Fear Effect Sedna

There are good games, there are dumb games, and then there are games that were purpose-built to make the player’s life hell. Fear Effect Sedna falls firmly in the third category. I’ll put the reasons for this in bulleted form for clarity: 1) The visual scale: everything in this game is TINY. For some reason, the developers made the visual field super wide like an RTS without a way to actually see any of the close-up things you’ll need to to progress in the game. The fog of war function makes this even worse since now you can only see half the screen AND it’s tiny. 2) Combat: the Fear Effect series has always had cruddy combat but somehow they made it worse here. The “special” attacks are useless and your main guns are weak, you essentially have to rely on stealth to kill as many enemies as you can and spam health kits when you trade hits with the rest. Both enemy and friendly AI are absolutely useless, but the enemies swarm you so they don’t need to be smart to get rid of you. 3) Bosses; Fighting the haunted mech is some Dark Souls-level type nonsense, why they even put this dumb sequence in I can’t even pretend to guess. Switching targets in the game is finicky, which ensures that the weird spirits will kill you every time while you’re trying to dodge the spazzy mech. 4) Puzzles; these puzzles have such warped reasoning, and often rely on visual cues (which you can’t see because of the screen scale). Even the rhythm game puzzle was a miserable experience, and on that note why were there security drones in a library/museum? 5) Voice Acting: I know getting the original voice actors would be expensive, but would it have been that much of a burden to find some talent who at least reads the script for context of their lines? Half of the script was badly written, and 75% of all the lines were delivered even worse. If my goal was to cure someone of video game addiction, I would give them access to only this one game and let them play as much as they wanted. They would be fixed in about two hours. What an absolutely miserable experience this was. A terrible send-off to a fun series.