This is the month when everyone should be pining for some fear, scares, and creeps in their entertainment. Maybe it’s your favorite Halloween film, such is the case that mine is The Thing, where it still gives me jump scares, even when I know what’s coming. Maybe it’s going on a ghost tour in your local area, where you can go hunt some real scares from shadow people and the undead.
Or maybe, just maybe, that entertainment comes from a game like The Fabulous Fear Machine from developer Fictiorama Studios where you cause fear in people and delight in their downfall as you slowly take control of their lives. Oh, it’s that much fun, but at the same time, you’re going to be in for a learning curve.
So, sit back, relax, turn the lights down real low, and get ready for a screaming good time with this review.
Story-driven
The Fabulous Fear Machine takes on the form of a horror comic from the moment you launch the game and progress. You’re given a setup from a creepy Big-like Zoltar machine that starts by choosing a character to play and see how their fear machine story plays out. I chose an up-and-coming businessperson and was sent out into the world to create a hefty amount of terror with a population of unsuspecting people. The story is generally one slanted towards the chaotic evil side of life, which means your character is not a good person and they have problems from their past that drove them to do wicked deeds. The businessperson I chose had a lonely childhood thanks to disengaged parents. She grew up figuring things out on her own, even going as far as graduating without support or celebration from her family, all the while growing and carrying that chip on her shoulder because of an unloving family. Her actions reflected her bitterness as the story progressed and lent itself to some horror situations, such as making a drug that knowingly killed people, or sabotaging Italian police so that animals could be used in drug trials. It’s a warped narrative that works within the confines of the developer’s world-building efforts to capture the essence of a horror comic book.
All the situations given build up the character you’re playing and are done so by the character succeeding in the game. The game contains blank panels of a horror comic that are slowly revealed as the player succeeds. One successful scenario in the game opens and drives another, which reveals the life story of your character’s journey as you progress and adds context to why they have become the person they ended up being. You don’t really dictate how your character lives their life in the story, rather you’re just given a path to see how bad it all can get, or at the very least how awful they are as a human being. It’s straight from a Tales from the Crypt-type of story, where nothing good happens at the end of the journey.
Having a happy ending to a horror-driven narrative should not be in the cards, so this makes complete sense. The type of comic this game imitates never ended well, so the storylines you’ll traverse should go along that same train of thought. It’s a horror game, there must be horror, and the original comic premise that this game was built from is/was the antithesis to 50/60s comics where the hero saved the day. In that respect, The Fabulous Fear Machine works perfectly. You’re going to be justifiably horrified at how your character runs their life and what results come from their evil decisions. Going back to our businessperson, as she grows older and more bitter, she becomes more sadistic in her feelings towards the world, the zenith of which is when she learns of her parent’s death, and she stacks even more anger and uncaring feelings on top of what already exists. Developer Fictiorama Studios nailed that old, warped comic structure and allowed no true freedom of choice for the player outside the occasional difficulty path which crops up after certain points in the overall story and is perceived branching. That last part will create replay value for this game, but even if it didn’t, that is more than okay considering the source material driving the concept and how well it is all executed. You’ll want to play this game repeatedly because of this, maybe every Halloween season, just to get that fun bit of evil that is structured well within a horror wrapper.
How the stories in The Fabulous Fear Machine unfold and how rigid they are with player control works with keeping this game completely on track with its intentions. It’s a bad horror comic that shouldn’t shine a good light on its characters. It’s supposed to show the bad part of a life gone wrong, and it does that perfectly, sometimes in ridiculous, over-the-top fashion. In addition to the story and how it works, the visuals help to push the devs’ agenda along. I love the presentation and style of the game, as it visually emulates that old comic book style and art. It’s wonderful and just what the doctor ordered for that Halloween season kickstart.
Overall, the story and how it’s told and controlled works. You’re picking your character, you’re seeing how bad life was to them, and you’re watching them, through your actions, linearly play out a horror comic. It’s a beautiful, creepy thing, and it works on the story side of the tracks. Sure, it would be nice to have a little bit more control over the story’s direction, but the devs seemed to have clear-cut plans for how these characters end up in the scheme of things. It’s lovely horror.
And there’s a lot under this horror hood
I cannot imagine the initial planning session for this game. There are so many moving parts to its gameplay that it must have been extensive. That isn’t a knock against the devs, rather it’s a compliment because I didn’t expect it to be this deep or good.
The game begins with this businessperson I chose for my journey. She was given a goal to spread terror among English regions in hopes of gaining influence and control of those areas. That’s the setup and premise of the entire game, where your character goes out, terrorizes people, sets up nasty things that could happen to populations of people, executes some of those nasty things, and then becomes a savior to everyone. Essentially, it’s the storyline for almost any politician. God, I wish that was humorous.
Anyway, the gameplay begins with the player laying down certain pointed fears in each region you’re playing within. Maybe money is an issue with one region, or maybe it’s fear of getting sick in another, regardless, you lay down an initial fear blueprint for each place you’re hoping to conquer with a point/concentrated fear. It’s a drag-and-drop icon method to get this portion of the gameplay started. It’s not complicated at all and it’s straightforward with what the game is setting up.
From there, the game gets far more complicated. After establishing what fears you should be focusing on, the next step is to plant a literal seed of fear in a region of your choice and then stoke that fear to help grow the seed’s reach. The point of the seed is to visually show how well you’re doing and to give you a fear percentage (top-left) that has its own completion goal indicator. The more fear you stoke and spread fear, the more that percentage gets higher to the point where you can conquer a region. Once you conquer a region, you move on to conquer another. Kind of like a sick game of RISK.
Pulling back a bit, to get that fear growing requires a few things. First, you must explore and scope out areas with helpers. The helpers are mannequin-masked people who are creepy as hell but act as your main pawns for fear spreading. Once they scout out places to spread fear, and each city has multiple fear locations, then you implant a type of resource you want to focus on to build that fear. That implant could be something as simple as politics (represented by a snow globe), blood (heart), or even a television icon that represents pop culture. There are more implants you can apply than those, so you will have plenty of choices depending on the city and its backstory. Anyway, in a real-time strategy game, these would be resources you mine to build up other resources. It’s the same structure here where you construct and reap the benefits of your construction.
Now, those resources are mined for the sole purpose of feeding into a bigger fear your character is trying to establish. Those fears are represented by a series of cards that you place in areas of cities you have explored. The cards could be something like spreading toxic waste, uncovering a tragedy from a wartime era, or going full Halloween with a tall tale of a legendary monster that once roamed and terrorized the area. The mined resources help to upgrade and further these cards, allowing you to grow their tales and thus spread more fear amongst the population. Now, even when you upgrade the cards, you are still required to put together the strength of the card’s narrative. The more you strengthen the narrative, the more believable the fear becomes in public, and the more fear you spread.
To grow that fear card’s narrative fire with every resource upgrade, you are given a choice of words and a picture of the fear. The picture represents what tale is being told and tasks you with choosing a word that best represents that picture. There are a bevy of words to the right of the picture which you drag and drop into a spot. For example, if you’ve got a bird-monster fear card, you see only the bird on the card. You are given words like nest, family, massacre, toxic, and maybe fear that possibly represent that card’s illustration. You must choose the best word that most represents what is potentially going on in the picture. If you choose right, you are given fear bonus points, and the story unfolds to the next panel of that card. If you choose wrong, the game doesn’t give you bonus points and you must work just a bit harder to get that fear more widely spread and established. It’s a fun and easy way to represent how you spread fear in the game, and the variety of fear cards featured is quite extensive.
Now, you can’t just willy-nilly your decision of fear cards. There are certain cards that belong to certain regions in the game, which are related to the initial categories laid out at the beginning of the gameplay. While you can put a fear card any place you would like, the game has a nice catch feature that warns you about wasting a fear in a region it doesn’t belong in. For example, I ran into a map that stoked monster legends in specific regions. Those regions were best suited for specific fear cards that featured matching monsters or urban legends. Each region you have might have certain rules and regulations about fears that match best with them. By choosing the most appropriate region, you stand to make the biggest fear impact. You want to have the most fear in the least amount of time, so getting it matched up correctly is vital. In addition to getting things right with the matching region, each region can hold multiple fear cards but is finite in the number you can use overall. And, yes, you can remove a fear card from one region and shift it to another but any upgrades you might have made on that card will be lost in the move.
And complicated gameplay keeps on rolling.
The fear cards are broken up into specific categories, so you’re not just given a stack of cards and told good luck. The four major categories for the fear cards are as follows:
– The Power
– The Form
– The Passions
– The Occult
Within those categories lie two forms of terror-related to them. For example, if you choose The Power, then you’re going to choose from two types of terror to spread – Terror of Conspiracy and Terror of the Future. Those terrors belong in certain regions and have purposes attached to them as they relate to your initial region choices, and they directly relate to the fear cards you can choose from in the game. It’s interesting how the devs broke these categories into forms of terrors and then ultimately into cards that have a significant impact on the overall body of gameplay. It’s a very complicated trail to lay down but it makes sense within the context of the gameplay structure. At the very least, the trail of terror forms a very tightly wound connection to the world-building aspect of The Fabulous Fear Machine. In a sick and twisted way, it’s quite lovely.
Anyway, as you run around with your mannequin helpers to stoke fears, produce resources, and create even more terror in regions, some roadblocks pop up. The smallest of the roadblock bunch are cards that affect your character’s fear power in regions. These randomly chosen pop-up cards have required goals that need to be met before completing them, and/or are additional side cards that come in the form of people or situations. These roadblocks can offer good rewards upon completion. It’s like little mini-side quests that you can take or leave. Most of the time, you will leave them, but sometimes they can help your gameplay out immensely by adding additional resources or ways to grow fear. These cards could be situations where your fear spreading is in danger, your main character is in jeopardy, or a little bit of both. They mostly aren’t necessary for you to complete the fear-spreading gameplay, but they can get in the way or be incredibly helpful. Regardless, they are there for an extra piece of the complicated puzzle.
The biggest roadblock that takes the most time to complete is when rivals show up. The rivals in the game are fear-seeking NPC characters that want to take your fear-spreading regions. Again, very RISK. The rival’s purpose is to be an obstacle in the gameplay that slows your progression but at the same time for good reason. Multiple evil people are living in the world, so it’s not out of the question to see another person show up to take what you built. Lord knows that we have all run into those p**cks in real life.
Back to the gameplay, these rivals try to take over fear spreading in your regions by spreading their own. If you let them, you will have more work to retake your regions. To prevent them from taking anything, you must send in a mannequin to infiltrate their space and gain knowledge to smear and discredit their efforts. The knowledge could be about them skimming off the top of a budget, doing something terrible to others, or just any basic fact that puts them in a bad light. Of course, to use that knowledge costs resources, which means you must take resources away from your main fear cards and apply them to expose your rivals. This takes time, effort, and money. The latter of which is always in flux, as you can trade resources to make more money.
If rivals weren’t enough to keep you busy, along with the constant need to create the right amount of fear, the other portion of the game that you must worry about is money-making. That is one of the more complicated elements of the gameplay and one you must constantly think about with every effort you make. The issue with money-making is that the longer you take sorting out rivals and spreading fear, the more expensive your venture becomes. Eventually, the game stops giving money through resource trading and starts taking it by charging you more as time rolls on. In other words, the longer you take, the fewer dollars start rolling in to help you complete your journey. At some point, you’re trading resources for money ends up becoming trading to keep your money flow from going into the red. You stop building up a money source and start constantly losing it.
Now, another reason why money is vital, outside of eliminating rivals, is that it affords you fear cards. Every fear card you use requires you to pay somewhere between 400-600. If you can’t purchase a fear card, then you’re dead in the water with your fear-spreading mission. It’s another complicated factor in the game and one that you must think about right out of the gates. It’s an interesting attribute to the overall gameplay, as it provides balance with consequence and reward. It is also a very irritating attribute, as you’ll know immediately once you cross the point of no return with money incoming and outgoing, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to resolve it. If you lose too much money, the game will end. That is the definitive conclusion to money-losing scenarios.
The gameplay for The Fabulous Fear Machine is complicated, addictive, and perfect for anyone looking for a challenge, as well as looking to get into the horror season spirit. While I still can see this being an uphill struggle for those not prepared for such a complicated juggling act of a game, there is an exhilarating satisfaction from finally learning the game and seeing how beautifully intricate the gameplay design is. No doubt that it’s going to be initially a bit confusing and frustrating but if you stick with it, it all smooths out and a great horror experience awaits.
On that note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion so far
The Fabulous Fear Machine from developer Fictiorama Studios is a test of skill as much as it is a test of patience. It’s a complicated game that is RISK-like and presents a wickedly good time in classic horror comic book form.
