This doesn’t stop FEAR 3 from being a good game, though. It’s mostly a load of tosh, and requires a good memory of the previous games (and knowledge of the comics) to understand properly.
Over the course of the game we’re told an increasingly complex tale of child abuse, sibling rivalry and family reunion. While they’re happy to collaborate towards this end goal, the pair have very different reasons for making the journey. The pair embark on a quest to reunite with their pregnant mother, Alma, who is still wreaking paranormal havoc on the town of Fairport. Nine months after the events of FEAR 2, Paxton Fettel breaks his brother, Point Man, out of a high security prison. Even the talents of John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) fail to save the narrative from the convoluted mess that FEAR 3 descends into. It’s hard to be scared by something so hard to comprehend, after all. What is truly frightening, though, is the script writers’ inability to weave a coherent story. This is a sentiment that’s been echoed in the VideoGamer community recently. More than this, though, it’s simply that we’ve seen it all before we’ve become desensitised to the horror. Co-op play offers no remedy for this either, as it’s hard to be scared with a chum on the other end of a headset. Silent protagonists are fine – just ask Link or Gordon Freeman (not that they’d respond) – but in a horror game they remove a much needed element of humanity from the narrative. There are several explanations for this: firstly, the game’s protagonist, the absurdly-named Point Man, never seems all too concerned about the hell that’s unfolding around him. Whilst this can on rare occasions be a little jumpy, it’s never remotely scary. Shadows of ominous-looking creatures flit about your peripheral vision, harrowing screams ring out from an unknown source, and every now and again Alma – the disturbing little girl at the heart of the game’s narrative – will appear out of nowhere, just standing there, looking all weird and unearthly. It’s 2011, and FEAR 3 is relying on the same scare tactics that the original game did back in 2005.
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