There was a time when survival horror games were considered a rather niche genre. The franchises that helped birth it, notably Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Alone in the Dark, had long since abandoned the traditional format – either going into other genres, dropping the whole franchise, or turning it a damn Pachinko machine instead.
And then, somehow, survival horror returned.
We had some notable indie releases make huge waves, big franchises coming back with their modernised over-the-shoulder perspective, and subsequently lots of imitators. It’s a great time for fans of the genre, although it can’t be denied that a lot of them start to blend together after a while.
Which is why Fear the Timeloop caught my eye. There have been plenty of time-loop games for sure, but in a survival horror? I was intrigued, even if a little bit sceptical as to how it would actually pan out. So let’s dive in and see whether or not this curious concept actually works.
Many thanks to the PlayWay for the review code.
LOSING A LOT OF BLOOD
Fear the Timeloop puts you in the boots of Sheriff James Cooper, who wakes up severely wounded in an unknown hospital. With only fifteen minutes until he bleeds out, he’ll need to act fast to survive – however, dying doesn’t result in a game over, but rather a reset of the loop with certain memories that will help you progress further next time. Think of it like Minit, except you have fifteen of them rather than just one.
At least, in theory. In practice the amount of time you have really varies on how you play. Medical kits, blood packs, and bandages all help increase the time at your disposal – and of course, getting hit by foes will reduce it. That constant reduction of health though is more than enough to keep you on your toes and feeling stressed as you rush about trying to solve puzzles and explore with a ticking clock in the background. Even though I never found it all that difficult to stay alive, the manual saving system – which is triggered at the end of each chapter by a VHS tape – keeps you feeling stressed.
Where the experience begins to drag, however, is with its core combat encounters.
Whilst the game’s main gimmick is rather unique and feels fresh for the genre, the same can’t be said for the game’s enemies. The majority of foes you’ll be up against will be bog-standard zombies – and not very intelligent ones either. These shamblers don’t pose too much of a threat, and only really serve to whittle down your health and, as a result, time. In fact, for most of the duration, I opted to use my trusty police baton to take out the undead instead of wasting precious ammo. Some harder enemies may require a bullet or two, but once you gain the damage upgrade for the baton you’ll find that you can still take out stronger foes with a bullet or two from a distance followed by several strikes from up close.
But that’s fine, especially as the game is more about surviving against time rather than any fearsome creature – not to mention that those saved bullets can be useful in other situations too, such as the using your shotgun to blow apart weak wooden doors. It makes the generic zombies less of an issue and allows you to focus on your main task at hand.
The one real problem I had though with the title is with its poor optimisation. As a game that isn’t too visually demanding, I had expected the Steam Machine to be able to cope with the game’s default settings; however, on numerous occasions the framerate would plummet quite substantially, almost into single digits. Save Rooms in particular ended up running at around 12FPS a lot of the time, forcing me to lower the settings quite drastically – which still didn’t resolve the issue in some areas, and I even had a hard crash because of it. Not ideal for a game with manual saving! As such, it would be hard to recommend on the Steam Deck or weaker hardware, as these issues only serve to make the time limit even more stressful.
But if you do have stronger hardware, or are willing to set your Steam Machine to lower than ideal settings, then there’s a lot to love about Fear the Timeloop. In an era where Survival Horror games are becoming fashionable, it’s great to play something that genuinely stands out from the rest of the crowd.
