Fear Effect

About Fear Effect

Fear Effect (2000) is Kronos Digital's cinematic, four-disc action-adventure in which three mercenaries in a 2050 Hong Kong hunt a Triad boss's daughter and stumble into a pact with demons.

Fear Effect in Depth

Around 2050, Wee Ming Lam, daughter of a powerful Hong Kong Triad boss, disappears, and three mercenaries, Hana Tsu-Vachel, Royce Glas and Jacob "Deke" DeCourt, set out to kidnap her before her father's men find her and hold her for ransom. She has vanished into the fictional Shan Xi protectorate, where Hana once worked in a brothel. What begins as a simple snatch-and-grab becomes a fiasco: Mr Lam owes his fortune and power to a pact with demons, and Wee Ming, a paper doll given life, is to be a sacrifice.

Its unshaded characters, textured to resemble cel-shading, made it one of the first games to attempt the technique, and instead of pre-rendered 2D backgrounds its environments are streaming or looping full-motion video, filling four discs. The player controls Hana, Deke or Glas through areas full of human and inhuman enemies with survival horror-style tank controls, but can run and shoot at the same time, fire two guns at separate targets and duck and roll away from fire, with puzzles between the action. The title refers to its life bar, a pulsing EKG that beats faster and turns red as the character is hurt, and calming acts, such as solving a puzzle or a stealth kill from behind, bring it back to green.

Making Fear Effect

Kronos Digital Entertainment developed it and Eidos Interactive published it for the PlayStation in 2000. It received mainly positive reviews, praised for its cinematic presentation and unique visuals but criticised for its difficulty; Edge praised its tight script and distinctive graphics but found its play unbalanced. A prequel, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, followed a year later.