“Yeah, he’s a Delta operator,” picks up Mulkey. “And at the beginning of the game it’s actually 30 minutes before the end of FEAR. You’re heading to the penthouse residence of Genevieve Aristide, because of all the things the FEAR team and the FEAR point man have been uncovering in the first game.” Obsessive fans may recall the voice of mysterious cigarette-smoking, femme-fatale Genevieve - she was the head of both the now-titular Origin project (mandate: lock up Alma - make her have babies) and the Perseus project (mandate: make Alma's kid able to control an army of clone soldiers, and make him eat people while you’re at it since that would be cool). Her voice closed FEAR with her telling a Senator that “the Origin situation has been resolved” and that “There is some good news, however: the first prototype was a complete success.”

“She’s very connected into what’s going on - all the cloak and dagger and black ops,” explains our man from Monolith. So he might say that Alma has a grudge against her? “Oh yeah, that might be fair...” Mulkey didn’t explain how a common Delta operative has the time-slowing ultra-sensitive reactions of the original game’s point man, but clues may come early in the game when you’re lying prostrate on an operating table as a woman with a snappy business voice looks on. After watching surgeons attempting to save you from the brink of death (and watching spectral assailants devour you whenever you lose consciousness) you wake up alone in the operating theater. This then turns into a Monolith master class in scripted-WTF - Alma has broken out, bits of guts keep falling from air vents, odd scrawling covers the walls and a surface-hanging man-creature is leaping around. “We’re really trying to introduce new soldier types that go beyond having a different coloured uniform,” says Mulkey.