FEAR is one of those games we lament because the things that were great about it feel like they’ve been lost, for few now live who remember it. Sure, there’s Trepang2. But FEAR was so good there should be an entire subgenre based on it. There should be an entire cottage industry of indie studios making singleplayer shooters with slow-motion and advanced enemy AI and something supernatural thrown in to give you the willies just when you’re feeling overpowered.
Anyway, instead of being all sad about how history becomes legend and legend becomes myth, let’s celebrate the fact that FEAR remains incredibly playable today—if you download the Echo Patch. It’s not one of those games that’s completely busted without mods, but if you play it at any resolution above 1080p all the text will look like it was written for ants.
The Echo Patch fixes that, and adds controller support so you can play it on your Steam Deck. It also lets you disable the letterboxing in cutscenes and optionally make the flashlight last forever if you don’t want to have to chase down batteries for it.
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In terms of bugfixes, the Echo Patch deals with a lot of problems that emerge if you run FEAR at high framerates. There’s “ragdoll physics instability” and “excessive water splash repetitions” if you go above 60 fps, and should you run it at more than 120 fps you’d find yourself unable to do a jump-kick, which is just unconscionable. All that and more is fixed in the Echo Patch.
It even makes the world state persistent, so all those bullet holes remain to remind you of the shootouts in days past. Bodies, blood, shell casings, and other debris hang around as well instead of despawning like it’s 2005 and we need to constantly clear the decks before your PC overheats from having to depict too many polygonal dead men at the same time.
The Echo Patch can be downloaded from Github, and is an easy install. Unzip it into the folder FEAR.exe is in, and tweak the .ini files if you want to enable optional stuff like turning off letterboxing or disabling the GOG version’s 60 fps limit.