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Cry Of Fear (PC) Game Review



Cry of Fear is an excellent and, quite generously, *free* horror title that I’m sure will please anyone looking for a terrifyingly unsettling, oppressive and lonely nightmare world to explore.



My pros:

-Excellent soundtrack, a great mix of melancholy tunes and nightmarish noise


-Lots of content: It’s a nice long adventure. *and* it contains unlockables, secret areas, multiple endings, and a bunch of custom campaigns built right in! All for free! This game is a wonderful example of how well-made and packed with content a game can be without the need of “triple A” BS and loot box crap.


-the nicest looking environments I’ve ever seen with this engine. The texturing is much more detailed than anything I saw in the classic Half-Life games. The environments are always wonderfully eerie and lonely feeling.


-great sound design: I’m a big fan of atmospheric sound in games, especially a horror game where atmosphere is key. There’s a lot of chilling ambience, and lots of nasty sounding monsters.


-good challenge - even when you play on easy, the game challenges you with the need for strategic game-play - if you reload most guns early, you’ll lose the ammo in that clip. You can only carry a small amount of items at any time, - there’s no magical Resident Evil chest - so you’ll have to pick and choose what to leave behind as you travel through the game. There were a lot of moments where I’d be in the dark, needing a light, but also needing to free a hand to reload my gun. That might sound like a pain to some , but I like that it made everything just that much more tense and challenging.




The story? I’ve only seen one ending, and I feel like there is more to the world to learn through the other endings. From what I’ve seen though, I like the themes of trauma and mental illness presented in it,




The cons:

-Despite my glowing recommendation, I will warn you that there are some bugs and one game-play mechanic I really didn’t care for: the crouch-jumping.
For the bugs, I did find ways past them all thankfully - here’s a couple of tips from my play-through.


-when you launch the game, don’t touch any keys until the main menus loaded up - otherwise it might freeze up.


- if you get a crash upon entering a door, you can find a “64 bit patch” on mod db that may help.



-as for the crouch-jumping, there a couple of parts in the game that this made dreadful, especially the seemingly infamous “train crash” area where you have to use this clunky maneuver to escape an area with a time limit. The other couple of areas I struggled to use this mechanic, were also irritating, but thankfully there was no time limit. One tip I can give: there’s a part where you have to crouch-hop out of a bus window, and the only way I got it to work was by facing away from the window as I tried to get through it, effectively “butt-scooting” my way through.




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