F.E.A.R. Extraction Point
One last step in taking this backwards-ish...
Extraction Point is the single best F.E.A.R. game at doing that thing the series is ostensibly heavily about: being scary. By the time I'd completed Extraction Point, I was having the kind of intrusive thoughts that frequently precede actual nightmares, and there were several moments that quite viscerally got to me.
It's unfortunate it's pretty flawed in terms of actual plot and code, then.
Like Perseus Mandate, it can eat some of your progress when ending a level, and it's got the same distracting physics glitches involving bodies making impact noises far more than they should. (Though to the best of my awareness it's otherwise less glitchy than Perseus Mandate, oddly enough)
Plot-wise, it's... well, it's basically a bit of a retread. In F.E.A.R. you fought Paxton Fettel, released Alma('s psychic sort-of-a-ghost signature), discovered that Armacham is shady at best and horrible at worst, and then escaped after a giant explosion only for there to be a dumb and obvious stinger of Alma crawling onto the helicopter because the original F.E.A.R. prioritizes horror tropes over coherent storytelling. In Extraction Point, the helicopter crashes -presumably due to Alma- and it's time for you and your two buddies (Jin and Douglas) to escape again. Only it turns out Paxton isn't completely dead, with the game itself hanging a lampshade on it ("I know it doesn't make sense," saysthe writer Paxton Fettel) and then moving on with no actual explanation, so he can reactivate the Replicants so they can be the default enemy of the game still, and the new-ish story elements proceed to reiterate that Armacham is fairly awful and... yeah.
By the end of the game, the only thing that's different from the original F.E.A.R.'s ending is that now Jin and Douglas are dead oh and now Point Man is trapped in the city. That's a pretty poor plot progression right there. And as I commented with Perseus Mandate, the story just kind of ends: you get to the new helicopter that's going to extract you, it gets blown up for some reason, and then the game ends on Paxton repeating his spiel about having dreamed of a horrible war-torn future and ROLL CREDITS. It's not even very effective as a surprise grimdark ending, for all that it means Point Man is now trapped in the city.
But, while the actual plot progression is lacking that doesn't mean the game's plot is pure disaster. (Like F.E.A.R. 2's is) One of the big things about Extraction Point -that highlights one of the original campaign's major flaws- is that Extraction Point has a coherent and clear idea of what's going on with the characters and how their behavior should be a logical outgrowth of their behavior. Where in the original F.E.A.R. Alma's behavior is a series of stock horror tropes that sometimes logically align with everything we're told and at other times are her trying to murder her own child while the plot emphasizes that 'wanting her kids back' is pretty much her major drive as a pseudo-ghost with 'get revenge on the people who took her kids away in the first place' being pretty much a sub-objective... in Extraction Point Alma's behavior is an actual outgrowth of her motives. While there's a couple of times she maybe tries to actually murder you -though it's worth noting these are placed early in the game, and if the game was made more or less front-to-back like a lot of games are it's possible the developers were just going off how the original game works at the time and then later realized this is dumb but weren't willing to gut all the work they'd done on existing levels- mostly she tends to act as a subtle guide and occasionally straight-up murders your enemies for you.
Generally in Extraction Point if Little Girl Alma appears somewhere, she's pointing you toward your next objective. Sometimes she's wandering off to go kill your enemies. This makes sense, since Point Man is her beloved son who she wants back: she's being a Momma Bear from beyond the grave! My favorite instance by far is also one of the game's best scare moments, surprisingly: at one point you're climbing a ladder, Adult Alma lunges out and shoves you off the ladder, and when you go climbing again you start hearing the sounds of combat and proceed to find a bunch of dead Replicants in tight quarters they would've been difficult to safely fight in. (Though Alma left the biggest one for you to kill, for whatever reason)
This is really clever and very much in line with how good supernatural horror stuff tends to work, though it requires you to have played the original F.E.A.R. for it to have the proper impact; very late in the original F.E.A.R. campaign there's a couple of sequences where Adult Alma is walking toward you and if you let her touch you you die, no ifs ands or buts. As such, the image of Adult Alma in your face making to touch you is alarming on a very immediate level... but like any good supernatural story in which spooky forces do scary things for their own reasons, Alma wasn't trying to scare you, she was trying to delay you while she went and took care of those big mean scary Replicants for you because she's an awesome mom like that. It's just she's a psychic ghost thing and apparently talking is rather beyond her and probably manifesting at all is a bit of an effort so she appears briefly, does something that will delay you a lot for little effort on her part, and then does her thing.
It's by far the most memorable moment for spooking me in Extraction Point.
But it's not the only one!
Extraction Point also has a really good paranormal enemy that looks pretty much like a remaquel Sectoid only with glowing red eyes and everything else transparent and almost impossible to see that runs around really fast, and tends to perform hit-and-run attacks on you. A semi-invisible enemy stalking you is already a bit nerve-wracking but the ghost Sectoids specifically performing a hit-and-run actually is a nice mesh with slow-mo, as frequently what'll happen is you take damage, trigger slow-mo in maybe a bit of a panic, and while you're whirling around trying to find them they're already a good chunk away from you and are going to vanish around a corner and attack you from who-knows-where in a minute. This can be contrasted against the Predator-cloaking Replicant ninjas from the original F.E.A.R. campaign, who though their visual effects are impressive, are not really used in an effectively scary manner; you get substantial warning that they're coming, and they have a bad habit of lingering in your face for so long after a strike that even if you didn't see them coming and vaporize them with your shotgun before they landed a punch you're certainly going to immediately reduce them to giblets before they get a chance to do anything else. The ghost Sectoids also tend to be encountered in blood-soaked environments, which even if you're unmoved by that facet because it means nothing within gameplay (Like me) it has the practical implication that it's surprisingly easy to overlook their glowing eyes which you'd really expect to undermine their near-invisibility. The overall result is surprisingly nerve-wracking!
Douglas' death is also handled surprisingly well as an unsettling experience, and I particularly like how trying to defend himself from the Creepy Things is what triggers them actually attacking him. It makes sense internally, it's consistent with good supernatural horror having reasons behind why the Scary Things do what they do, and it's also genuinely a bit unsettling in the context of a shooter game where your default safe behavior is to shoot everything that moves. It's too bad Extraction Point itself doesn't follow through on this on a gameplay level -you'll have to go play multiplayer F.3.A.R. for that, where one mode has Little Girl Alma wandering around and if you linger nearby her for too long or make the mistake of shooting her she will murder you- but it's still a case of Extraction Point using the intersection of 'this is a horror game' and 'this is a shooter game' to good effect instead of having the two elements operating heavily at odds with each other. (A problem common to many horror games, be they shooters or some other murder-everything-everywhere genre, but the original F.E.A.R. is one of the more egregious examples)
The game is also notably more ambitious than the original F.E.A.R. campaign is with its visual effects during spooking sequences. (Unlike Perseus Mandate, which largely avoided spooking sequences entirely, and when it did use them was largely fairly uncreative and uninteresting. The shadow water creatures were something of an exception, I suppose, but it's telling I completely forgot to mention them in the Perseus Mandate post itself) They don't all work, but then most of the ones in the original F.E.A.R. don't work particularly well either, so TimeGate isn't really dropping the ball here. If anything they've got a higher ratio of successes! I especially like the twist-y messing-with-gravity sequences, both in terms of them being technically impressive and in terms of them being genuinely a bit disorienting.
You might notice I didn't really talk about the gameplay of Extraction Point. That's because it's solid but largely not exceptional or particularly new. There's a few odd missteps, such as the very strange decision to make a new, even higher tier of mecha enemy, have you fight two of them in a row when you're like 80% of the way through the game as your introduction to them, and then never show up again (Shouldn't these have been the final boss or something?), and I will never get over the absurdity of the Laser weapon having visible travel time in slow-mo, but for the most part the gameplay is pretty much 'more F.E.A.R.' I do like the new minigun-wielding armored enemy with a shield, though. They're a legit cool enemy, and I like that F.3.A.R. did a similar riot shield enemy. (Though one with a substantially downgraded weapon)
But if you're wanting a solid game in terms of the gunplay, the original F.E.A.R. probably has overall better execution, and between the coding flaws and the story retreading aspect I'd be somewhat hesitant to actually recommend it to others, but it's by far my favorite entry in the series. (Yes, even over F.3.A.R. It's really good as a game and has a coherent plot and yadda yadda yadda, but it's so utterly lacking in fearfulness that I actually forgot to even think of it as a horror game)
Extraction Point is the single best F.E.A.R. game at doing that thing the series is ostensibly heavily about: being scary. By the time I'd completed Extraction Point, I was having the kind of intrusive thoughts that frequently precede actual nightmares, and there were several moments that quite viscerally got to me.
It's unfortunate it's pretty flawed in terms of actual plot and code, then.
Like Perseus Mandate, it can eat some of your progress when ending a level, and it's got the same distracting physics glitches involving bodies making impact noises far more than they should. (Though to the best of my awareness it's otherwise less glitchy than Perseus Mandate, oddly enough)
Plot-wise, it's... well, it's basically a bit of a retread. In F.E.A.R. you fought Paxton Fettel, released Alma('s psychic sort-of-a-ghost signature), discovered that Armacham is shady at best and horrible at worst, and then escaped after a giant explosion only for there to be a dumb and obvious stinger of Alma crawling onto the helicopter because the original F.E.A.R. prioritizes horror tropes over coherent storytelling. In Extraction Point, the helicopter crashes -presumably due to Alma- and it's time for you and your two buddies (Jin and Douglas) to escape again. Only it turns out Paxton isn't completely dead, with the game itself hanging a lampshade on it ("I know it doesn't make sense," says
By the end of the game, the only thing that's different from the original F.E.A.R.'s ending is that now Jin and Douglas are dead oh and now Point Man is trapped in the city. That's a pretty poor plot progression right there. And as I commented with Perseus Mandate, the story just kind of ends: you get to the new helicopter that's going to extract you, it gets blown up for some reason, and then the game ends on Paxton repeating his spiel about having dreamed of a horrible war-torn future and ROLL CREDITS. It's not even very effective as a surprise grimdark ending, for all that it means Point Man is now trapped in the city.
But, while the actual plot progression is lacking that doesn't mean the game's plot is pure disaster. (Like F.E.A.R. 2's is) One of the big things about Extraction Point -that highlights one of the original campaign's major flaws- is that Extraction Point has a coherent and clear idea of what's going on with the characters and how their behavior should be a logical outgrowth of their behavior. Where in the original F.E.A.R. Alma's behavior is a series of stock horror tropes that sometimes logically align with everything we're told and at other times are her trying to murder her own child while the plot emphasizes that 'wanting her kids back' is pretty much her major drive as a pseudo-ghost with 'get revenge on the people who took her kids away in the first place' being pretty much a sub-objective... in Extraction Point Alma's behavior is an actual outgrowth of her motives. While there's a couple of times she maybe tries to actually murder you -though it's worth noting these are placed early in the game, and if the game was made more or less front-to-back like a lot of games are it's possible the developers were just going off how the original game works at the time and then later realized this is dumb but weren't willing to gut all the work they'd done on existing levels- mostly she tends to act as a subtle guide and occasionally straight-up murders your enemies for you.
Generally in Extraction Point if Little Girl Alma appears somewhere, she's pointing you toward your next objective. Sometimes she's wandering off to go kill your enemies. This makes sense, since Point Man is her beloved son who she wants back: she's being a Momma Bear from beyond the grave! My favorite instance by far is also one of the game's best scare moments, surprisingly: at one point you're climbing a ladder, Adult Alma lunges out and shoves you off the ladder, and when you go climbing again you start hearing the sounds of combat and proceed to find a bunch of dead Replicants in tight quarters they would've been difficult to safely fight in. (Though Alma left the biggest one for you to kill, for whatever reason)
This is really clever and very much in line with how good supernatural horror stuff tends to work, though it requires you to have played the original F.E.A.R. for it to have the proper impact; very late in the original F.E.A.R. campaign there's a couple of sequences where Adult Alma is walking toward you and if you let her touch you you die, no ifs ands or buts. As such, the image of Adult Alma in your face making to touch you is alarming on a very immediate level... but like any good supernatural story in which spooky forces do scary things for their own reasons, Alma wasn't trying to scare you, she was trying to delay you while she went and took care of those big mean scary Replicants for you because she's an awesome mom like that. It's just she's a psychic ghost thing and apparently talking is rather beyond her and probably manifesting at all is a bit of an effort so she appears briefly, does something that will delay you a lot for little effort on her part, and then does her thing.
It's by far the most memorable moment for spooking me in Extraction Point.
But it's not the only one!
Extraction Point also has a really good paranormal enemy that looks pretty much like a remaquel Sectoid only with glowing red eyes and everything else transparent and almost impossible to see that runs around really fast, and tends to perform hit-and-run attacks on you. A semi-invisible enemy stalking you is already a bit nerve-wracking but the ghost Sectoids specifically performing a hit-and-run actually is a nice mesh with slow-mo, as frequently what'll happen is you take damage, trigger slow-mo in maybe a bit of a panic, and while you're whirling around trying to find them they're already a good chunk away from you and are going to vanish around a corner and attack you from who-knows-where in a minute. This can be contrasted against the Predator-cloaking Replicant ninjas from the original F.E.A.R. campaign, who though their visual effects are impressive, are not really used in an effectively scary manner; you get substantial warning that they're coming, and they have a bad habit of lingering in your face for so long after a strike that even if you didn't see them coming and vaporize them with your shotgun before they landed a punch you're certainly going to immediately reduce them to giblets before they get a chance to do anything else. The ghost Sectoids also tend to be encountered in blood-soaked environments, which even if you're unmoved by that facet because it means nothing within gameplay (Like me) it has the practical implication that it's surprisingly easy to overlook their glowing eyes which you'd really expect to undermine their near-invisibility. The overall result is surprisingly nerve-wracking!
Douglas' death is also handled surprisingly well as an unsettling experience, and I particularly like how trying to defend himself from the Creepy Things is what triggers them actually attacking him. It makes sense internally, it's consistent with good supernatural horror having reasons behind why the Scary Things do what they do, and it's also genuinely a bit unsettling in the context of a shooter game where your default safe behavior is to shoot everything that moves. It's too bad Extraction Point itself doesn't follow through on this on a gameplay level -you'll have to go play multiplayer F.3.A.R. for that, where one mode has Little Girl Alma wandering around and if you linger nearby her for too long or make the mistake of shooting her she will murder you- but it's still a case of Extraction Point using the intersection of 'this is a horror game' and 'this is a shooter game' to good effect instead of having the two elements operating heavily at odds with each other. (A problem common to many horror games, be they shooters or some other murder-everything-everywhere genre, but the original F.E.A.R. is one of the more egregious examples)
The game is also notably more ambitious than the original F.E.A.R. campaign is with its visual effects during spooking sequences. (Unlike Perseus Mandate, which largely avoided spooking sequences entirely, and when it did use them was largely fairly uncreative and uninteresting. The shadow water creatures were something of an exception, I suppose, but it's telling I completely forgot to mention them in the Perseus Mandate post itself) They don't all work, but then most of the ones in the original F.E.A.R. don't work particularly well either, so TimeGate isn't really dropping the ball here. If anything they've got a higher ratio of successes! I especially like the twist-y messing-with-gravity sequences, both in terms of them being technically impressive and in terms of them being genuinely a bit disorienting.
You might notice I didn't really talk about the gameplay of Extraction Point. That's because it's solid but largely not exceptional or particularly new. There's a few odd missteps, such as the very strange decision to make a new, even higher tier of mecha enemy, have you fight two of them in a row when you're like 80% of the way through the game as your introduction to them, and then never show up again (Shouldn't these have been the final boss or something?), and I will never get over the absurdity of the Laser weapon having visible travel time in slow-mo, but for the most part the gameplay is pretty much 'more F.E.A.R.' I do like the new minigun-wielding armored enemy with a shield, though. They're a legit cool enemy, and I like that F.3.A.R. did a similar riot shield enemy. (Though one with a substantially downgraded weapon)
But if you're wanting a solid game in terms of the gunplay, the original F.E.A.R. probably has overall better execution, and between the coding flaws and the story retreading aspect I'd be somewhat hesitant to actually recommend it to others, but it's by far my favorite entry in the series. (Yes, even over F.3.A.R. It's really good as a game and has a coherent plot and yadda yadda yadda, but it's so utterly lacking in fearfulness that I actually forgot to even think of it as a horror game)
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