With small releases abounding before the holidays and The Game Awards taking everyone’s attention away, it’s hard to catch everything that comes up. Sometimes there are some odd little game that sneak by with almost no one noticing. That’s where Fearmonium comes in. An odd and dark Metroidvania from developer Red Black Spade and publisher Ratalaika Games, Fearmonium puts you in control of a neurosis. That’s right, you’re a low key mental illness.
Now, before we go any further, let’s put a bit of a trigger warning in here. This is a very, very dark game. It’s specifically focused on mental illness and not the nice parts. If you have phobias or issues with talking about or investigating mental illness, this is probably not the game for you. You start out as an unpleasant memory in the mind of a teenage boy named Max. Your job is to turn yourself from a bad memory into an effective neurosis and then into a full-fledged phobia, traumatizing Max as much as possible. Max has things rough with his family life and a recent loss in his family and he’s already coping with depression. In fact, Lady Depression is mostly in charge of his headspace where you’ll be playing and she’s encouraging you to destroy any semblance of good left in Max’s psyche.
Yes, it’s that dark. You are literally tasked with destroying Max’s mental state and leaving him in perpetual sorrow and misery. Fun, right? Anything that comforts him and makes him happy needs to be rooted out and destroyed. That’s childhood memories, that’s feelings of safety, everything. The entire game is a slow slide into madness with a distinctive clown theme that is part of your pathway to attaining phobia status. Freeing Max’s hidden fears makes you even more powerful and as you progress, other mental issues with join your cause, empowering you with their special abilities. It’s a wild concept that’s sure to put off more than a few players.
Fortunately, the gameplay is a bit more down to earth than the high-concept storyline. This is a standard Metroidvania and you’re exploring the nooks and crannies of Max’s mind. Each area brings new challenges and requires you to obtain various weapons and items to access new areas. It’s a very typical formula and the map is fairly large and convoluted. Like most games in this genre, you’ll be going back and forth through the same areas repeatedly, trying to figure out what you’ve missed and where you need to go next. Conveniently, you can save at Lady Depression’s bathtub (you’ll see) as well as buying additional ammo and adrenaline to heal, and nightmares to give you an extra life if you die. You can also meet up with a number of other evil clowns and obtain additional information such as marks on your map that detail where to go next or where there are clowns that sell specialized ammunition for some of your weapons.
As you bounce around the map, you’ll find some other weird things lying about as well. Broken clown dolls give you boosts to attack power and other stats, chained birds provide you with access to additional weapons and ammunition upgrades, and releasing Max’s hidden fears which are contained in jars weakens bosses when you finally reach them. That’s a good thing as the bosses are particularly difficult in Fearmonium if you don’t have anything to help you and the first couple especially will give you a run for your money. Most bosses have explicit patterns but the bosses here adapt to your positioning, making it hard to predict what attack they will hit with. Ensuring you have a nightmare to revive you and adrenaline to boost your health is essential in boss fights as they will typically get in some pretty nasty hits. Finishing off all the bosses will definitely take some time as they are scattered all around the map and require upgraded items (as you might expect for this genre) in order to even access them. Eventually you’ll get all the way down the list of bosses (you can see all their covered portraits on the wall in a hallway in Max’s mind) and unlock access to the deepest parts of Max’s psyche. After beating a boss, their picture appears on the hallway wall.
There’s a lot to be said for the concept design in Fearmonium but that doesn’t extend to the gameplay mechanics. The physics are floaty and imprecise and it’s easy to make a simple mistake and take some unwanted damage. The hitbox is less refined as well, leading to times where you absolutely thought you had a tiny bit of wiggle room and take a hit anyway. Compared to other games in the genre like Astalon (review here), Ender Lilies (review here), Cathedral (review here), and Infernax (review here), Fearmonium just doesn’t have the precision that other Metroidvanias have. That’s unfortunate because it really has a lot of potential and an extra level of polish would definitely have increased audience appeal here. As it stands, playing with the controls long enough will give you a chance to get the hang of the game but it never really fully controls like it should and some of the more precise things you have to do can be frustrating.
Fearmonium looks as interesting as it’s concept at least. On the surface, screenshots and trailers have a very Cuphead-esque feel to them. That feeling does not carry over to actual gameplay though. Visually, there’s a big step down from something like Cuphead to Fearmonium and you can expect serviceable visuals with excellent design aesthetics. The colors are a bit more drab than they could be but you’re also in the midst of poisoning a teenage boy’s brain with fear and ruining his life so the colors are applicable. In contrast there are a few outdoor areas that are quite vibrant and these are shocking to the eyes after the duller colors in most of the starting levels. The cartoonish look of Fearmonium certainly adds to the exaggeration of fears and problems in Max’s mind but the art direction could definitely be cleaner and crisper than it is most of the time and it’s clear that the art budget here was a bit on the low side, especially compared to some of the other aforementioned Metroidvanias.
Sound is equally lacking on Fearmonium and while the soundtrack is certainly serviceable, it isn’t particularly exciting or stimulating. The music fades into the background and feels somewhat repetitive and the sound effects work but they almost feel like there’s a millisecond delay between impacts and hearing the effects, leading to a minute disconnect in sound effects. Experiences certainly may vary here but as game soundscapes go, Fearmonium had the potential to be incredibly menacing and traumatic and the audio design holds the game back from being as disturbing as it could have been.
With a unique and rather disturbing concept and fundamentally solid design, Fearmonium ends up being a serviceable Metroidvania that is held back by odd physics, average boss fights, and convoluted map design. The visuals are interesting but could use a bit more refinement and the sound could be better, but all and all, it’s an enjoyable game, especially considering that your end goal is to destroy the life of a teen with heightened phobias and mental illness. If that’s enough for you, this is a game that will hold you in place for a good 10-15 hours at least and for $13, that isn’t bad at all. Now all you have left to do is ruin Max’s life!
This review was based on a digital copy of Fearmonium provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Fearmonium is also available for PS4/PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
