The Fabulous Fear Machine, out today, is a strategy game of engrossing evil
Many are the horror games that haunt the dark, but it takes a real gift for creepy-crawlies to pull off a horror game that's set in the light. I'm not sure The Fabulous Fear Machine - devised by Fictiorama Studios in partnership with AMC and Shudder - is quite that horrifying, but it's certainly chewing on my nerve endings in an engrossing way.
It's a top-down management sim, which might not sound very scary, but just look at those colours - irradiated and unwholesome shades of purple and yellow, spreading over chunky, HyperCard continents emblazoned with pulp comic fonts. The visuals wear away at you like the stink of hydrochloric acid. And then there's that red-eyed, turbaned figure, gazing at you in top left. This is the face of the Fabulous Fear Machine. Its offer: to enable your character's world-toppling ambitions. Its price: that your story will become part of its story. The game is out today, and I've got some thoughts ahead of a possible review.
The Fabulous Fear Machine is a table-top-style espionage-driven experience based around maddening the population of each region so as to bring about an overall objective, like persuading voters to hand over a country's healthcare to your character's sinister pharmaceutical corporation. What an exotic idea!
Care of the Machine, you can dispatch agents to cities so as to extract various psychosocial energies by instigating awful rumours, like "all the lamp posts on my street are secretly Thin Men who want to eat my pancreas" (this scenario is my invention, but it's absolutely representative of the writing in-game). Do so with cunning and patience, and you'll nurture a Fear seed representing the public mood swing you're trying to bring about, slowly flooding each
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