brain of the ship.

Note: these screenshots are all from my 4K gameplay with maxed out graphics settings.  They may look a little blurry here, but click on them and you'll see the full 4K detail.  It's absolutely gorgeous level of work that went into replicating everything in game.  There are hardly any copy/paste levels; it's an insane amount of work to create a world that feels like you're actually living in it.  I keep pausing just to admire the details of everything, even just random hallways!

This game is a masterpiece in graphic design, and the soundtrack pulled right from the 1979 classic film helps to pull you into this world even more.  I really enjoyed this game and I can't recommend it enough!