Cold Fear

congratulations GOG & Patrons

When I saw this game, I literally felt like I went back in time. This game is truly a GOG. Thank you individually to everyone involved! The work you did is incredible.

The game itself is good, Cold Fear has a very unique concept for any game, let alone a horror title, because it takes place on a ship. The monsters and gameplay are similar to that of the Resident Evil games and the game has you encountering keys and different clues to make progress. It's a fine game, but at the time it was bogged down by some really bad technical problems and the like, this independently of the PC version or what not (that had its own fare share of issues). Now GOG has released this version with numerous fixes, widescreen support (up to even 4k wtf?) and the game has recieved tons of tweaks and QoL to make it as playable as it's ever going to be; they even added all of the game's languages, so thanks so much for that GOG!. On top of that, GOG has also made sure that the title is being sold for less than 10 buckos, which is pretty crazy on its own. Cold Fear is far from being a perfect title, it does have some annoying difficulty spikes and the saving system can be a tad bit frustrating at times causing you to lose some pretty significant chunk of progress if you're not careful. But this version is as good as its ever gonna get, and frankly it's a good game that deserves to be played by more people.

I think I heard of this game like twice in the 2000's and never looked into it, but there's an awful lot of emphasis on this rerelease and I mostly hear good things, so I took a stab at it. Before anything else, I feel it prudent to warn anyone as uninitiated as myself: Check all the keybinds before starting a game, and maybe do some remapping. It can easily be up to an hour before you find the first save point as you're getting to grips with the game, there are no tutorial prompts for controls, GOG does not provide a manual (in fact if there ever was one for the PC release it seems to be lost media), and the options menu is inaccessible ingame. How do you sprint? Spacebar. How do you reload? RMB + F. Melee is RMB+E. Yyyeah. Don't get caught out like I did and have to spend 10 minutes trying literally every key and key+mouse combo to figure things out. There is controller support, but it feels utterly horrendous, like it's using some Joy2Key wrapper. That out of the way, I guess this launched the same year as Resident Evil 4 and I find myself wondering who peeked at whose homework or if there was just some odd convergence at play piggybacking off the established tropes of survival horror at the time. Lone wolf protagonist who clearly isn't getting paid enough for this crap gets sent to remote location populated by [Russians/Spaniards] who are dealing with a deliberately engineered parasitic not-zombie outbreak and hurls himself into danger to rescue a tomboyish damsel. Parasites burst from the popped heads of infected, more "flesh hell" adjacent mutations show up as the game progresses, corpses rapidly dissolve with a bubbly effect, there's an over-the-shoulder aiming system with laser-pointer-enabled guns, both protagonist and rescuee end up infected and have to find a cure, and B-movie tropes are absolutely abound. I'll lead with what's impressive here: Cold Fear combines the classic horror game fixed camera angles system with the ability to switch to over-the-shoulder aiming at any time. It works surprisingly well, except when the game tries to present you with a horror sting it had lying in wait which doesn't really land because you were walking around fully anticipating it and able to peek at what would have been obscured by the fixed camera. Then there are a couple sequences where it's critical to be able to just run in a straight line but that's rendered far more difficult than it should be by the sudden camera cuts. I don't mean to complain, in fact I kind of wish more games had tried this dual setup, but I understand why they didn't. It just ends up interfering with itself. The first third or so of the game also takes place aboard a rickety whaling ship being tossed violently in a storm, and whether you're on or belowdecks the rocking of the ship is a major focal point of the physics systems. Your character's feet remain planted as his body pitches sharply with the ship, throwing off your aim a bit, loose items are thrashing about hazardously in the wind, there are intricate water physics at play, it's something I've never seen any other game do, it works well and is impressively novel. Then things start going a bit downhill as the remaining two-thirds of the game take place in another location and the sweet sweet physics tech is largely ditched as the game drowns most of its remaining novelty in ridiculously, hilariously awful and nonsensical B-movie plot beats that sadly aren't rescued by any sort of self-awareness, every room in the game getting reused about three times over to save on budget as you're funneled back through them repeatedly while events develop, culminating in possibly the worst final boss ever committed to the survival horror genre which ultimately got me to just uninstall and watch the ending on YouTube; an ending that's about on par with "I have to go now. My planet needs me," leaving one of the most vital plot developments completely unaddressed in the most catastrophically nonsensical manner possible. I will say, for what it's worth, that it managed to hold my attention (almost) all the way to the end, and I can certainly see how the physics of the rocking ship would have left a lasting impression, especially back in 2005. It even has a leg up on RE4 in that it's a less janky PC port than RE4 was, you get proper mouse aim with your weapons here, the gunplay in general was surprisingly solid, and there's the unique meld of camera systems. The ammo economy was decently balanced, it took me about 6 hours all told, but between the completely scattershod (even by B-movie or horror game standards) plot, the back half of the game being far less inspired, and that utterly godawful boss... it's just, you know, fine, I guess. Memorable and disappointing all in one. 7/10, not enough water.

A derelict ship AND an oil rig? Just hook it to my veeeeins! I loved this game back on the OG xbox and haven't played it in forever. I'm looking forward to revisiting it in this new state that's compatible with modern hardware & expectations. I'm super glad GOG does the preservation stuff and that this was chosen as worth it. If you like Resident Evil 4 you should check this out, it was considered a clone back in the day.