Welcome back to our ongoing exploration of the free horror games available on Steam; this week we’re going to be looking at one of the biggest and most ambitious of the lot, “Cry of Fear.” This game originated as a mod for “Half-Life” which entered development in 2008 and was finished in 2012. However, an update to the “Half-Life” rendered the mod incompatible, and so Team Psykskallar decided to turn their mod into a standalone game, which was released in 2013.

The story in “Cry Of Fear” is a bit jumbled. The game opens in a city in Sweden, where a young man named Simon is hit by a car. After a series of brief flashes of vague medical imagery, Simon awakens in an alley with no idea of how he got there. After that, Simon begins receiving text messages from his mother asking him to come home, as well as from an unknown number begging him for help. The player then takes control of Simon as he tries to get home and help this stranger. The location switches back and forth between a more realistic depiction of the city and a more hostile, abstracted version in an obvious homage (if you’re feeling generous) to the Silent Hill games. Also much like the Silent Hill games, “Cry Of Fear” attempts to make much of its story and setting into a metaphor for what is going on inside of the character’s mind, though Team Psykskallar does not pull this off anywhere near as well as Team Silent. There is a twist to the story, but you can probably see it coming from a mile away. There are a few really nice atmospheric touches, but the game’s attempts to be “Silent Hill 2” just remind the player how much better that game was than “Cry Of Fear.” It does have some good jump-scares though.

“Cry Of Fear” is not a visually appealing game. The graphics might have looked good if the game had come out around 2002, but in 2013 it just looks ugly. This doesn’t seem to be any sort of stylistic choice, but rather just an artifact of the rendering engine used. Many of the game’s textures are unacceptably low-resolution for a modern game. The enemy design is incredibly generic. Players can expect to see the same three or four posters in every single location that they visit throughout the game. There really is very little in this game that is easy on the eyes, which is a poor decision in a game that reuses so many of its visual elements again and again.

“Cry Of Fear” runs on the eighteen year old GoldSrc engine, and oh does it ever show. The collision detection is spotty, objects regularly clip through walls, and bugs and crashes are not at all uncommon. The actual gameplay is fairly standard for a survival-horror game, but with a few really puzzling decisions. The most baffling of all of these decisions is the addition of platforming sections of the game. You know, like Super Mario, where you have to jump from one platform to the next to avoid falling into a bottomless pit. It is just so out of place that I cannot even begin to guess why there are multiple sections like that in this game. To make matters worse, the platforming controls are not very good. The incredibly limited inventory space and the fact that opening the inventory doesn’t pause the game seem like they could be good mechanics, if only the player ever wanted to carry more than a couple of things around or grab something out of their backpack during a fight. There are so many mechanics like those that the game doesn’t bother to fully explore or implement that it becomes something of a study in wasted potential. However, when we compare it to most other free games, the gameplay seems absolutely wonderful.

If there is any truly great part of “Cry Of Fear,” it is the music. The game’s soundtrack is full of that same sort of clanking, pounding ambient industrial that made the soundtracks to the early Silent Hill games so memorable. So it is more Silent Hill emulation, but it pulls it off very well. As for the rest of the sound design, it does not hold up as well. The voice actors are clearly not native English speakers, but for some reason that is the only language with a full audio track. The sound effects are very unsatisfying, mostly just very generic thumps and moans. However, you can just go into the options menu and turn down the sound effect volume so it won’t get in the way of enjoying that great soundtrack.

“Cry Of Fear” definitely doesn’t match up to the sort of quality one expects from a game of its size. It is definitely not a professional quality game. However, as far as free games by amateur teams go, it’s alright. It’s certainly not as tightly designed of an experience as say “the static speaks my name,” but is still impressive in the sheer amount of content and effort put into it. Yes, it’s ultimately a very unsatisfying love letter to “Silent Hill 2” but if you’re just looking for something to scratch that horror itch between better games, then “Cry Of Fear” is probably worth a try.