The Fabulous Fear Machine is a delicious pulp game about the horrors of propaganda

engadget.com:

Did you know AMC makes video games? The television network responsible for Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead has a full-blown publishing label for video games, and it’s shepherded four titles to market since 2020. Its first was a real-time flight simulator from the NYU Game Center Incubator called Airplane Mode, which trapped players in the window seat of a commercial airliner for six literal hours, complete with the small luxuries and major annoyances of actually flying coach. AMC’s IFC channel even produced the in-flight safety video for that game.

So, yeah, AMC publishes video games. Its latest project is a collaboration with Shudder, the network’s horror-focused streaming service, and it’s developed by Fictiorama Studios, the team behind 2018’s Do Not Feed the Monkeys. Their new title is called The Fabulous Fear Machine and it’s a cheeky real-time strategy game about using terror to gain ultimate power. It’s a heady topic presented in a pulp art style, with a magical fortune-telling automaton, exaggerated stakes and dramatic noir dialogue softening the narrative’s serious edge. Think Tales from the Crypt, but with propaganda and disinformation as the target subject. It’s kitsch, it’s camp, and at times it makes you pause and say, huh. Put simply, I adore it.

The Fabulous Fear Machine is a dense game that responds to your decisions moment-to-moment and then collects your story in the pages of an old-school comic book. The fortune teller, encased in glass and lights, uses this comic to fuel its own supernatural whims, but all of that is secondary to your personal quests for control, wealth and power. The game features multiple Masters of the Machine, each with a unique goal, and it kicks off with a brilliant,