A PR representative provided Play Critically with a review code for this videogame.

The Fear Business is a retro survival horror videogame that evokes aspects of the genre that have worn away since its late 1990s prominence: a tense atmosphere heightened by deadly enemies and scarce resources, puzzles inspired by classic point-and-click adventure videogames, and fixed camera angles that create the feeling of a cheap horror movie come to life. I play as Sarah McPherson, a producer and host for a shlock investigative television show called American Mysteries that sensationalizes rumors, crimes, and scandals across the United States. The latest episode brings Sarah to Black Hill, a small town where travelers have begun to go missing. Her investigation brings her to the Solomon Manor where she witnesses a cult, the Crimson Society, torturing a captive. When Sarah tries to sneak back out of the Manor with her videotaped evidence, she finds her original entrance sealed shut. I must help Sarah to explore the puzzle-filled Manor in search of another way out, all while she is stalked by something that is locked inside with her—something large, persistent, and deadly.

Before getting to the Solomon Manor, The Fear Business begins with a prologue set in a Black Hill motel. Sarah attempts to interview several of the patrons in its attached bar, capturing a local perspective from its patrons about the disappearances in their town on her camcorder. 

It takes some prying before the locals will film their interviews. A young man skulking in the corner, identified only as Arcade Freak, will not speak with Sarah until she beats his high score on the nearby Starship Vector arcade cabinet. Grace, an old woman sitting at a booth, is too worried about her missing grandson Robbie to be interviewed. Eventually, Sarah is approached by a man with his face hidden by a hood and dark glasses. He warns her about the Crimson Society and offers her a ride to the Solomon Manor, which she accepts.

This prologue is odd, filled with subversions, humor, and even a minigame. There’s nothing sinister happening with Grace’s missing grandson; Robbie is found in a men’s bathroom stall, throwing up into a toilet. The Starship Vector arcade game is a fully playable, simplified version of Asteroids. Sarah’s interviews with the bar’s patrons, if she can earn them, are voiced in full motion video cutscenes; they are the only full conversations Sarah has with other characters. This prologue is nothing like the rest of the videogame that succeeds it. 

I assume this prologue is meant to imitate the light-hearted openings of classic horror movies, establishing the innocence and naivete of the protagonists before they are hunted and slaughtered by the story’s monsters. That works in a film medium. In a videogame, it sets up expectations in the first ten minutes of playtime that are not met by the subsequent two hours. It’s a vestigial addition that makes me feel like I’m playing a completely different videogame before I am allowed into the scary, puzzle-filled mansion.

While this prologue feels out of place, it does have the useful function of acclimating me to The Fear Business’ controls in an environment where nothing can harm the player character. Every space Sarah enters is viewed from a single, static angle, as though witnessed through a security camera. When she steps around a corner, enters a doorway, or even walks far enough into a room, then the camera angle shifts to another perspective. The entire world is navigated from these shifting perspectives.

Thanks to decades of videogame design, it is second nature for players to press the joystick or control pad in the direction they wish the player character to travel relative to the camera’s perspective; to move the player character up the screen, they press up, left to move left, and so on. The Fear Business’ constantly shifting camera angles complicate this reflex. When Sarah walks through a doorway and the camera shifts to a new angle, the left side of the camera’s frame jumps in an instant to a completely new perspective.

To keep Sarah’s movements coherent during these jumps, her controls are based on her perspective instead of the camera’s. She handles like a tank. Pressing left or right on the control pad directs her to pivot to her left or right and pressing up or down causes her to step forwards or backwards. By holding up, I direct Sarah to run in the same direction no matter how many times the camera shot changes.

These static camera angles and the related control scheme are classic survival horror, reproduced almost exactly as they were implemented in 1996’s Resident Evil. It creates awkward motion. Moving around the environment is slow; Sarah often steps between camera shots and suddenly finds her path blocked by a decoration that was completely invisible in the previous shot. Interacting with objects is imprecise; I can’t point Sarah directly at an object so she may interact with it. I must first push her in front of the object, then pivot her to face it. 

This awkwardness, defiant to the practiced standards of videogame design, increases the tension. The fixed camera angles make what might be around the corner and even across the room a complete mystery. When Sarah steps into the next shot, she might need to run away from what appears there. The sluggishness of pivoting in place before running forward, not quite in the direction I want Sarah to go, ramps up the feeling of helplessness. It makes the player character feel more like the protagonist of a horror film where inept characters are somehow cornered and butchered by monsters and murderers who seem to teleport between camera cuts.

After leaving the motel, the remainder of The Fear Business is spent inside the Solomon Manor. It’s a small building and a curiously fortified one. When Sarah examines any of its windows, she discovers they are all made from armored glass, justifying why she cannot simply break a window to escape. It’s left an open question whether the Manor’s unbreakable windows and heavy doors are meant to keep intruders outside or keep its occupants inside.

The Manor is two stories tall and contains a couple dozen rooms. It makes up for its small scale by being packed with detail. In a hallway, the camera lingers near the ceiling, peering down at Sarah walking beneath three gibbets, one containing a dead Crimson Society cultist. On the Manor’s second floor is a library where I control Sarah from behind half-full bookshelves, as though I am borrowing the vision of a hidden creature spying on her through the stacks. The basement is like a portal in time to a castle dungeon, complete with torches filling the hallways with flickering light and tiny prison cells sealed by massive wooden doors.

At first the manor seems sinister, but not extraordinary. Then Sarah finds a hidden door leading to the cult’s torture chamber. Another hidden door reveals a twisted distillery where the Crimson Society has industrialized harvesting blood from their victims. Still more hidden doors reveal that passages behind the walls connect almost every room and hallway, letting Sarah slip from one end of the mansion to the other in seconds once she has the right key. The Solomon Manor seems simple at first, but as Sarah’s investigation continues, she uncovers its true complexity. It’s an impressive and tightly-designed space for videogame adventuring.

This complexity reveals itself as Sarah solves the puzzles that abound throughout the Manor. I see signs of these puzzles as soon as she begins exploring. A piano sits in a gallery on the second floor overlooking the dining room below. In a side room, a machine part lies at the bottom of a fish tank filled with ravenous piranha. A trio of levers to raise and lower the gibbets is found in an upstairs hallway, but they are unpowered and a nearby fuse box is missing its fuse. Sarah discovers most of these classic adventure videogame artifacts long before she has the documents or tools needed to solve them.

A significant obstacle Sarah must deal with to solve these puzzles is carrying in her pockets the many puzzle pieces strewn throughout the Manor. She only has four inventory slots to start and may add just two more during her exploration. When she must also carry bandages to restore her health, blunt objects to stun anything she might encounter in the Manor, and keys which often open multiple locked doors, there is precious little inventory space leftover to carry puzzle pieces.

To clear up inventory space, Sarah may store excess items in a chest she finds on a second floor landing, placed roughly at the Manor’s center. Once Sarah discovers this chest, I fall into a comforting groove: Direct Sarah in exploring the Manor’s many rooms in order, carry any items she discovers back to the chest, and when she finally finds a puzzle she possesses the needed item to solve, retrieve it from the chest and use it on the puzzle. This invariably opens more rooms and the process starts all over again. The saving graces are items automatically disappear when they have no more use, preventing them from cluttering Sarah’s pockets or the chest after they have served their purpose, and documents take no space at all and are handily recorded in Sarah’s notebook, which also does not take an inventory spot.

There is another item which can potentially take up Sarah’s precious limited inventory, and she carries it from the moment she enters the Solomon Manor: her camcorder. Its most obvious use is recording the horrifying things Sarah encounters. When it is equipped, holding down a button prompts Sarah to hold it up to her eye, switching my vision to a first-person view that allows me to point her gaze around the room. If anything in the room glows red, lingering the camera on it for a few seconds will add more evidence to Sarah’s video log. There is an achievement for finding and recording all of the evidence in the Manor but it otherwise has no impact on Sarah’s search for an exit.

The camcorder’s more frequent use is via its powerful light. Sarah’s exploration takes place at night during a rainstorm, casting many of the Manor’s rooms into semi- or total darkness. The camcorder’s light is her primary tool for illuminating these spaces. Its most practical function is adding a sparkling effect to items and documents when the light passes over them, making them stand out from the many other objects in the environment that are purely decorative. I could force Sarah to deposit the camcorder into the chest to free up an inventory slot, but I’d be a fool to do so. It’s too essential to her exploration of the Solomon Manor.

In an interesting twist to The Fear Business’ otherwise faithful recreation of classic survival horror, there is only one monster in the Solomon Manor for Sarah to be wary of: Goat Face.

Goat Face is tall and dressed in a white robe splattered in the blood of its victims. Its body appears to be that of a normal human. The difference is its head, a massive goat’s head with empty, black eyes. It’s never quite clear if the creature’s head is an elaborate mask or its actual head, if it is a man or mutant. What is clear is that Goat Face is murderously territorial of its home and spends the entire time Sarah spends in the Solomon Manor hunting for her.

Goat Face can appear at any time and in any place. Sometimes there are warnings when it is nearby. The telltale sign is static lines appearing on the screen as though The Fear Business is a worn VHS tape instead of a videogame. These lines grow in density the closer Goat Face is to Sarah. Sometimes there is no warning at all. Sarah will step between camera shots and suddenly Goat Face is there, slashing at her with a jagged knife.

Goat Face’s swings with its massive knife are not particularly accurate. Most of the strikes it lands on Sarah occur when it suddenly appears beside her, seeming to teleport when the camera is not fixed on it like Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers. It is mostly a threat through intimidation. The moment of panic when Sarah enters a new camera frame and Goat Face appears, the screen fills with static, and the ambient soundtrack turns to a rattling durge is when the creature is at its most deadly.

Goat Face is surprisingly easy to outrun. It may be briefly stunned by hitting it with sticks and pipes Sarah finds around the Manor, though these are breakable and limited in quantity. A greater defensive advantage is its running speed. Sarah can run slightly faster than the creature, its ability to catch her reliant on her getting hung up on the clutter placed around the Manor while she flees through rapidly shifting camera shots. It’s easy for Sarah to outrun Goat Face in the hallways, leaving its line of sight long enough to hide inside a wardrobe or behind a bathtub curtain. It will never look in these hiding places. It will stomp around the room, grumbling about blood and murder, then wander off to hunt elsewhere. 

I know Sarah is truly safe when all the static clears from the screen, restoring it to a crisp, high-definition image. With the coast clear, Sarah is free to resume exploring the Manor and solving its puzzles until she encounters Goat Face again and another chase ensues.

Despite Goat Face’s monstrous stupidity, inevitably its invulnerability and doggedness will wear Sarah down and she will be killed. Her insurance comes from the Devil’s Shrines that appear throughout the Manor. Each Shrine contains a lit candle. If Sarah snuffs the candle, her progress is saved and she will continue from that point the next time Goat Face kills her.

These Devil’s Shrine candles have a few effects that make them unique in survival horror. Each candle may only be snuffed once. This puts a hard cap not only on the number of times Sarah’s progress may be saved, it also limits where it can be saved. It’s a good idea to make sure Sarah has accomplished something significant and that she is well-positioned to move towards her next goal before snuffing another candle, though the Manor’s small size keeps unexpected deaths from necessitating an especially obnoxious retracing of Sarah’s steps.

Snuffing candles has a second, more dramatic effect on my experience. Every extinguished candle lowers the Manor’s light level. By the time all of them are extinguished, the rooms are so dark even the light from Sarah’s camcorder is only of limited use. The Fear Business makes the bold choice of penalizing me for saving too often by making it more difficult to run from Goat Face and to find items around the Manor. Saving conservatively is always a good idea in survival horror. The Fear Business makes it almost a necessity.

I am uncertain The Fear Business will win over anyone who isn’t already a fan of the foundational survival horror videogames it imitates. Its prologue gives a misleading impression of what the remainder of Sarah’s investigation will play like. The Solomon Manor’s puzzles are stock and classic, satisfying to see reproduced here but not introducing any new ideas or twists. Goat Face’s design is drawn from more recent horror videogames, being an unstoppable creature from which Sarah can only run, though again, without any new ideas to make it stand out. The Devil’s Shrine candles are the most interesting addition, forcing me to make strategic decisions not just about when Sarah’s progress is saved, but where. The narrative is slight. The inexplicable title does refer to something in the story, but it arrives so late and is so inconsequential to Sarah’s goals it may as well not exist in the story at all. The Fear Business is a tightly-designed frightener that will fill a spooky evening as long as you’re not expecting anything groundbreaking.