I think this was about the fourth time I’d been killed trying to go downstairs, get the fuse, take it back upstairs, get it to the fuse box, solve the puzzle , then arrive at the next save point without dying. I sat down in my chair, took a long, slow sip of water, and started shouting explanations that I can’t repeat here. Then I took a deep breath, hit “rewind” and tried again. And the fifth time, it worked. When The Fear Business is at its best, it’s a very fun, if not particularly frightening, experience. When it doesn’t work, it can be very annoying. I think the good outweighs the bad here, but it can be frustrating in ways I didn’t expect.

The Fear Business is not a particularly original game. It owes all of its ideas to other games, notably survival horror games from the PS1 era, notably Resident Evil. It even looks like a PS1 game. The configuration is, at least, interesting. You step into the shoes of investigator Sarah McPherson, a journalist who covers strange stories for a show called American Mysteries. Her career is in decline and she is desperate to tell a good story. Her final episode took her to Black Hill, a small town of about 500 people, where people started disappearing.

Small American towns are really haunted, bro

You start in the hotel and the small bar attached to it, interviewing the locals about the disappearances. You can only interview Arcade Freak after beating his high score in the Starship Vector game in the corner, which is basically Asteroids. You will only be able to interview Grace, the old woman who hangs out in a booth in the corner, once you find her missing son Robbie. Everyone has what sounds like some pretty crazy theories about a local cult. Sarah doesn’t have much luck when a hooded man wearing dark glasses tells her that where she really wants to be is Solomon Manor, home of the cult, the Crimson Society. He offers to take her, and even though it’s all super fishy, ​​Sarah is desperate and agrees.

It’s once she sneaks into the mansion that The Fear Business really begins. Naturally, there’s some creepy cult stuff going on, and Sarah’s plan to “go in, take a few pictures and get out” goes about as well as expected. From there, you’ll need to figure out how to navigate the mansion and escape.

Solomon Manor owes most of its design to Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion, and you’ll notice the puzzles you’ll need to solve almost immediately if you’ve ever played a survival horror game before. There is a piano on the second floor without a key; there is a piece of machinery sitting at the bottom of an aquarium filled with piranhas; several doors are marked with a specific symbol and must be opened with a special key; and, as I mentioned at the beginning, a fuse is missing from a fuse box. The mansion itself isn’t huge: it starts out with only two floors, but as you explore and start unlocking doors and opening secret passages, you’ll discover everything there is to know. there is to explore. Exploring the house is by far the most interesting part of The Fear Business, and revealing its secrets is the best part of the game.

Enter survival horror

Like most survival horror games, your inventory is limited. You can carry four items at a time (which you can expand to six by finding a certain item during your exploration), so you’ll often have to throw excess items into a large chest on the second floor of the mansion. Your items are what you’d expect: keys, puzzle pieces, bandages to restore health, etc. Restricting your inventory is nice, but it doesn’t really make sense. Why can’t my friend Sarah hold more stuff? Does it just have no pockets? What is happening? While it encourages backtracking and inventory management, this system mostly feels like it’s there because it’s supposed to be there, not because it improves the game in any truly meaningful way. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed exploring the mansion and solving its puzzles, but please, Sarah, get some pants with pockets, girl.

The coolest idea in The Fear Business is Sarah’s camcorder. Like everything else, the camcorder takes up a slot in the inventory, but from the start it plays a dual role as a light source for Sarah and allows her to go into first person, seeing things she normally could. miss and record evidence of cult activity. It’s an interesting twist that powers the game’s menus – the main menu looks like a menu you’d see on a camcorder – and encourages you to capture images, which is… you know, Sarah’s job .

The problem is that Sarah is not alone at the mansion. She shares space with Goat Face, a large goat-headed monstrosity (is it a masked man? Some kind of monster with the body of a man and the head of a goat? Who knows?) who prowls the mansion with a knife. If Goat Face sees you, the screen will be filled with static – again, like a VHS tape or camcorder – until you can run away. Sarah can fight Goat Face with wooden planks and metal pipes, but she can’t kill him; stun him just long enough to escape. Goat Face isn’t particularly scary, but you have to respect him.

Goat, goat faces

The whole “unstoppable monster you can’t kill but can get around” thing is an interesting idea in theory, but not much fun in practice. First, you can outrun Goat Face quite easily in a straight line, so if you can get a head start, your chances of escaping aren’t bad… sometimes. The problem is with The Fear Business’s camera and controls. Like the great survival horror games of yesteryear, The Fear Business uses fixed camera angles and tank controls. Normally these things are fine and add to the atmosphere of the game… until you have to run away from Goat Face. Since the camera angles are constantly changing and static fills the screen whenever Goat Face is nearby, it can be difficult to see while you’re running away. This means that you will die, not because you play badly, but because you run into walls, closed doors and other obstacles that you cannot see because of the camera or static effect .

Normally, your best bet is to avoid Goat Face altogether. Sometimes the screen fills with static as he gets closer to you. The more static you see, the closer it is and you can plan accordingly. Sometimes, though, that won’t happen, and you’ll open a door and turn a corner and there he will be. Your only hope then is to stun him if you have a weapon and run until you can hide in a cabinet or behind a shower curtain. Goat Face never looks into these areas unless he sees you enter them, so if you can make one invisible, you’re good. He will enter the room, growl about blood and death and your inability to hide, then leave.

It’s great… when it works. But having him sneak up on you without warning sucks, and not being able to see where you’re going or control Sarah like you’d like when you’re running away means you’re going to die because of him at least a few. times. Eventually I just started letting Goat Face kill me if I had just saved when he found me. It took less time than hoping I could escape when I couldn’t see.

Blow out the candles and make a wish

Which brings me to the other mixed bag of The Fear Business: the save system. Saves in The Fear Business are limited, as you would expect. There are no ink ribbons or typewriters, however. This time it’s Devil Shrines. Extinguish the candle at once and you will save your progress. But once you’ve used a Devil’s Shrine, you can’t use it again, so you need to make sure you’re in the right place before blowing out that candle. I made the mistake of using one when I had to backtrack to complete my next goal, which resulted in the first paragraph of this review. It was exceptionally boring, and it mostly felt like I was waiting until I got lucky for the race where Goat Face wouldn’t randomly appear next to me rather than accomplishing anything because I played well.

Devil Shrines also remove light in certain rooms, meaning using them makes it harder to see. In some areas, it’s not a big deal. In others, it may be of great importance. It’s an interesting twist on the traditional survival horror save system, and I really liked it. I just wish Goat Face wouldn’t randomly appear next to me without warning and make me replay the same sections over and over again if I recorded in the wrong place.

All told, The Fear Business is a pretty solid homage to the horror games of yesteryear. It’s not particularly original, but the PS1 aesthetic, Solomon Manor’s sharp design, and compelling puzzles work well enough to make up for its annoyances. It’s not a long game (your first playthrough will probably take between 3 and 5 hours), but there are several difficulties to complete and secrets to find, and it seems ripe for speedrunning. I just wish it was better controlled and that dealing with Goat Face wasn’t so annoying. But if you’re looking for a horror game to spend an evening with, you could do a lot worse. Just… you know, try to be smarter than Sarah the next time you investigate mysterious disappearances, okay? If a guy had offered to take me to a cult-infested mansion, I would have just gone home.

This review is based on a digital copy of the game provided by the publisher. The Fear Business is now available on PC.

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His gaming writing has also appeared on IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find it on @bywillborger.