Then you open the only door and see an infinite black void with a white X floating in the air some distance away. You take a picture nothing happens except a camera flash. You come to in a normal, cramped apartment, holding a Polaroid camera. Horrible imagery flashes: Uncomfortable faces, recurring memories, a wall with increasingly bloody words. Our protagonist, a 19-year-old named Simon, finds an injured man on the backroads of a Swedish city. As it’s only available on PC ( free here), I’ve also included a wordless walkthrough of the start of the game, below. To explain why it works so well, without giving you a chance to see it for yourself first, would be a waste of good art.
#CRY OF FEAR STORY MOD#
But even in mod form, it contained a beautiful slice of terror that couldn’t have been achieved in any other medium. If not for that, Cry of Fear would never have been its own game. Around the one-year anniversary of its release, Valve patched Half-Life and made Cry of Fear incompatible, so the team took two months to make the game standalone. It’s origins were humble: It took four years to complete the mod in the developers’ free time (2008-2012). And yet this game’s opening remains perhaps the best example of how game mechanics can scare you like nothing else– in part, because it did something that no other major game has done since.
![cry of fear story cry of fear story](https://media.moddb.com/images/members/4/3542/3541784/profile/epilogue_promomoddb.png)
While it’s exceptional, if you don’t go out of your way to find good horror games, you probably haven’t even heard of it. Cry of Fear is a 4-year-old Half-Life horror mod, one of hundreds of such games.