Deep Fear
Sega Saturn
Nostalgia Factor:
In the last year or so I've really been brushing up on my Sega Saturn history. I listen to a Sega Saturn podcast and I also participate in several Saturn-based Facebook groups. This podcast and these groups have been an absolute wealth of information as far as discovering new games. There are so many interesting titles out there that I've never heard about or otherwise would have thought to play. Deep Fear is one of those titles.
There's a good reason I had never heard of this game before: it was never released in the USA. As soon as I read this game's premise and saw some of its screenshots, I knew I had to play it. From everything I was able to gather, the whole game was one big blatant ripoff of the original Resident Evil. And you know what? I was all for it.
I started playing this game on Halloween, and I just finished it a few days ago. Did the USA miss out on an awesome title when they decided to keep Deep Fear overseas, or was this whole thing a huge mistake? Read on for my full thoughts!
Story:
You play as John Mayor, the game's protagonist. No, not John Mayer. His body is NOT a wonderland. John Mayor, with an O. He is member of an emergency response unit that resides in an underwater station called the Big Table. It's very similar to something you'd see in the movie The Abyss.
The game's premise is based around a probe that was sent out by Earth many years ago. The probe returns to the planet and crashes in the ocean. A recovery unit is sent out to reclaim this probe, and bring it back to the Big Table. Yeah. It goes about as well as you would expect.
Before you can count to 20, the station is infected with a virus that turns regular people into horrible, violent mutations. It's now up to John to rescue as many people as he can and escape to safety.
Gameplay:
When I say this is a Resident Evil clone, I mean it. You'll have no trouble picking this game up and getting the hang of it if you have ever played a classic Resident Evil game in your life. Tank controls. A similar inventory screen. Similar combat. Similar exploration. The only obvious difference is that you don't see the door swinging open when you move from room to room. Instead you just get a black loading screen with some text that gives you the name of the room you are entering.
Deep Fear does have other differences, however, that make it unique. The main difference is the oxygen meter. Many areas in this game display a countdown on the top of the screen. This countdown indicates how much oxygen is left in your area. There are small display consoles located randomly throughout the game that refill the oxygen supply and pump those numbers back up to their maximum. But as you play you are constantly having to monitor your oxygen levels, and I found that this helped increase the tension in the game. Well, for a little while at least. Not too long into the game, you find a breathing device that kicks in as a failsafe when the oxygen level reaches zero. I'm still not entirely sure what happens when you completely run out of oxygen, as I simply never ran into this issue at all. I'm sure you die - but the game is so generous with the time allotted that this never became a serious concern from my end. It's a nice idea, though.
I also like what Deep Fear does with its health items and its ammunition supply, although admittedly it reduces the tension levels tenfold and makes the game laughably easy at times. I'll explain what I mean. Each area of the game has its own room dedicated to ammo or health supplies. These supplies are infinite. So if you have no health items, just come to one of these rooms and fill up your inventory with them until you can't hold any more. Same with ammo. Just refill all your guns and head on back out. There's no real threat of running out of health items or ammunition. This was one of the scariest things about the original Resident Evil games: staying alive and managing your inventory to make sure you didn't run out of anything to keep you alive. In Deep Fear, this is never really a concern. You'll always have what you need in order to advance right at your fingertips. It may require some backtracking at times, but it'll be there.
The word "backtracking" gave me some PTSD when I typed it in just now, so I guess I need to elaborate on that before I dive deeper into my review.
The backtracking is terrible. Some of the worst I've ever experienced in a video game before, and I've played a lot of video games. I know from playing Resident Evil and other similar games to expect a certain level of backtracking, but this game takes it to a whole new level. The Big Table isn't called the Big Table for no reason. This thing is freaking huge. There's a ton of rooms, a ton of different areas, a ton of different levels to explore, and a ton of loading screens to sit through. Simply going from one end of the Big Table to the other, even without fighting anything, can take you about 10 or 15 minutes. And that's if you know where you are going. Deep Fear seems to get its rocks off on not giving you any idea of where to go next, and then letting you flounder for 20 to 30 minutes at a time.
But Daaaaaaan, all these survival horror games do the same thing. No, imma stop you right there. They don't. They give you some kind of clue what to do next. You'll see a locked door with a specific type of key that you need, or you'll see an unexplored area on the map. You might run into a puzzle that seems a little obscure. But you have a general idea of what to do or where to go next. This game just says fuck it, you're on your own.
A prime example of this happened to me about 60 percent of the way through the game. There's a door on the top floor of the residential area that is locked the entire duration of the game. I checked it dozens of times as I played, each time as I walked through the area. A certain character later tells you that you have to come to this door, but there's just no way to enter it. I wandered for freaking hours, with no clue what to do. Turns out that after I talked to that character, I had to go explore another area of the Big Table, and then come back and talk to that character again. After you do that, the door mysteriously unlocks on its own and you're able to gain access to it. WTF? I had literally JUST talked to that character, and she told me to go to that room. Why do I need to go explore another area of the game and then come back and talk to that same character again for that door to open? She told me to go there. Why the extra hoop to jump through? I was stuck on this area of the game for so freaking long. Even looking online didn't help much, as text walkthroughs on this game are few and far between - and it was hard to find where to look when all the YouTube walkthroughs of this game are like 10 freaking hours long. Just one click a freaking millimeter apart from your last one fast forwards you through like 15 minutes of game video. Trying to find the one tiny thing you need to do in a video that long is much more difficult than it seems.
This isn't the only instance of something small like this tripping me up for hours on end. It happens a lot in this game. You have to explore every inch of the map, and talk to some characters multiple times for things to open up properly. With the size of the map and all the rooms to explore, plus all the loading screens, this becomes a massive drain on the game. I was just completely done with this game by the time I was even halfway through it. Luckily I'm a completionist or I may have just stopped playing completely. There's just no fun to be found in all that wandering. I have a toddler. My time is limited. I hated this aspect of the game. Absolutely hated it.
That said, all of the things that this game does right were still enough to keep me going.
Barely.
Graphics:
If you enjoy the graphical style of the 32-bit era Resident Evil games, you'll enjoy the look of Deep Fear. The areas are well-designed. The characters are blocky and pixelated, but still have that classic charm to them. Cutscenes are your standard terrible looking affair associated with this era of gaming, but I still enjoyed them.
I have to give the Saturn props for handling this game as well as it does. It could have easily been a massive train wreck, especially with all the water in this game and the Saturn's propensity to mess up water textures. But if you had told me this was a PS1 game, you would have fooled me completely. It looks good!
If I had to offer any complaints, it would be about the "samey"-ness of the environments. I had a hard time telling some areas apart from time to time. I guess there's only so much you can do with the dark underwater living areas.
Sound:
I'm starting to sound like I'm repeating myself, but if you are a fan of the sound of the 32-bit Resident Evil games, you'll be a fan of this game's sound. The voice acting is cheesy and terrible, but it works. I swear the voice actor for John Mayor is the same voice actor who does Wesker in the original Resident Evil game, but according to IMDB it is not.
As far as the sound effects go, the ambient noises like the dripping and clanking you hear all fit the environment perfectly. You'll even hear some recycled sound effects from the Resident Evil games, like the sound of your footsteps. I can't remember any specifics, but there were a few other sound effects that made me tilt my head and think to myself: "Did they just steal that straight from Resident Evil?"
Overall:
I really wish I could say I liked this game more than I did. It has all the trappings of a great game, but at the same time it has too many terrible flaws that completely wreck it for me. If only they'd given you a better map, or some kind of indicator of where to go next, or cut down on some of the backtracking, this would have been a much more enjoyable experience. Instead, too much depends on blindly wandering around, talking to people you've already talked to, and exploring areas you've already explored, all in the hopes that you'll accidentally trigger something that gives you direction on what you need to do next. I wasted hours and hours of my life blindly wandering through this game, and let me tell you this: I want those hours back.
This game also is not as scary as the Resident Evil games it is based on. And it's not even close. Aside from a few jump scares, this game never reaches a fraction of the stress level that any of the Resident Evil games did. No tension as you walk around. No dread. That creepy unsettled feeling you get when playing Resident Evil is completely absent here, which is a little strange considering that Deep Fear's setting is perfect for a horror game. I want to be scared. I want to be on the edge of my seat. And this game just didn't do it for me.
I didn't like this game, but I won't say I hated it. There's something to be found here, if you're at all interested. I can see why someone would like this game. It's just not for me. If this was actually a Resident Evil game, it would rank below all of the tank control games in my opinion - even below Zero and Code Veronica. And again, it wouldn't even be close.
I'm glad I played this game, if only for curiosity's sake. But will I play it again? Not a chance.
THE GRADE:
D+
If you liked this review, check out some of my other survival horror game reviews:
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