When stories about the good guys start to get boring, taking on the role of the bad guys, even in a managerial position, can be a breath of fresh air you didn't know you needed. This is the promise of The fabulous fear machine, a game in which you will have to use all your intelligence to sow fear and manage the influence and power that comes from it.
The fact that developed by Fictionorama Studios It might seem like a simple manager of seven resources, but beneath the surface of the apparent simplicity hide layers of variables that will stimulate strategies in you capable of providing you with many hours of fun. The other strong point of this game, then, is its pulp horror graphics that combine perfectly with the theme of the town fair machine that for the price of a penny can make even the most perverse wish for global domination come true.
A disturbing premise
The Fabulous Fear Machine is a collection of three stories (plus the tutorial), each divided into missions that can have a varying number of objectives. Each of these adventures, graphically represented as a comic drawn in the pulp horror style, is the story of an inept and ambitious person who dreams much bigger than what he is willing to face: with the help of a Fair Machine he will be able to make it come true. But with one condition: when this wish comes true, whoever expressed it must pay his debt.
This Machine has the shape of the classic mechanical fortune teller that American movies (Big, not to mention Futurama) have taught us to associate with the occult and, as in the most iconic horror movies, it makes available to those who play cards that, Over the course of the levels, they will go to implant a fear in a territory (there are eight different ones, divided into four categories) that will weaken the confidence of the population to the point of making it malleable enough to absorb a message: the desire of those who control The Fabulous Fear Machine.
Without spoiling the surprise, the first adventure shows a young biotech researcher in command of the Machine that She dreams of being the owner of the world in the pharmaceutical field and is willing to do anything to achieve her goal. In your missions your objective will be to take control first of the British Isles, then of Europe and then of the world using viruses, corruption and espionage to penetrate the unconscious of the population and propose yourself as the only possible option to quell fears. that she herself instilled in him. According to the law of "he who makes it, he waits", however, not everything goes as planned and the house will always win.
Letters and Legends
The structure of The Fabulous Fear Machine is quite intuitive: on a map there are nerve centers (cities) in which it is possible to extract the necessary resources to enhance fears and defeat rivals. As masters of the Machine, you will command its agents, the entities without which a nerve center does not produce the resource assigned to it. The currency that drives the game's economy is oil: you will receive between 800 and 1000 at the beginning of the game, then, in cities already conquered by fear, you can install a drill to extract more. However, as time passes, the game world will begin to require oil regardless of your actions (a mechanic called "the Machine's flame"), so expand your mining efforts It must continue to be a priority in every game.
There are four major spheres of influence in the game world, each one with two specific fears: the world of Power is divided into fear of conspiracies and that of the future; The form is that aspect of society in which the fear of aging and pain resides; The sphere of the Passions corresponds to the terror of violence and death; and fear of the Occult includes fear of the irrational and the unknowable. The Legends that you will plant in the territory through cards will refer to a sphere of influence and two fears that, many times, belong to two different spheres of influence. This way you can more easily fulfill the requirements of the game's missions.
The objective of a level, in fact, is spread a message which will help make the protagonist's wish come true. This may require you to simply spread fear or instill a specific terror, such as that of death or pain, to lead citizens to seek refuge in the ideas you wish to spread. Legends can level up, increasing their effectiveness, but to do so you will need to have one of the eight available resources (Politics, Gaia, Blood, Visions, Fate, Pop, Science and Root) that your agents must extract in the cities that act as focal points. During each game the Legends are limited, as are the spaces where they can be placed: you will have to carefully choose which terror benefits which objective.
Spokes in the wheels: rivals and utopias
Each in-game event in The Fabulous Fear Machine requires a number of days proportional to its value. Extracting three Political units, for example, takes 20 days, while infiltrating your rivals' base can take up to 35. These adversaries, whom your agents They will have to spy to discover their weak points., they will occupy spaces in your cities with penalties that reduce the power of fear in that area. To destroy them you will have to find incriminating material about them and use it by spending the appropriate resources. You will often find yourself in a race against time to defuse these optimism bombs because the longer they spend in an area, the more the adversaries' influence will increase: if it reaches the borders of the region, you will have lost that territory forever, one of The conditions of the game end when the available time runs out. Each rival has a series of lives and to take them away it is necessary to eliminate the penalties that he imposes, each of which will cost him from one to three hearts, after which he will be defeated.
Another obstacle to positivity in this game, then, are utopias, rainbow-edged cards that override some parameters of fear on the playing field. To get rid of them you will have to extract the necessary resources to turn their virtues into defects, thus transforming them into Legends and fears that influence the population. The objective of each mission is to instill fear in a certain number of territories, managing to stop rivals and deactivate utopias so you can achieve your goals before time runs out. It seems simple but events that happen in the world will also put a brake on you, such as the news of an imminent assassination attempt against you, which you will have to face with time and resources if you do not want to receive incapacitations. sanctions for their mission.
Take care of your agents
Each level will start with a single active agent, so you will only be able to perform one action at a time as you explore the cities to unlock new Legend slots and resources; start mining one of the game coins; or carry out espionage missions against your rivals or within world events such as assassination attempts. making progress you will unlock bonuses including tarot cards that act as one-time active upgrades that can speed up the assignment of an agent, double a resource, and more. Depending on the chosen difficulty, you will also get a second agent, doubling the possible actions at the same time. Each of these characters has three statistics that can be improved by leveling up.
Strength affects the speed of resource extraction (reducing the time or increasing the amount per interval), Intuition reduces exploration time, and Stealth is used to succeed in spy missions. The more tasks these agents complete, the more experience points they earn to level up. This process will cost more and more resources, but will allow upgrade your minions and get free special legends like the Hellmouth that, without consuming any resources, greatly increase fear in a region. Each agent, then, has a personal story that is revealed to you over time and that influences the development of his statistics.
Conclusions
Version shown PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Price 14,86 € Holygamerz.com 8.0 Readers (7) 8.4 your voteThe Fabulous Fear Machine is a great example of taking familiar mechanics and interactions and using them to create an entirely new experience in its combination of gameplay, atmosphere, and art style. You will play the role of a villain, feed people's irrational and emotional fears, exploit tormented souls for your own purposes, and in the end, you will pay the price. The passing of time, the rivals that hinder you, and the scarce resources will always keep you on your toes: you will almost never encounter dead moments or moments in which you have to speed up the passage of time too much to get what you need. There are quite a few clichés and you can guess where the three stories are going fairly easily, but the gameplay is easy to understand and incredibly fast-paced. If management games are your daily bread, you'll find this game an engaging and stimulating challenge, while if you're new to the genre but love the pulp aesthetic, you'll appreciate the clear and concise explanations. It does not shine for its narrative originality, but otherwise, The Fabulous Fear Machine is an experience worth trying to satisfy the goals of each of us to dominate the entire world.
PRO
- Iconic and highly used aesthetics
- Few important and well-managed resources.
- Natural and compelling progression
AGAINST
- Unoriginal and predictable narrative.
- A single random element bothers a completely mathematical management experience
