Chasmal Fear (Demo) - First Thoughts

I'd say, generally speaking, horror games are not typically by bag. I'm not averse to playing games in the genre (I enjoyed Doom 3 and F.E.A.R back in the day and Dead Space and a couple of the Amnesia titles more recently) I'm just not the biggest fan of jump scares.

That said, when I saw the trailer for Chasmal Fear it piqued my attention. The 'scare factor' visuals looked great and the idea of it being from a "bodycam" viewpoint sounded cool, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

As always I was going to play this on my SteamDeck so I already had it in mind I'd probably have to fiddle with button mappings, and I would almost certainly have to limit my expectations with the visuals. These were both true but actually after setting the graphics preset to medium, turning on FSR and upping the TDP it ran pretty well.

Starting into the demo I definitely had a feeling of nervousness. That immediate concern that I was going to be attacked by something awful was there from the very start, so the ambience and atmosphere was set just right. The lack of any real HUD was a nice touch too and, obviously, in keeping with the feeling of viewing things through the body cam. 

With very little hand holding I was led around a fairly linear path to discover refills for my knife (which were used to administer a serum that stops the mutations that had escaped into the base) and ammo for my pistol. Before finding a health recharge point, lifted straight out of Half-Life, I was set upon by the first enemy. A cross between a zombie and something from Davy Jones' crew from Pirates of the Caribbean. It took 3-4 shots but I took the blighter down.

Then things got.... Buggy.

From this point on the enemies stopped being scary because they were not terribly dangerous. More often than not I could just stand there and shoot them because their attacks missed me or they were half buried in the walls and doors. This broke the suspense and, sadly, made the rest of the demo kinda boring.

One thing that DID make me jump was a joyous yip sound that, I think, came from a huge android thing that was hiding around a doorway. I yelped and shot the bastard! I have no idea if I was supposed to, but it went down with one round from my pistol and there were seemingly no consequences.... So, yeah.

All in all I didn't dislike Chasmal Fear but I think it needs a bit more debugging before it's true potential can be reached to have players pooping their Pampers.