Cry of Fear

Last updated
Cry of Fear
Cry of Fear header.jpg
Developer(s) Team Psykskallar
Publisher(s)
  • Team Psykskallar  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Designer(s)
  • Andreas Rönnberg
  • James Marchant
  • Jordy Boerma
Programmer(s) James Marchant
Artist(s)
  • Andreas Rönnberg
  • James Marchant
Composer(s)
  • Andreas Rönnberg
  • Bxmmusic
  • Muddasheep [1]
Engine GoldSrc
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows
ReleaseFebruary 22, 2012
Genre(s) Survival horror, first-person shooter
Mode(s) Single-player, multiplayer

Cry of Fear is a first-person indie survival horror game developed by independent Swedish studio Team Psykskallar. Though originally a mod for the video game Half-Life in 2012, it was released as a standalone product the following year. Cry of Fear follows the story of Simon Henriksson (a 19 year old Swedish male with depression and anxiety) going through the city of Stockholm.

Contents

Combining elements of survival horror and first-person shooter mechanics, Cry of Fear challenges players to navigate through a haunting urban environment filled with monsters and unsettling occurrences. The story explores themes of mental illness and trauma. The game was praised for its atmospheric tension, narrative, and innovative use of the Half-Life engine. [2] [3] [4] Cry of Fear received several awards from Mod DB in 2012, including the main category Best Single Player Game of the Year and the Community Award.

Development

Cry of Fear began development in 2008. The mod was delayed several times due to time limitations before being released in 2012. During the 4 years of development of Cry of Fear, many ideas were scrapped while others were improved. For example, the phone's flashlight was initially made to illuminate an area around the player. This was later changed to illuminate the area in front of the player. The inventory system was also reduced from 12 slots to 6. At its beginning, Cry of Fear used the standard Half-Life renderer which was later replaced by one from Paranoia, another popular Half-Life modification. Changing the renderer allowed the developers to bypass some older limits and add new engine effects such as texture bump mapping, specular reflection and 3D skyboxes. [5]

Gameplay

The player controls Simon Henriksson, a 19‑year‑old who wakes up in an alley shortly after being hit by a car. The player must navigate the city solving puzzles and fighting monsters to progress. The game switches between normal gameplay levels representing the city and surrounding areas, and "nightmare" levels, similar to those found in the Silent Hill series. [6]

Cry of Fear features many unique mechanics, such as a limited inventory system that allows the player to carry only 6 items at a time and does not pause the game while the screen is open, being also possible to combine items. Another unique mechanic is the ability to dual-wield inventory items, allowing the use of two weapons at a time, or one weapon and a light source. Health is recovered by the use of morphine syringes, which can blur the player's vision if overused. Stamina is consumed through strenuous actions such as running and jumping, and can be recovered by resting or the use of morphine syringes.

A separate co-op campaign is also available for up to four players, [7] following a parallel plot where the players control a group of police officers that also get trapped in the nightmare world while investigating Simon.

Some days before Cry of Fear's anniversary, Valve released a Half-Life update for Linux compatibility, making changes in the folders and engine. This update made several Half-Life mods, including Cry of Fear, incompatible with the base game. Team Psykskallar decided that, since no more could be done for the mod itself, they would finish a standalone version. Confusion due to Valve regarding Cry of Fear's status as freeware caused the game to be delayed until April 25, 2013. [8] [9]

Plot

The story begins in a dark and gloomy city in Sweden, with the protagonist Simon waking up in an alley after a car strikes him as he is trying to help an injured man. Simon tries to make his way home, but deformed monsters attack him. After failing to call the police, Simon receives a text from a man pleading for help.

When he enters and searches an apartment block, he finds the man dead in his bathtub. Progressing further, as the apartment building slowly grows more run-down (and eventually covered in blood), a monster attacks him with a chainsaw that decapitates itself upon defeat, prompting Simon to vomit and pass out.

Simon wakes up near a cryptic and violent doctor who claims that he cannot trust him. After exploring the city and encountering threats along the way, he finds Sophie, his childhood friend, and love interest, on a rooftop. Simon attempts to confess his love to her, but she rejects his advances and commits suicide by jumping off the roof.

A monster known as Carcass appears, giving Simon the choice to either kill it or flee from it back into the building. Simon continues on his journey home, attempting and failing to enter a subway station because he lacks a fuse. He goes to a nearby college to collect a fuse, however monsters ambush him upon finding it.

Simon escapes to the station and enters it successfully where he, once again, encounters the doctor directly after he has murdered someone and gives chase where his progress is blocked by a door needing two more fuses. Simon enters the previously chained-up apartment and, after a long hallway where he hears a doctor describing an encounter with his patient and being attacked yet again, finds the fuses. While attempting to retrieve the fuses again to open a gate for a train, he enters another nightmare where he is chased through a maze by monsters hanging from the ceiling, escaping through a door that opens back up to a completely different hallway.

Boarding the train, Simon is attacked by monsters yet again, and the train eventually crashes and derails, causing him to lose all of his belongings. As it is about to fall off a cliff, Simon escapes narrowly and finds himself in a dark forest. Deep in the forest, Simon discovers an asylum as the doctor enters. Simon finds the doctor behind a gate where the doctor orders him to hand him a new gun in exchange for letting him pass. Simon can either oblige or refuse, but regardless, the doctor ends up betraying Simon and shoots him, with a greater penalty to maximum health if Simon complied. Simon eventually kills the doctor after a gunfight.

Simon leaves the forest and rows through a lake to his hometown. He finally reaches his house and expects his mother to be waiting for him but the house is empty. He enters his bedroom and finds a book. Through a flashback, the player finds out that the entire story was a figment of Simon's imagination. After the car crash, Simon had become reliant on a wheelchair. Depressed, his therapist (who was the doctor in the game) advised him to document his feelings in a book. The character controlled throughout the game was a concocted version of Simon, and all the monsters represented the trauma in his mind. Cry of Fear has five different endings depending on the player's choices.

Reception

Cry of Fear has received positive reviews, with reviewers praising its overall atmosphere and unique setting. [10] [ user-generated source ] It has an average user score of 8.2 on Metacritic [11] [ user-generated source ] and 9.4 on ModDB. [12]

Reviewers praised the game's strong story, atmosphere, high tension, enemy designs, and inventory management. Some criticism was levied at the game's platforming segments, primitive graphics and engine, and occasional crashes. [13] [14] [15] [16] The game's combat was praised for the added tension stemming from the player's non-regentative health but criticised for the powerful late-game guns that drained some of the fear out of the game. [13]

Related Research Articles

<i>Counter-Strike</i> (video game) 2000 first-person shooter video game

Counter-Strike is a tactical first-person shooter game developed by Valve. It was initially developed and released as a Half-Life modification by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe in 1999, before Le and Cliffe were hired and the game's intellectual property acquired. Counter-Strike was released by Valve for Microsoft Windows in November 2000, and is the first installment in the Counter-Strike series. Several remakes and ports were released on Xbox, as well as OS X and Linux.

<i>Team Fortress Classic</i> 1999 video game

Team Fortress Classic is a first-person shooter game developed by Valve and published by Sierra Studios. It was originally released in April 1999 for Windows, and is based on Team Fortress, a mod for the 1996 game Quake. The game puts two teams against each other in online multiplayer matches; each member plays as one of nine classes, each with different skills. The scenarios include capture the flag, territorial control, and escorting a "VIP" player.

<i>Half-Life 2</i> 2004 video game

Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter (FPS) game developed and published by Valve Corporation. It was published for Windows on Valve's digital distribution service, Steam. Like the original Half-Life (1998), Half-Life 2 combines shooting, puzzles, and storytelling, and adds new features such as vehicles and physics-based gameplay. The player controls Gordon Freeman, who joins a resistance to liberate Earth from the Combine, an interplanetary alien empire.

<i>Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil</i> 2005 video game

Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil is a survival horror first-person shooter video game developed by Nerve Software and published by Activision. It was released for Microsoft Windows worldwide on April 4, 2005, as an expansion pack and sequel to Doom 3 and on October 5, 2005, for the Xbox video game console. The Xbox version does not require the original Doom 3 in order to play, and includes The Ultimate Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth and Master Levels for Doom II. A remastered version of Resurrection of Evil was included with Doom 3: BFG Edition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mod DB</span> Video game modding website

Mod DB is a website that focuses on general video game modding. It was founded in 2002 by Scott "INtense!" Reismanis. As of September 2015, the Mod DB site has received over 604 million views, has more than 12,500 modifications registered, and has hosted more than 108 million downloads. A spin-off website, Indie DB, was launched in 2010 and focuses on indie games and news.

<i>Minerva</i> (video game) 2005 video game

Minerva is an episodic series of single-player modifications ("mods") for Valve's Half-Life 2. The mod was created by Adam Foster. The plot and settings of Minerva are linked to Someplace Else, Foster's original map for Half-Life, and to Half-Life 2. The mod was released on Steam on April 30, 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gravity gun</span> Type of device in video games

A gravity gun is a type of device in video games, particularly first-person shooters using physics engines, whereby players can directly manipulate objects in the world, often allowing them to be used as projectiles against hostile characters. The concept was popularized by the gravity gun found in Valve's Half-Life 2, as well as the Temporal Uplink found in Free Radical Design's TimeSplitters: Future Perfect; although a similar concept was used by id Software during the production of the earlier game Doom 3, eventually leading to the introduction of a physics-based weapon in the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil. Later games, such as Portal, BioShock, Crysis, Dead Space, and Garry's Mod have been influenced by the success of these physics-based weapons, adopting their own styles of comparable abilities or weapons.

<i>Zombie Panic! Source</i> 2007 video game

Zombie Panic! Source is a cooperative survival-horror Half-Life 2 first-person shooter modification. It is the sequel to the Half-Life mod Zombie Panic. Set in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, players start as a small group of survivors attempting to stay alive. Each map will have its own objectives to complete and win the round or survive by a period of time.

<i>Jailbreak: Source</i> 2007 video game

Jailbreak: Source is a multiplayer team-based first-person action video game, developed as a total conversion modification on the Valve's proprietary Source engine. The game was in beta development stages before it was abandoned, with its first public release on 14 February 2007. 0.2 followed a week later as a patch. The third major public version was released two months later on April 21, 2007. The next release was made available just over a year later, on May 3, 2008 with the latest version (0.6) being released on 15 January 2010.

<i>Korsakovia</i> 2009 video game

Korsakovia is a single-player mod for Valve's video game Half-Life 2. It was developed by Thechineseroom. Korsakovia was released as freeware download on 20 September 2009.

<i>Black Mesa</i> (video game) 2020 video game

Black Mesa is a 2020 first-person shooter video game developed and published by Crowbar Collective. It is a fan-made remake of Half-Life (1998) made in the Source game engine. Originally published as a free mod in September 2012, Black Mesa was approved for commercial release by Valve, the developers of Half-Life. The first commercial version was published as an early-access release in May 2015, followed by a full release in March 2020, for Windows and Linux.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GoldSrc</span> Video game engine

GoldSrc, sometimes called the Half-Lifeengine, is a proprietary game engine developed by Valve. At its core, GoldSrc is a heavily modified version of id Software's Quake engine. It made its debut in 1998 with Half-Life and powered future games developed by or with oversight from Valve, including Half-Life's expansions, Day of Defeat and games in the Counter-Strike series.

<i>No More Room in Hell</i> 2011 video game

No More Room in Hell is a cooperative first person survival horror video game, created by Matt "Maxx" Kazan and initially developed as a modification on Valve's Source game engine. Set in a zombie apocalypse, the player assumes the role of one of eight remaining survivors, with a focus on co-operation and survival. The game can be played through "Objective" or "Survival" mode. It is heavily inspired by George Romero's Living Dead series, with the title being a reference to Dawn of the Dead, specifically the line "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.", and some characters being references to other films such as American Psycho and The Big Lebowski.

<i>Half-Life: Alyx</i> 2020 video game

Half-Life: Alyx is a 2020 virtual reality (VR) first-person shooter game developed and published by Valve. It was released for Windows and Linux, with support for most PC-compatible VR headsets. Set five years before Half-Life 2 (2004), players control Alyx Vance on a mission to seize a superweapon belonging to the alien Combine. Like previous Half-Life games, Alyx incorporates combat, puzzles and exploration. Players use VR to interact with the environment and fight enemies, using "gravity gloves" to snatch objects from a distance, similarly to the gravity gun from Half-Life 2.

<i>Research and Development</i> (mod) 2009 Half-Life mod and puzzle game

Research and Development is a free mod for the first-person shooter video game Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Developed by Matt Bortolino and released on July 17, 2009, it is a non-violent first-person puzzle video game, and has been compared to Portal. It received critical praise for its unique gameplay and high development quality.

<i>Half-Life: Echoes</i> Half-Life mod

Half-Life: Echoes is a modification of the first-person shooter video game Half-Life created by British developer James "MrGnang" Coburn and released on August 10, 2018. The mod was under development for four years and uses the GoldSrc engine.

<i>Half-Life: C.A.G.E.D.</i> 2017 video game

Half-Life: C.A.G.E.D. is a game modification of Half-Life by Cayle George and Future Games Select released on September 21, 2017. Made using the GoldSrc engine, the mod includes a single-player campaign in which the player must escape from a closely guarded prison.

<i>Entropy: Zero 2</i> 2022 video game

Entropy: Zero 2 is a 2022 first-person shooter video game developed and published by Breadmen. It is a single-player modification for Half-Life 2 (2004) and is a sequel to Johnny "Breadman" Richardson's previous project, Entropy: Zero (2017). The game was released on Steam on August 20, 2022, as a free download for owners of Half-Life 2. A Linux version was also released on May 27, 2023.

References

  1. "Amazon.com: Cry of Fear (Official Soundtrack): Bxmmusic & Muddasheep Andreas Rönnberg: MP3 Downloads". Amazon. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  2. "Cry of Fear (PC)". neoseeker.com. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  3. "Cry of Fear on Steam". store.steampowered.com. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  4. "Mods - Cry of Fear". ModDB. 2013-04-23. Retrieved 2024-06-14.
  5. "Paranoia". cry-of-fear.com. Archived from the original on 2014-09-05. Retrieved 2014-09-01.
  6. Bertz, Matt (October 31, 2012). "Get In The Halloween Mood With These Five Fright Fests". Game Informer . Archived from the original on January 24, 2014. Retrieved January 4, 2021.
  7. "Cry of Fear (PC) Co-Op Information". Co-Optimus. BA Productions LLC. Retrieved 29 September 2021.
  8. "UPDATE: Cry of Fear Delayed Over Pricing Confusion | ValveTime.net | Valve News, Forums, Steam". valvetime.net. Archived from the original on 2014-01-18. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  9. "Cry of Fear for Steam delayed due to confusion on it being free : Games". reddit.com. 25 April 2013. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  10. "Reviews - Cry of Fear Game - Mod DB". moddb.com. 23 April 2013. Retrieved 2014-04-12.
  11. "Cry of Fear for PC Reviews - Metacritic". metacritic.com. Retrieved 2024-07-22.
  12. "Cry of Fear Windows game". Mod DB. 23 April 2013. Retrieved 2022-06-05.
  13. 1 2 Couture, Joel (10 May 2013). "CRY OF FEAR [REVIEW]". Mash Those Buttons. Retrieved 18 January 2024.
  14. "CRY OF FEAR HORROR GAME REVIEW". The Advocate. 1 November 2021. Retrieved 18 January 2024.
  15. Antony, Wright (8 November 2020). "Cry of Fear: Modded Horror at its Finest". Medium .
  16. Eric, Sapp (27 February 2012). "This Half-Life Mod is Terrifying". IGN. Retrieved 18 January 2024.

Official Steam page