Medium. No story spoilers.

Cry of Fear is a free-to-play standalone mod for Half-Life. Unlike its spiritual predecessor, Afraid of Monsters: Directors Cut, you do not need to install Half-Life to play this game. It is also available to download straight from Steam. Nothing to note regarding performance or fixes, but be wary of crashes.

Cry of Fear is a free-to-play survival horror game that is easy to pick up and play, although it is a larger time commitment than its predecessor. Simon Henriksson is a depressed teenager who is walking home, when a man who seems to have been attacked, gets his attention. Before Simon can call medical services, a car runs him over. While unconscious, you experience vivid nightmare in which you progress by using the camera flash on marked locations, culminating in a sudden scare. Simon comes to, and finds himself in an alleyway, with a text message from his mother asking him to come home. Since he seemed to have already been on the way to doing that, surely he is just on his way and the nightmare is over. Unfortunately for Simon, or the player, it's really just begun.

The systems introduced in this game help it greatly differ from other Half-Life mods including AoM. One feature that this game has and makes great use of is a limited inventory system. Simon can only hold 3 items in his pockets, and 3 more in his bag. This doesn't include ammunition, but this does include key items such as, well, keys, to progress. This can be annoying for some players who may feel they're juggling with limited space, but I think that this helps Cry of Fear a lot, forcing you to manage in a similar vein to a Resident Evil title. Speaking of Resident Evil, this game also has two more things, a somewhat interconnected world where you can revisit some areas to get items that you may want, and a reliance on manual saving at specific locations (in this game, a tape recorder). Both of these work great on paper, and mostly in practice, but it does unfortunately get significantly hampered by the crashes. You are likely to lose a good chunk of progress because the game decided to crash prior to entering an important room, or after a cutscene. This may he something that could be fixed by running the game in XP compatibility mode, but I cannot verify. Regardless, I won't hold this against the game.

Something I will hold against the game is other little frustrating segments. The most dangerous enemy in the game, the Sawrunner, is a sprinting creature with two chainsaws that will rapidly chase after you after you trigger an event, such as walking near a certain area, or picking up an item. This is a really cool way to introduce urgency for chase scenes, and the sound design is great! Unfortunately, I find that these chase sequences are incredibly trial-and-error. You often never have enough stamina to sprint away from them, and they may sometimes simply catch up to you and instantly kill you as a result. Most frustratingly, a later section forces you to run to a house and unlock a door while being chased by a Sawrunner. This is much worse than it sounds, because you have to open the inventory (which doesn't pause the game) while the sawrunner is already likely right on top of you. This segment alone took me about 5 minutes of 20 second tries because the sawrunner would usually catch up before I reach the house. These segments aren't completely frequent, but they're present enough where I find them annoying instead of anything else.

This game's visual elements are very reminiscent of Afraid of Monsters, which is reminiscent of Silent Hill. Since all of these games focus a lot on personal struggle, this works really well I feel. I do love the grimy aesthetic of all of these game's nightmare sequences, which there are several here. Graphically, Cry of Fear is actually quite amazing for what it is. The developers and artists who worked on this game really made the most out of an old engine to get this game to look the way it does. At times, it even looks comparable to a source engine video game, especially with the trickery involving the water effects, or the animations that play for "physics objects" in the environment. The attention to detail is great here.

Once again comparing to AoM, I think the enemy design is overall an improvement over them, but the "Twitchers" from AoM is still the scariest by far. I think my favorite design in this game are the Tallers or the Carcass. Something that is definitely notable about Cry of Fear's monster design is that it all has some direct relevance to Simon's condition, physical and mental. Unfortunately, some of these monster designs also just end up kind of goofy. I think the worst example of this game are the enemies that look like an older woman with spikes for appendages, their walking animation is a little silly and their death animation just feels too on-the-nose, even for a game as blunt in its portrayal as this. The environment and enemy design for the most part is a lot more grounded in a good way.

Cry of Fear also has a ton of jumpscares. While I am not someone who dislikes jumpscares much at all, I think a lot of this game's scares are quite weak. The best scare in the game is the introductory nightmare section. Not just the climax of it, but the flashes of imagery that make you second guess what you just saw. There are also a handful of segments that can be a little haunting, particularly a segment within claustrophobic tunnels, but they are few and far between.

Cry of Fear has four endings, not including a secret joke ending. Unlike AoM which has endings change based on things as small as making a wrong turn, this game has two deliberate choices a player has to make to achieve the endings, which makes seeing them all a lot easier in technicality (although replaying the whole game might be a chore). For a free survival horror game, Cry of Fear is packing lots for a player to dig into. While I think some aspects make the game feel a little weak, or downright frustrating, this is worth playing if you're a fan of Silent Hill especially. Once again, dispel the notion that you will be playing a game with any subtlety whatsoever, this game is very in-your-face, and it is okay for it to be precisely that.