Spookygames: Cry of Fear (Sound of Gun)

Know what’s scary? That fraction of a fraction of a second between your trigger breaking and the rifle firing when you realize you don’t have your earplugs in.

Cry of Fear is one hell of a portfolio piece for its developers, Team Psykskallar. With only three core members and several other contributors, they put together an atmospheric horror experience that at times manages to meet the best in the genre eye to eye. That it happens to be a free game, built in Goldsource and available from modDB right here only sweetens the pot. I think it’s a really cool thing, though one that is unfortunately marred by some bad boss encounters, areas with unclear goals and a limited inventory system that is trying to be too clever for its own good. So it’s an uneven experience, but one that has some pretty jaw tightening atmosphere and unique scenarios.

Here’s the thing that it does really well, though, and it’s a thing I don’t think I’ve seen a horror game do before: it doesn’t just give the player an arsenal to empower them against the threats they’re facing, it makes them a part of the tension and the sense of the stress.

There’s a lot of developer backmatter available from Team Psykskallar on the making of the game. One of the areas they make very clear where they did not skimp was their research and handling of the game’s weapons. It wasn’t just that they went and got range time with their weapons, they recorded their handling, how they move and kick. They didn’t just record the bang, they recorded the sounds of handling, they made things real as they could. They did this, because they understood that firing a gun can be a horrific experience in and of itself, because they took into consideration what it would be like to come across a gun in a horror scenario.

To date, horror games with actual gunplay have either cast you in the role of an individual who have either arrived to the horrorshow strapped and ready, or as someone who finds a gun and is naturally ready to take up arms against the supernatural evil hunting them. Either is reasonable, but the thing about the second scenario is that it’s one that makes a lot of assumptions about firearms. Namely, about how easy they are to just pick up and use. Now, granted, we live in a time of first person videogames and chances are good if we’ve ever played any of them for any given time, we could probably puzzle our way through loading and firing a handgun from watching the semi-accurate flailings from our on-screen hobby. You could account for stress and fear having ways of making us dumb and clumsy, but semantics of gross motor skill firearms handling is not what we’re talking about.

What we are talking about is how goddamned loud guns are in this game. Games have had some ideas over the years over what a Glock chambered in 9mm sounds like, and not a lot of them have been accurate. Really, there’s a reason for that, and for why just in general doing guns that both sound real and sound good is hard to do. This is because real guns are loud, ridiculously loud, so loud that you need proper hearing protection to operate one without any chance of sustaining permanent hearing damage. Shotguns in particular are nasty, as the shock and report of one going off near your head is sufficient to cause loss of equilibrium and possible permanent damage to the structure of the inner ear. But it’s not just that guns are loud, as any sufficiently loud noise can cause that sort of damage to your ears. It’s that they’re loud in a way that is alarming, a block-shaped waveform of volume, zero to one hundred, and then back down to zero again in a short, but also hard to distinguish how short- the bang has a way of becoming indistinct. If you’ve ever fired a gun without your ears covered, you know the feeling is disorienting, painful, and with the potential to be unclear in what, if any, effect it had on target. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s alarming.

That sense of alarm is carried in the animations but especially the sound effects of Cry of Fear’s arsenal. The Glock’s report is a sharp BUCK that doesn’t sound in your ears, so much as it does hit them. The gun doesn’t recoil so much as it does throw your screen up and to the side. The bigger guns, especially those capable of automatic fire, are louder and even more disorienting. This game gets that rapid fire is both difficult and also brain rattling.

More to the point, the guns in Cry of Fear are your best offensive option, less so because melee is totally unviable (you can chop up or bonk most of the game’s creeps pretty easily in one on ones and even one on twos), but more so because the guns are really, really good. The operate with a fairly accurate crosshair and have functional iron sights, so your shots go where they are pointed, and on top of all that, they hit like a semitruck, more than capable of flattening enemies you’d normally have to brawl with in a few shots. They also limit what you can carry in your hands- there’s no flashlight mounts for any two-handed weapons in this game. On top of that, this game works off of mag-based ammo, meaning you have to resist the urge to reload after firing every few shots. This is a game where player error is, for better or worse, a part of the tension.

All of this comes together into one big point, expressed better than any horror game that has incorporated gunplay: that your best defense is disorienting, failure prone and with drawback. It puts a deadly weapon in your hand, one that can be trusted to do what it needs to within precise parameters, very precise and deadly parameters, and then within seconds of getting it, presents you with a moving target that wants to kill you. This is a scenario that is the stuff of nightmares in and of itself, but especially in the context of a game that’s about anxiety and not being ready, it fits exceptionally well. When it translates into a feature that further translates into a viable means of being able to fight back once you get the hang of it, that’s all the better.

Until the game introduces to you the next weapon in your arsenal to come to grips with, something that further stirs the mix. See, guns in this game don’t behave like they’re all the same- this game doesn’t get so complex as to have different control schemes for different weapons a la Reciever (another game I have to talk about), but what it does have is guns that have completely different cadences of fire and different recoil patterns. Each time you get a new weapon, you get a new weapon that you’re probably going to have to get used to, because there’s not enough ammo to use just one. With that, comes a new interest to keep the player involved, and with it, a new anxious resource to manage and make mistakes with. A resource that in itself is enough to make the player jump. 

Yeah, guns are that loud, folks.