Fear Society 2

The title pretty much summarizes my overwhelming impression about Fear Society 2. The original game was hardly ideal, with its anthology stories generally employing stock horror plots and pretty conventional rmk puzzles, but it at least had a fun meta-narrative to fall back on, and each story was sufficiently condensed to avoid boring you. It’s one thing that ZeroDigitsZ opted against deploying the same “campfire” meta-narrative again, fairly judging that it would grow stale the second time. However, I hoped that the anthology stories themselves would then become more interesting and better written, since now they all have to stand up on their own merits. Instead, they became longer, emptier, and more generic.



So far, two stories are available out of the planned four. Since, there’s no longer a campfire acting as an impromptu menu, the game now has a conventional menu screen you can see above, and doesn’t start directly from the instructions. This is one of the gameplay changes; the other is the ability to use a mouse to click on where to walk/interact next, just like in developer's earlier One of You, and the ability to save at any time, instead of the original’s default blue savepoints. It’s also an aesthetic improvement, as it looks very eerie in general, and also features the animation of a bird flock flying past, and is accompanied by a very fitting track. Once you select “New Game”, you get the current choice between “Detention” (Be careful what you wish for!) and Midnight. I’ll begin by describing Midnight, because right now it’s literally shorter (ending right as the narrative seems to diverge into two paths depending on your choice.) and is also the same type of Haunted House story as one in the original.

Sure, this time, the motive is different, and is more sympathetic. Whereas the original Haunted House was about a thief trying to steal a necklace from that place to pay off a debt, now your character, Sam, is searching for his missing friend, Jennifer, alongside her brother Beckett. This information is conveyed in one of the least immersive ways possible:



I suppose the presence of a second character is also technically a difference, but he’s devoid of a personality and so narratively useless up until the narrative pathway choice, and so he doesn’t matter too much. Then again, same goes for your own character, and you certainly know nothing about the woman you are searching for (other than that she went missing after going out at midnight), so there’s nothing to get attached to. It also has the same problem I had with a few other games, like An Evil Night: you are not able to update your companion on anything you find, even when it would be very relevant. You find a knife with a note “You are gonna need that”, but can’t say it to him. In another room, there’s Jennifer’s cellphone, an incontrovertible proof of the owner’s involvement (i.e. the thing you are actually searching for) but Beckett doesn’t react when you get back to him with that, and you have to solve the next puzzle on your own to trigger something relevant.

Then, whoever the actual antagonist is has a similarly limited presence. There are paintings of the so-called Boogeyman on the walls in one room, and there’s a cool moment when they briefly glow red as you walk by. Otherwise, there are a couple threatening notes with instructions and that’s it. The main problem with “Midnight” is how little it uses its setting to explore its characters and antagonist. The mapping of every room looks decent enough, and environmental description is present, and is not bad per se, but it reveals nothing unique about either the player or the antagonist to latch on to. Same goes for the puzzles: they are functional, and the clock one is decent, but they have no deeper connection to anything in the story besides their immediate role as a temporary obstacle in your way.

However, these problems are even worse in “Detention”. As its title suggests, it’s set in a school; a setting that seems to suck in rmk horror more often than usual. I know from original Silent Hill’s Midwich Elementary that abandoned schools can be utterly terrifying, and I heard Corpse Party did a good job there as well. Yet, so far in my time on RMN I’ve seen abandoned schools crop up in Mystery Dorm 1 (2 had a university), Ghost Lullaby (good-looking, but so boring I never finished it), Psychostatis and Afterlife: The Second Dimension and it was at best in the last two, as a brief and so tolerable chapter. Mystery Dorm was entirely set in its school and soon became a hell of running back and forth in search of keys across dozens of empty, identical rooms hoping for something interesting to happen. “Detention” only has about a quarter of MD’s rooms, but nearly all of them are equally boring and sterile.



Most of them exist just to correlate with what a normal school building has: a science classroom, a computer classroom, a library, a music room, an art room, two generic classrooms, boys’ and girls’ toilets (which have no signs on their doors or near them; it’s just that one has urinals and the other does not.), a cafeteria, a single supplies storage room in the basement, etc. There’s occasionally some good description like “A cool breeze is emitting from the air conditioner.” or “The faucet has a small leak. Tightening the handle doesn’t seem to fix it.”, but it again tells us nothing much about the player character himself, the school, or his peers and teachers he must have interacted with on a daily basis. For instance, there are students’ paintings in the art room, each with a title and student’s name, but that’s it. Interacting with them elicits no comment from Finn on either the paintings themselves or the students who drew them. Going into the staff room shows you a note from the principal saying Finn was given a detention for sleeping in class, but doesn’t contain any other documents at all. There are also some unreadable scraps of paper around the place, and each classroom has attendance sheet, but you can never see anything on it, unlike, say, Dream Fair adverts or gossip mags in the original Fear Society's “Tyler” story. On the other hand, the chemistry lab repeats a flaw from that same story, with two identical periodic tables hanging around for no reason. Most often, though, the rooms are just too immaculately clean: I would certainly expect an average school toilet or locker room to have some graffiti, for instance. Equally, there could be a ton of various school objects left behind on desks, all of which could trigger a response with a snippet of a backstory from Finn.

Like I said, some rooms have a puzzle associated with them, but they are again just there, with no deeper meaning. The progression through these puzzles is questionable at best: you go down to the supplies room in the basement to get a “Book of Secret”, for instance (which is obviously unreadable itself), so that you can put it onto a bookshelf to reveal a passage behind it. Afterwards, you find a lockpick in school’s kitchen, somehow, and earlier, you solve an unusual (if easy) puzzle in the computer room to get a code print-out for the teachers’ safe, which gives you…wirecutters. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Book of Secret to be in the safe, and wirecutters and/or lockpick in the supplies room, alongside mops and brooms? (No buckets, though.) One puzzle does end with a gory and disturbing easter egg, but it has no connection to the main narrative.

In fact, most of the weak “spooky” stuff going on at school (bloody handprints appearing on windows, phones calling on their own, static on TVs, blood dripping from lockers, etc.) seems to be random creepypasta with no relation to the supposed reason these things are happening to Finn in the first place. It’s told in the opening, which is about two adults, James and Vivian, trying to get a wish from some poorly drawn thing. After bickering who should go first, and with Vivian being undecided as she’s trying to count through the implications of each potential wish, James simply interrupts her and opts for the old classic of 1,000,000.00 USD. Then, the actual game starts with Finn, and you don’t see those two until either ending (determined by whether or not you pick up the Fire Extinguisher.), which reveals that it’s not just inspired by a monkey’s paw story, but is practically a remake, with the wish literally stemming from one. In fact, the bad ending literally repeats the actual story’s ending beat-for-beat. The original Fear Society’s Penelope already took some elements of that story in “Penelope” vignette (which is called out in the meta-narrative), but this is staggeringly uncreative.

Typos & bugs:


Conclusion

It’s not easy to say this, but coming from One of You and the original Fear Society, the current version of Fear Society 2 is a massive disappointment. It needs a swift course correction, and I would hope ZeroDigitsZ can do it. I would suggest taking a break and studying the classic horror games here more, as well as the best examples of environmental narration here. My all-time favorite in that regard is Swallow’s Descent; when it comes to horror, an otherwise mediocre Until Daybreak actually did an impressive job at first.