But will Alma be developed into a more tangible threat? She’s such an iconic figure that she’s got to be developed somehow. “Alma will be more physical, she’ll touch you more. It’s going to be very personal and more up in your grill,” he assures. “The first game’s child manifestation was a projection of herself in her last moment of innocence. When her father imprisoned her, impregnated her and forced her to give birth to the player and Paxton Fettel. In this game, we’re going to see her at the point where she was at the end of the game, as a hag, and as a woman.”
One of the levels we’re allowed to play is the first level. This works as a tutorial, as you’d expect, but it also sets the tone of the game. Monolith are no strangers to the movie sensibility – pretty much everything they’ve done has been directly related to, or heavily influenced by, the love of a good movie genre. So, when the death-hardened Delta Force squad we’re a part of finds a dead body – possibly the result of Point Man’s adventures – it’s taken with nervous humour. “It looks like they hit his aorta,” the team’s aspiring doctor suggests, and is roundly mocked for this absurd diagnosis. “Argh,” screams one of my friends, “They hit my aorta!”
Waiting for the elevator, the atmosphere is cordial, friendly, even whimsical. So much so, that we decide to take a look at our fellow combatants close up. The models are better looking and this extends to the enemies you encounter in Project Origin. As mentioned, the samey look of the previous game’s enemies was alleviated only by the fact that they behaved so intelligently. “On the first game, we didn’t have the variety of enemies that we wanted to have. First, you’d have the guy with the face mask with one filter. Then you’d have the guy with two filters. One guy has blue armour and one guy has green. It’s the reality of production that forces you to do what you can,” explains Mulkey.
“So, one of the things we pushed for on this project was greater variety. Especially the idea that in character design, there’s silhouette, colour and motion. So, if we can get variety in those ways, that’s great. So when you fight the Armacham guys, it’s not 400 guys with short-sleeved shirts and mirror shades.” We’re so busy inspecting our teammates and pondering the models that we don’t notice the lift has arrived. The banter ceases as bullets fly past us. This causes our first nervous jump, but it’s more down to the fact that we were behaving like a military knob-end. The level then becomes a series of combat set pieces and tutorials, as we learn to use our new moves.
FEAR made you aware of your legs – not only by looking down and seeing them, but by bringing them into view with moves like the slide. There’s more of that in Project Origin, as you vault over railings and flip tables over to provide yourself with cover. This is something the Armacham forces did in the first game, and granting the player the same power helps to make an area feel like a satisfying game of table-flipping murder chess. The world of FEAR has its own noises – just as Half-Life 2’s health and power stations and the shout of the Combine’s forces are evocative to the point of bringing on a shudder, the enemy barks and instructions are similarly transporting. But while it’s good to be back in the universe that caused much pant-shitting all those three years ago, isn’t it all a bit... bright, colourful? And aren’t these offices a bit... nicer?
