I don’t write much about survival horror games. It’s not a genre I love with any sort of passion, but it is definitely one I find intriguing, especially when it comes to developers finding new ways to make things creepy and unsettling to players.
My experiences with survival horror begin with the most famous survival horror franchise of them all, Resident Evil. But not the original titles on PS1 – though I remember being at a friend’s house when I was younger where he played Resident Evil 2 trying to unlock The Tofu Survivor. No, I’m talking about the early 2000s doldrums period of the franchise, when the series was struggling where exactly the series should go from those PS1 games. Games like the 2002 Resident Evil remake, Resident Evil 0, Code Veronica X, that kind of stuff. Before Resident Evil 4 came out and suddenly changed everything.
With Resident Evil taking the fairly niche survival horror genre into the mainstream, various developers from around the world would release their own spins on the genre. Some, like Konami’s Silent Hill franchise, leaned a lot more into the psychological Japanese horror. Others would opt to take a few pages from Capcom’s playbook and make their own spin on it. Today, we’re talking about a bunch of folks based in France taking that playbook and running with it. That game was Cold Fear.
Released in late 2005 for the PC, PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox, Cold Fear was basically a more “western” take on the survival horror genre popularized by Resident Evil. This was developed by Darkworks, a French game development studio best known for Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, the fourth installment of the progenitor to the survival horror genre.
Before playing Cold Fear on the recommendation of a few friends, all I knew about this game was Mega64 doing a few promotional videos for the game, featuring Rocco Botte portraying a games journalist asking developer Gunther Galipot – fake dubbed in a bad French accent by Botte – about the message of the game, while the rest of the Mega64 crew film themselves doing jumpscares at random folks in a Costco. In hindsight, It’s kinda surreal how much Mega64 made videos that made fun of the games they were hired to promote. Wonder if they ever got in trouble over that.
Spoilers for Cold Fear within.
So the story goes like this: You play as Tom Hansen, a member of the United States Coast Guard. You and a squad of soldiers are sent onto a Russian fishing boat going wildly off-course during a massive storm to investigate what’s going on. Suddenly, the rest of your squad gets killed off by weird parasitic monsters. Armed with only a 1911 pistol, Hansen must figure out what’s going on and stop this whole mess.
