The Fear Business review: What's old is new again

I think it was about the fourth time that I’d been killed trying to go downstairs, grab the fuse, trek it back upstairs, bring it to the fuse box, solve the puzzle, and then get to the next save point without dying that I sat back in my chair, took a long, slow drink of water, and started yelling explitives that I can’t repeat here. Then I took a deep breath, hit “rewind,” and tried again. And the fifth time, it worked. When The Fear Business is at its best, it’s a very fun, if not particularly scary, experience. When it doesn’t work, it can be very annoying. I think the good outweighs the bad here, but it can be frustrating in a way I didn’t expect.

The Fear Business isn’t a particularly original game. It owes every idea it has to other games, especially the survival horror games of the PS1 era, particularly Resident Evil. It even looks like a PS1 game. The setup is, at least, interesting. You step into the investigative boots of Sarah McPherson, a journalist who covers strange stories for a show called American Mysteries. Her career is on the downswing, and she’s desperate to break a good story. Her latest episode has brought her to Black Hill, a small town with a population of about 500 people, where folks have started to go missing.

Small-town America is hella haunted, bro

You start off in the hotel and the small bar attached to it, interviewing the locals about the disappearances. You can only interview the Arcade Freak after beating his high score in the Starship Vector game in the corner, which is essentially Asteroids. You’ll only get to interview Grace, the old woman hanging out in a booth in a corner, once you find her son Robbie, who has gone missing. Everyone has what sounds like some pretty crazy theories about a local cult. Sarah’s not having much luck when a hooded man in dark glasses tells her that where she really wants to be is Solomon Manor, which is where the cult, the Crimson Society is. He offers her a ride, and while this whole thing is super skeevy, Sarah’s desperate and accepts.

It’s once she’s snuck into the manor that The Fear Business really begins. Naturally, there’s creepy cult stuff going down, and Sarah’s plan of “get in, get some footage, and get out” goes about as well as you’d expect. From there y’all have to figure out how to navigate the manor and escape.

Solomon Manor owes most of its design to the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil, and you’ll notice the puzzles you’ll need to solve almost immediately if you’ve ever played a survival horror game before. There’s a piano on the second floor missing a key; there’s a machine part sitting at the bottom of a fish tank filled with piranhas; several doors are marked with a specific symbol, and must be opened with a special key; and, as I mentioned at the beginning, a fuse box is missing a fuse. The manor itself isn’t huge: it’s only two stories initially, but as you explore and start unlocking doors and opening secret passages, you’ll discover just how much there is to explore. Exploring the house is by far the most interesting part of The Fear Business, and revealing its secrets is the best part of the game.

Enter the survival horror

Like most survival horror games, your inventory is limited. You can carry four things at a time (which you can expand to six by finding a certain item as you explore), so you’ll often have to dump excess items in a large chest on the manor’s second floor. Your items are what you’d expect: keys, puzzle pieces, bandages to restore health, and so on. Restricting your inventory is interesting, but it doesn’t really make sense. Why can’t my girl Sarah hold more stuff? Does she just not have pockets? What’s going on? While it does encourage backtracking and inventory management, this system mostly just feels like it's there because it’s expected to be there, not because it enhances the game in a truly meaningful way. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed exploring the mansion and solving its puzzles, but please, Sarah, get some pants with pockets, girl.

The Fear Business’s coolest idea is Sarah’s camcorder. Like everything else, the camcorder takes up an inventory slot, but it pulls double duty as Sarah’s light source early on and allows her to enter first person, see stuff she might normally miss, and record evidence of the cult’s activity. This is a neat twist that feeds into the game’s menus — the main menu looks like a menu you’d see on a camcorder — and it encourages you to capture footage, which is… y’know, Sarah’s job.

The problem is that Sarah isn’t alone in the manor. She shares the space with Goat Face, a large, goat-headed monstrosity (is it a man in a mask? Some sort of monster with the body of a man and the head of a goat? Who knows?) who prowls the manor with a knife. If Goat Face sees you, the screen will be filled with static — again, like a VHS or camcorder tape — until you can get away. Sarah can fight Goat Face off with wooden planks and metal pipes, but she can’t kill him; just stun him long enough to get away. Goat Face isn't particularly scary, but you do have to respect him.

Goat, goat facers

This whole "unstoppable monster you can't kill but most navigate around" thing is a neat idea in theory, but not all that much fun in practice. First, you can pretty easily outrun Goat Face in a straight line, so if you can get a head start, your odds of escaping aren't bad... sometimes. The issue is The Fear Business’s camera and controls. Like the great survival horror games of yesteryear, The Fear Business uses fixed camera angles and tank controls. Normally, these things are fine, and add to the atmosphere of the game… right until you have to run away from Goat Face. Because the camera angles are constantly changing and static fills the screen whenever Goat Face is nearby, it can be hard to see while you’re running away. That means you’re going to die, not because you’re playing badly, but because you’re running into walls, closed doors, and other obstacles you can’t see because of either the camera or the static effect.

Normally, your best bet is to avoid Goat Face entirely. Sometimes, the screen will fill with static as he gets close to you. The more static you see, the closer he is, and you can plan accordingly. Sometimes, though, that won’t happen, and you’ll open a door and round a corner and he’ll be right there. Your only hope then is to stun him if you have a weapon and run until you can hide in a wardrobe or behind a shower curtain. Goat Face never looks in these areas unless he sees you enter them, so if you can make it into one unseen, you’re good. He’ll come into the room, growl about blood and death and you not being able to hide, and then leave.

It’s great… when it works. But having him sneak up on you without warning sucks, and not being able to see where you’re going or control Sarah the way you’d like when you’re running away means you’re going to die to him at least a few times. Eventually, I just started letting Goat Face kill me if I’d just saved when he found me. It took less time than hoping I would be able to run away when I couldn’t see.

Blow out the candles and make a wish

Which brings me to The Fear Business’s other mixed bag: the save system. Saves in The Fear Business are limited, as you’d expect. There's no ink ribbons and typewriters, though. This time, it's Devil Shrines. Snuff the candle at one, and you’ll save your progress. But once you use a Devil’s Shrine, you can’t use it again, so you’ll want to be sure you’re in a good place before you blow that candle out. I made the mistake of using one when I had to backtrack a bunch to complete my next objective, and that resulted in this review’s first paragraph. It was exceptionally annoying, and I mostly felt like I was waiting to get lucky for the run where Goat Face wouldn’t just randomly appear next to me rather than accomplishing anything because I was playing well.

Devil’s Shrines also remove the light in some of the rooms, which means using them makes it harder to see. In some areas, that’s not a big deal. In others, it can matter a lot. It’s a cool twist on the traditional survival horror save system, and I liked it quite a bit. I just wish Goat Face wouldn’t randomly appear next to me without warning and make me replay the same sections over and over and over again if I saved in a bad place.

All told, The Fear Business is a pretty solid homage to the horror games of yesteryear. It’s not particularly original, but the PS1 aesthetic, sharp design of Solomon Manor, and compelling puzzles work well enough to make up for its annoyances. It’s not a long game (your first playthrough will probably take between 3 and 5 hours), but there are several difficulties to complete and secrets to find, and it seems ripe for speedrunning. I just wish it controlled better and dealing with Goat Face wasn’t so bloody annoying. But if you’re looking for a horror game to spend an evening with, you could do a lot worse. Just… you know, try to be smarter than Sarah the next time you’re investigating mysterious disappearances, yeah? If a dude had offered me a ride to a cult-infested mansion, I would have just gone home.

This review is based on a digital copy of the game provided by the publisher. The Fear Business is available now on PC.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.