The true Monkey’s Paw situation is used throughout The Fabulous Fear Machine; it is up to you to choose what’s better or worse.
When it comes to strategy games, it is always important to build your empire, get yourself strapped, and attack your enemy whenever possible. It is the usual, war-themed strategy game everyone has become accustomed to throughout the years. But what if the strategy games are not about war but personalized stories?
That would be very odd to think about; however, some recent titles have achieved this whole mindset with different iterations. One of them appears to be The Fabulous Fear Machine, which has a unique take on the strategy genre.
As I said, some games try to narrate the events a bit differently than others. The Fabulous Fear Machine takes the strategy aspect of the real-time strategy games into stories of real people and how they had to achieve their goals by using dirty secrets.
Instead of conquering land as a general, you play as the people who have dreams and ambitions but do not have the will to establish said dreams in quick succession. This is one of the most unique parts of the game, and it already showcases something different than what we are used to seeing.
If you are not familiar with the genre, the game opens up with a simple tutorial on how the systems and mechanics work; detailing them would be too sudden now, so I will talk about the details later on. Despite being a three-part tutorial, it is simple enough to see what you can encounter during the gameplay and how to react to it. After all, someone might have started being interested in The Fabulous Fear Machine due to its art style and UI filled with fewer elements for a real-time strategy game.
After the tutorial, the game starts setting you in the first story, in which you play as a successful doctor who wishes her products to be well-known and used daily for any treatment. She finds herself gambling- and possibly threatening the whole human race- to be successful in a short time, by taking a spin at “The Fabulous Fear Machine“. The machine grants a wish; however, in return, the world has to suffer the consequences of loneliness, hopelessness, and, most importantly, fear.
Fear is what fuels us the most in. The people are driven by fear and live by fear. This is made quite apparent in the title, as your weapons are not nuclear weapons or infantry that knock on the door on the border. Fear drives them to be cautious and forces them to steer onto the roads they do not want to be on.
The same tactic can be seen in The Fabulous Fear Machine; to let people know about your medical products as a somewhat successful doctor, you need to be very oppressive and use fear to inform people about your relevance. To let people know about her products, she follows the orders of the machine and finds it in the abandoned funhouse.
This is where the core game begins: conquering the UK by spreading misinformation and legends that are not real. You have to pump up the conspiracies and create a wave of fear in people so they can find trust in her medicine instead. Firstly, we have to hire an agent.
Agents are the most important bits of your plans as they get to do everything you order them to. Since the UK is divided into three different countries, you dedicate certain plans for each country, such as pushing forward your product in Scotland and telling about how terrible the other products are in England and Wales.
Agents in The Fabulous Fear Machine are also dynamic characters; despite being your minions, they also have backstories to discover and can be leveled up. All the actions taken by the agents take days. Once they start gaining experience and leveling up themselves, their actions take fewer days to go through, giving you an upper hand on spreading rumors and even getting rid of rivals, which I will talk about soon.
To boost the rumors and theories, you can move agents to certain places and start a selected rumor by choosing a card. These can differ a lot, such as one being about fear of death, fear of sickness, fear of war, or fear of political conflicts. It is best to choose the matters about your current playthrough, such as choosing health-related rumors during the first mission.
Some of the places you need to conquer already have specified filters that need to be filled out to conquer. For example, to boost the trust of your medicine’s safety in Scotland, you need to get a fear of sickness, which already has a corresponding card. For the ones that do not have a specified bar, you just have to fill up the fear meter.
The way building fear works is a bit confusing, as it does not show much about how to gain those said fears. With an agent, you have to implant a rumor and start working on spreading it. Spreading rumors and fear works by fuel, which can be gained by the amount of response you get from the media or the people themselves. The fuel you get as a response can be used for, you guessed it, to fuel the fear even more. But be careful with the consumption of it, as fuel gets too much it might cause the fire to go out and completely kill your run.
A strategy game cannot be a strategy game without rivalry, right? Because of that, there is a rival system implemented. Just like how you spread fear onto the public, you also use fear and scandalous acts upon your enemies to get them out of your way. For example, during the first mission, you will encounter another person trying to persuade their followers to come against your actions. By sending agents to certain places of your rivals, you can use the gathered information against them and put them out of the race.
Defeating him is an easy task; after investigating, you need to farm fear off from the public or use the information against them. Their health bar is shown with the number of cards they have. Once you deplete their health, they are out of the game for good. Though these acts either use fuel or fear, it is best to eliminate them as soon as possible. In the later game, you can come against two to three rivals simultaneously, so finding how to eliminate them is a bonus.
Once you get through the lowest limit of the fear bar or conquer all of the maps, you finish the storyline for that character; however, the game might throw you an extra challenge by continuing the storyline even further. There are not only campaigns, though, but also certain scenarios included in the game for you to try out. Finishing certain objectives during the campaign also unlocks some extra content for you to view; it usually expands the storyline a bit further than usual.
Does The Fabulous Fear Machine have any drawbacks? Not that I had seen, but it might be a tad bit boring to keep track of your agents and which sort of plans they are up to. The game keeps getting more hectic as you progress, and with the excessive number of incidents happening, it gets hard to keep track of your resources and elements. Sometimes, one wrong decision can be an endgame; however, the veteran strategy players will do well despite The Fabulous Fear Machine’s different themes and pacing.
In terms of graphic and sound design, The Fabulous Fear Machine gives the eerie vibe of the late 70s, which fits well with the whole atmosphere and general idea of the game. The title looks like it is out of a comic book, and with fonts and UI elements, it does feel as if you are the villain of a story, which fits surprisingly well. UI does not feel clunky and is easy on the eyes, making it a smooth viewing experience. The tones of orange and yellow, which were dominant in the 70s, again fit well for the theming.
One of the other unique elements of the game is that you are portrayed as evil; since fear is the only emotion you are giving to the masses, your job is to be mean and eliminate any obstacles you come across in your playthrough. Usually, other strategy games let you play as the good guys all the time, but taking a twist in The Fabulous Fear Machine was a good experience.
The Fabulous Fear Machine does provide a unique take on the strategy genre as a whole. Instead of being the good guy everyone wants all the time, filling the masses with conspiracies and rumors to exploit them can also be great fun. It is recommended to check out the title if you are looking for an exquisite strategy game with its personality and charm.
