Unlike the cinematic AAA releases of modern gaming today, Fear Effect doesn’t sacrifice what makes games fun to play in order to achieve an engrossing experience.

While recent AAA games often prioritize cinematic experiences at the expense of player agency, Fear Effect seamlessly blends cinematic elements with gameplay that demands active participation. Instead of mindlessly going through the motions with unenthusiastic side quests and simplistic action, you are constantly problem solving and thinking quickly on your feet. You don’t need to sacrifice effective gameplay to have a cinematic experience, and Fear Effect proves that.

The narrative is a winding and strange tale featuring morally gray characters and an eccentric plot that defies expectations set by disc 1. While relatively straightforward and easy to follow, it remains engaging due to how unique it is. The unexpected twists and turns, unparalleled plot devices, and impressive pacing will leave you eager to see what happens next.

This game is a technical marvel. Every single background is an FMV, similar to a sparse few scenes in Final Fantasy VII. They transition smoothly and the various surroundings are all breathing and full of life. But it’s not all looks, the FMV’s are a huge part of Fear Effect’s gameplay philosophy, as boss fights and puzzles use these often. Fear Effect is only 7 or so hours and it’s on 4 discs. It could be the shortest 4 disc game in the PS1’s library, but I’m not sure.

While Fear Effect is more simple in level design and lacks a consistent labyrinthine structure such as those found in survival horror contemporaries, it compensates in surprising ways. The intuitive combat, with its quick invincible dodge roll, stealth elements, remarkable enemy variety, and real-time ammo and weapon management is possibly the best combat found in a fixed camera-angle tank control release, only rivaled by the intense fast-paced arcade action of Dino Crisis 2. The wholly unique set-pieces that work congruently with pre-established gameplay mechanics offer ever-changing variety. Moreover, the puzzles in Fear Effect strike a perfect balance. They are challenging enough to engage players and make you rack your brain, yet avoid veering into cryptic territory. I was able to complete Fear Effect without referring to a guide. All these aspects contribute to the creation of fantastic level design. It is simpler than something like the original Resident Evil but still succeeds in keeping the player in a perpetual state of problem-solving and critical thinking.

Getting into Fear Effect can be a bit daunting, however. It’s a difficult game with swift deaths during combat and has a reliance on a trial and error design philosophy. Granted, there are sections in Fear Effect that exhibit poor design, showcasing trial and error at its most frustrating, The initial helicopter encounter and the train boss fight being prime offenders that come to mind. However, these instances, while occasionally perplexing, were seldom frustrating. They never dissuaded my pursuit of the next plot revelation, combat challenge, or mind-bending puzzle.

The trial and error design and swift deaths can be peculiar at times. Staring at the loading screen for 10 seconds isn’t fun, but the rest of this game sure is. It seamlessly blends enthralling storytelling and cinematic elements without sacrificing gameplay whatsoever. Fear Effect excels at survival horror puzzle solving and action. The level design is less complex than the contemporaries on the PS1, but it successfully blends it’s elements together to make an immersive experience that I’d recommend to survival horror fans, PS1 enthusiasts, and anyone that enjoys good video games.

9/10

I want to be clear that I’ve already lied to you by the time you’ve read this, because this game isn’t worthy of four stars. However, it is one of the most interesting and unusual games I’ve played in a long time, so I wanted to get the word out. If janky, mediocre PS1 games which fly off the rails are your thing, then go play it. Otherwise, I’ll just talk about its weirdness, spoiling things as I go.

So, the plot starts off in a Ghost-in-the-Shell cyber future, with your three protagonists entering the stage via the obligatory cyber helicopter. The first one you control is Hana, a slick super-spy who fits the mold of her time, essentially being Lara Croft by way of Motoko Kusanagi. Then, you have Glas, whose five o’ clock shadow and bright blue hoodie signify that he’s a hard-boiled detective undercover as a fifth grader. Finally, you have Deke, a potentially fake Australian who says “bloody” and “sheila” while wearing an unflattering turtleneck. The mission of this little mercenary band is to sneak into a yakuza hideout, and get information from their inside-man about the leader’s missing daughter. Sneak in, get the info, go out and find the girl, turn her in for a massive reward, easy. But of course, the job goes bad, the informant dies, the boss discovers what the mercs are up to, and they’re on the run. Now they have to get the girl as a bargaining chip for their own lives, and the race is on.

Please change the disc.

This game’s backgrounds are all pre-rendered videos, and it’s extremely central to this game’s identity. I may complain about how you have to juggle four discs to play a five hour game and laugh at the low resolution, but I can’t help but love how this game looks. I mean, it looks rough, but it’s the sheer commitment I respect. They didn’t want a rectangle with a circle on top as their helicopter; they created a fully-detailed model to be used in a pre-rendered video alongside other real-time effects. They wanted vents fogging up a rooftop with steam, not flat concrete walls. MGS-style head wiggling for talking wasn't good enough, they wanted animated faces with expressions and mouth flaps. They wanted an interactive animated feature within the limitations of the PlayStation, and that ambition really impresses me. I’ve played a ton of games which call back to this era, but they never replicate that ambitious attitude. They never capture the feeling of pushing the system to its breaking point, or of solving technical challenges with creativity. I mean, analog flaws are cool and all, but it feels like throwback games often miss the point by celebrating limitations for their own sake rather than for the creativity they engendered.

Please close the lid. Loading.

The second mission has you catching up to the missing girl, who’s in a town overrun by what seem to be zombies. She’s a little vague on the details, but she tells you that she “didn’t know that blood was the catalyst”. It’s a bit of a jump from the straight cyberpunk we started with, but sci-fi mixes with any genre pretty well, so it’s all good. She agrees to return to her father, as long as she gets to see a woman known as Madame Chen first, since she can explain things. But of course, Chen’s working with the yakuza, and the girl’s captured as soon as Glas brings her in the door. This third mission has you switching between characters in Madame Chen’s restaurant-slash-brothel: escaping capture as Glas, sneaking in as Hana, and kicking in the door as Deke.

This is an abrupt stop, but I’m about to drop a significant spoiler for the exact moment that shit flies off the rails. If this has piqued your interest at all, stop at the end of this sentence and go play it. This is the big reveal.

Ok, now change the disc again.

Glas and Deke are ambushed. They die, and their souls go to hell. The madame turns out to be a demon queen, and Hana kills her. Her blood melts a hole into the underworld. Hana descends the melted blood hell pit to go kill Satan.

That’s not an exaggeration. Not a joke. That’s what happens. You've spent the majority of the game as these two characters, and now they're bloody scraps. As hard of a tonal pivot as it is though, this is the exact moment where I totally fell in love with this clunky old game. With such an unsafe move, it achieved something that Resident Evil was never able to: the establishment of vulnerability when players are at their strongest. It’s a Predator-esque pivot where a lone action hero has to come to the realization they’re actually in a horror movie. You used to worry about normal soldiers shooting at you, and suddenly you’re facing demons with scythe hands. Maybe the zombies in the second chapter should have struck me more than they did, but I was expecting them to be explained away. I thought it would be revealed that the yakuza girl was genetically engineered to work with next-generation nanomachines or something, and that the nanobots in her blood were lethal to anyone else. I mean, the zombies in the games which inspired Fear Effect were the result of an engineered virus, and I don’t expect Jill Valentine to go kick Satan’s ass until RE10 at the earliest.

One last disc change.

That’s as far as I’ll spoil the plot, since I think it’s enough to convey why I have four-star love for this mediocre game. It’s just so wholeheartedly bold. Even to this day we get lazy rearrangements of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but Fear Effect showed how to use the format while fearlessly establishing its own identity way back in 2000. It fought every technical limitation, ignored standard practices, and did its own thing. Being just as good as the other games out there wasn’t the goal at all, it had to blow people away. It probably shocked you at least once just in this summary, and I didn’t even include some of the cooler things it does towards the very end. So, I’m fine with it having a shit inventory system. I’m fine with a broken lock-on. I’m fine with all the flaws, because, as cheesy as it is to say, this game was never trying to be good, it was trying to be awesome.

Bokura is a delightfully simple 2 player 2D puzzle platformer which begins deceptively familiar and quickly evolves over its 4-ish hour runtime into something truly unique. Unfortunately, the nature of reviewing such a game is that the reviewer is inevitably stuck in a catch-22 whereby on the one hand, describing the handful of twists the game delivers spoils the readers experience of the game should the reviewer convince said reader to try it out. Yet, on the other hand not describing said twists leaves the reader with an incomplete understanding of why specifically, I enjoyed it so much. As a result, I will be doing a lot of vague handwavy gesturing so as to tip-toe around completely spoiling the experience for the first paragraph of my review, just to give anyone interested in trying it out enough to chew on to make that decision for themselves. Then, after a prominently signposted "spoiler warning" I will get into much more specific detail about what I enjoyed (and what I didn't enjoy) about Bokura.

If there is one thing you should know about me as a reviewer, it is that I have played way, way, waaaaaay too many games in my life. It should genuinely concern you. You should read my reviews with the gnawing feeling in the back of your mind that you are, by dint of reading and engaging with my review, encouraging a deeply unhealthy obesession with video games which I have carried with me my entire life. For this reason, it takes something truly novel to pull me out of the feeling of "been there, seen that" that suffocates 85 - 90% of my time playing video games. Without spoiling anything, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that within the first half hour of playing, Bokura did just that. I was suddenly and unceremoniously hit with a concept so interesting, yet so simple, that I couldn't believe no one (as far as I knew) had done it before. In fact, it was so sudden, and so unceremonious, that at first, I didn't even realize anything had happened. Yet, as soon as I realized what this game had done, a stupid smile was immediately plastered onto my face for the remainder of the playthrough. My friend can attest to the fact that for the next twenty or thirty minutes I was muttering slight variations on "This is so cool" nonstop just because I was so genuinely delighted by Bokura's core concept. Don't get it twisted, this game is not as revolutionary as Portal, not even close, but the feeling of this game's unique idea was similar in type, if lesser in intensity, to the feeling I felt the first time I interacted with the series' titular portal gun. And while the surprises later in the game were never as satisfying as that first little hook, the game nevertheless continues to have fun exploring what can be done in a two player cooperative game that absolutely cannot be done with only a single player. And I don't just mean that they make more complicated puzzles which can only be completed by having two player characters on-screen. I mean that in playing this game, I got the feeling that the developer had specifically gone out of their way to deliver entirely unique types of gameplay experiences that simply cannot be experienced in a single player game. In the same way that you cannot experience smell nor even anything remotely similar to smell, without a nose, you cannot experience anything like Bokura's gameplay without two distinct players with distinct minds on distinct displays, and while the result is unlikely to join your pantheon of greatest games of all time, it would be a mistake, in my opinion, for you to pass up playing something which delivers so singularly novel an experience as Bokura does. If you can find a friend to tag along and carve out four hours out of your week, I can comfortably recommend this little indie game. And, while it is not always as cute and cuddly as the box art makes it look, this is also the type of game that is simple enough that I think it would specifically be a fun bonding game with a significant other, regardles of his or her relative inexperience with games. So long as they can hold a controller, they'll be just fine.


SPOILER WARNING!!!!!!


Okay, now onto the spoiler section of the review! By far my favorite part of this experience, as I am sure you can tell my the first section of this review, was the moment that I and my friend with whom I was playing the game, were, without warning, sent into alternate versions of the map. The few minutes of my confusion at his mention of cute farm animals and his confusion of my mention of robots, neither of us understanding the other, yet neither of us confident enough to ask what exactly the other person was talking about, before I had the ah-ha moment that maybe we were seeing different things and had him send me a screenshot of his display was by far the pinnacle of my experience of the game. To me, that moment is Bokura. And while none of the puzzles delivered the kind of ah-ha moments the best of puzzle games are always delivering, it was nonetheless fun to see all of the different ways the developers had thought to make the game different between our two versions. Had the game gone on much longer, this novelty would have worn off, but watching each other walk through walls or fall through floors remained enjoyable throughout the short runtime of Bokura.

The next really cool idea that I encountered was that, a few times throughout the game, the game would separate us, have us turn our microphones off, and give each of us separate pieces of the story, before reuniting our characters to continue on. However, I couldn't help but feel there was a lot of missed potential here. The game should have set up some reason for us to deceive one another about what we had seen, or at least, some reason to suspect the other player may not be telling the truth. Or, at least, they should have done something to make it more interesting when we met up, explained to each other what we had seen, and proceeded to make the choice the game always prompted us with after these sections about what we should do next. Again, this is a really cool idea, but in comparison to the first gimmick, I just never really felt like this one got off the ground.

I also feel obligated to point out that one of the two players (whoever has the blue jacket) has a significantly worse experience in the game than the other. Both the foreground objects and the backgrounds in the robot world are an endless sea of barely distinguishable red and brown slop, seemingly puked onto the screen and spread around into the vague shape of a level. Whereas, in the other world, the art design is simultaneously much more varied and interesting, and much more pleasant. I'm not saying one world can't be a dystopian post-apocalyptic future, with all of the ugliness entailed by such a setting, but the ugliness should feel purposeful and the objects in both the foreground and the background should be fully legible. In addition, in the robot world, there is a LOT of waiting for some reason, they give two different unique mechanics to the animal world in the back half of the game (the portals and the removable head) which require the robot world person to wait around for the other player to do stuff. And while eventually the removable head does give way to some neat puzzles involving one player needing to guide the now blind headless character through mazes, the amount of waiting endured by the robot character could have been significantly tuned down.

As for the story, it is simple enough but too short to be particularly deep or complex. The message about different perspectives reminded me multiple times during my playthrough of Death Stranding's in that it was about as subtle as being hit by a bus. Nevertheless, I applaud this short puzzle-platformer for having a message at all. It didn't need to go out of its way to do that and I appreciated it for trying.

Overall, I found my experience with Bokura was significantly better than I expected it to be when my friend suggested we try it out, and while it was disappointing some aspects of its "2 players with different perspectives" gimmick weren't as fleshed out as they could have been this is a game that I will not soon forget.