The Fear Business

I am not someone who enjoys run and hide style horror games very much, but I do love fixed camera style survival horror and I will take a swing at this sort of game because often there's enough there despite my grievances to make it worthwhile - which was the case in both Night of the Scissors and Cannibal Abduction, so I was looking forward to this one. Sadly, although there's a lot I really like here, I find the stalker to be way too hard to shake off in this one and it has driven me to drop it. I will still recommend checking it out for anyone who likes puppet combo games or the games made by this developer previously as I am sure you'll get more out of it than I did. If you want more of a resident evil/silent hill sort of fixed camera game, this is probably not going to do it for you. I was intrigued by the plot, the set up, the level design and the visuals. I do think the inventory size is more of a hinderance than anything else though. The camera and the notebook should probably not take up slots and just let us have 5 slots free. As far as I can tell there's only 1 item box and pretty seriously limited saves so there's just a huge amout of running back and forth and risking losing progress. I really dig the save system actually, the lighting of candles/blowing them out is a really great idea. Also, the map is frustrating as hell. Having nothing marked other than doors and wether they are locked or not is kind of not enough in a game like this. Obviously there's always going to be a degree of personal preference here, I tend to like my survival horror maps to be clear and cleanly marked with the basic things I have found that are relevant, you know, save points, item boxes, unsolved puzzles. And for some games the lack of map detail can work, I just think between the tiny inventory (3 useable slots before the upgrade) and the borderlne worthless map it feels like the game is trying to maximize the chances we run into the stalker in a pretty annoying way. Honestly, I'd be annoyed with these things regardless but I'd suck it up and keep playing if there were an easy mode to mitigate the frustration. I don't often pine for an easy mode in horror games, usually I want a hard mode to dive head first into, but in this case I guess it's the opposite. Oh well. Sometimes you just have to admit that maybe a game isn't for you. It's just harder to stomach when it has so much you likve about it. Give it a go if you lean more into the clock tower/puppet combo style, I'm sure you'll have a blast here.