I think it was the fourth time I got killed trying to go downstairs, grab the fuse, go upstairs, bring it to the fuse box, solve the puzzle, and get to the next save point without dying. I leaned back in my chair, took a long, slow drink of water, and began shouting obscenities that I cannot repeat here. Then I took a deep breath, pressed “rewind” and tried again. And it worked the fifth time. At its best, The Horror Job is a very entertaining experience, even if it’s not particularly scary. It can be very annoying when it doesn’t work. I think the good outweighs the bad here, but it can be frustrating in a way I wasn’t expecting.

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, especially Resident Evil. It even looks like a PS1 game. The setup is interesting to say the least. You step into the investigative boots of Sarah McPherson, a journalist who covers strange stories for a show called American Mysteries. His career is in decline and he’s dying to tell a good story. His final chapter brought him to Black Hill, a small town with a population of about 500 people where people began to disappear.

Small town America is a cursed place, brother

You start at the hotel and its small bar, interviewing locals about the disappearances. You can only interview Arcade Freak after he gets his high score on Starship Vector, which is essentially Asteroids. Once you find her missing son, Robbie, you will only be able to interview Grace, the old woman sitting in a corner cabin. Everyone has some pretty wild theories about a local cult. Sarah doesn’t have much luck when a hooded man with dark glasses tells her that the place she really wants to be is Solomon Manor, home of the Crimson Society cult. He offers her a trip, and even though everything is extremely twisted, Sarah is desperate and accepts.

The Conjuring really begins from the moment he sneaks into the mansion. Naturally, creepy cult stuff happens, and Sarah’s “get in, take some footage and get out” plan goes as you’d expect. From there you need to figure out how to navigate the mansion and escape.

Solomon Manor owes much of its design to Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion, and if you’ve ever played a survival horror game you’ll immediately notice the puzzles you need to solve. On the second floor there is a piano with a missing key; A piece of machinery sits at the bottom of an aquarium full of piranhas; many doors are marked with a specific symbol and must be opened with a special key; And as I mentioned at the beginning, the fuse in the fuse box is missing. The manor itself isn’t very big: it’s only two stories high to begin with, but as you explore and start unlocking doors and unlocking secret passages, you’ll discover just how much there is to discover. Exploring the house is by far the most interesting part of The Fear Business, and uncovering its secrets is the best part of the game.

Enter survival horror

Like most survival horror games, your inventory is limited. You can carry four things at a time (you can expand this to six by finding a specific item as you explore), so most of the time you’ll have to toss excess items into a large chest on the second floor of the mansion. Your items are what you’d expect: keys, puzzle pieces, bandages to restore health, etc. Restricting your inventory is interesting but doesn’t make much sense. Why can’t my daughter Sarah carry more stuff? Doesn’t he have pockets? What’s going on? While it encourages backtracking and inventory management, this system mostly feels like it’s there because it’s expected to be there, rather than because it actually improves the game in any meaningful way. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed exploring the mansion and solving the puzzles, but please, Sarah, buy some pants with pockets, girl.

Fear Business’ coolest idea is Sarah’s camera. Like everything else, the camera takes up an inventory slot, but it pulls double duty as Sarah’s light source early on, allowing her to enter first-person, seeing things she might otherwise miss, and recording evidence of the cult’s activities. It’s a neat change that feeds into the game’s menus – the main menu looks like something you’d see on a video camera – and encourages you to shoot, which is… you know, Sarah’s job.

The problem is that Sarah is not alone in the mansion. He shares this space with Goatface, a large, goat-headed monster (a masked man? Some kind of monster with a human body and a goat head? Who knows?) who prowls the mansion. a knife If Goatface sees you, the screen will still fill with static electricity, like a VHS or camcorder tape, until you move away. Sarah is able to fight Goatface with wooden planks and metal pipes, but cannot kill him; Just stun him long enough for him to escape. Goat Face isn’t very scary, but you have to respect him.

Goat, goat faced ones

This whole “unstoppable monster you can’t kill but just hang around most of the time” thing is a nice idea in theory, but it’s not that much fun in practice. First, you can outrun Goatface pretty easily in a straight line, so if you get a head start, your chances of escaping aren’t bad… sometimes. The problem is The Fear Business’ camera and controls. Like the great survival horror games of the past, The Fear Business uses fixed camera angles and tank controls. Normally these things are good and add to the atmosphere of the game… until you have to run away from Goatface. It can be hard to see when running away, as camera angles are constantly changing and static fills the screen when Goatface is nearby. This means that you will die not because you played badly, but because you hit walls, closed doors and other obstacles that you cannot see due to the camera or static effect.

Normally your best bet is to avoid Goat Face altogether. Sometimes the screen fills with static electricity as it gets closer to you. The more static you see, the closer you get and you can plan accordingly. But sometimes that doesn’t happen and when you open a door and turn the corner he’ll be right there. Then your only hope, if you have a weapon, is to stun him and run away until he can hide behind a wardrobe or shower curtain. Goatface never looks at these areas unless he sees you enter, so if you can transform into an unseen area, you’re in good shape. He will come into the room, grumble about blood and death, that you can’t hide, and then leave.

Great… when it works. But having her sneak up on you unannounced sucks, and not being able to see where you’re going or control Sarah the way you want while she’s running means you’re going to die to her at least a few times. times. Eventually, I started to let Goatface kill me if I had saved him when he found me. It took less time than hoping I could escape when I couldn’t see.

Blow out the candles and make a wish

Which brings me to The Fear Business’ other mixed bag: the save system. Savings in The Fear Business are limited, as you’d expect. But there are no ink ribbons and typewriters. This time it’s the Devil’s Temples. Blow out the candle once and you save your progress. However, once you use a Satanic Temple you can’t use it again, so you’ll want to make sure you’re in a good place before blowing out the candle. I made the mistake of using one when I had to backtrack a bunch to complete my next objective, resulting in the first paragraph of this review. It was extremely frustrating, and mostly I felt like I was just waiting to get lucky for the run where Goatface wouldn’t randomly appear next to me, rather than accomplishing anything because I played well.

Demon Temples also eliminate light in some rooms, meaning that using them makes it harder to see. In some areas this isn’t that big of a deal. In others, it may be very important. It’s a great twist on the traditional survival horror rescue system, and I quite liked it. I wish I’d saved Goat Face in a bad place so it wouldn’t randomly pop up next to me with no warning and make me replay the same sections over and over again.

All in all, The Fear Business is a pretty solid homage to the horror games of the past. While not particularly original, the PS1 aesthetic works well enough to make up for Solomon Manor’s sharp design and challenging puzzles. It’s not a long game (it’ll probably take you 3 to 5 hours to play through the first game), but there are plenty of challenges to complete and secrets to find, and it looks ripe for a sprint. I just wish it was better controlled and Goatface wasn’t so frustrating to deal with. 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 next time you’re investigating mysterious disappearances, okay? If a man offered to go to a mansion infested with cults, I would immediately go home.

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

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been working on plays since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His game writing has also been featured on 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 it at X @bywillborger.