True Fear: Forsaken Souls, Part 1 bills itself as a “psychological thriller”. I purchased this title from Steam, though I believe I originally played it as a hidden object game through Big Fish. The Steam version boasts improved graphics and seemed to have a bit more of the darker and more horror focused elements than the Big Fish version.
Considering it was fairly cheap to buy, I decided it was worth a try as I vaguely recall the Big Fish version being fairly decent. The Steam version certainly did have much better graphics, as well as different options that are not available in other versions. For example one that some players may enjoy is the ability to turn off most of the hidden object puzzles, i.e. the infamous junk piles. On the flip side, the difficulty settings are not customizable and you only have three options to choose from.
In terms of story, True Fear had a lot of potential but I’m not sure if I would say it lived up to it completely. The main characters continue to do the usual “too stupid to live” type decisions, and the game suffers from being a part one that currently has no part two available. It also relies on heavily telegraphed jump scares for most of the “horror” part of the game, combined with hints of a potentially dark storyline that we only vaguely explore in this part. It does have fairly decent music that fits the mood of the piece, and that music does a better job of setting the psychological thriller side of the story than all the jump scares and occasional gore.
Still, for the price I got about 3 to 3 1/2 hours of fun out of it and it was an improvement over the Big Fish version. I don’t know that I would highly recommend it, but if you just want a quick game that’s fairly simple to play, it might be worth grabbing on sale. Or if you, like me, used to be a Big Fish player, you might appreciate having a slightly less neutered version of the game. I would not however hold out much hope on the part two that was supposed to be coming, considering it’s been almost 2 years since they first released the demo, but then again they did do an update in November so maybe they haven’t completely forgotten it yet.
