The Haunted Hoard: Breathing Fear (Switch)

In Breathing Fear, if you let your heart rate get too high, you’ll literally be scared to death. How this concept actually manifests in game is rather strange though, an indicator for your heart rate causing an instant death if you hit 70, but it can also get as low as 0. Perhaps rather than measuring beats per minute, it instead tracks how many beats above a safe heart rate you’re at, but this horror adventure game’s hero also seems like a bit of a coward, his heart rate going up incredibly quickly if you turn his flashlight off and even the simplest scares are at risk of pushing you over the edge. There could be a game where this heart monitoring could be a fascinating mechanic to up the sense of tension and dread, but unfortunately. all Breathing Fear can think to do with it is to have it force an annoying restart of an incredibly linear sequence of events.

Breathing Fear sees you playing as an escaped convict who comes across a large house at night and entering it to investigate. The player isn’t really given much of a goal to motivate looking around, but eventually they will start to piece together notes they find into a narrative, this 2D game all about searching around the house and a few nearby buildings to try and figure out some sort of story. For the most part this manifests as just investigating every object that gives you the option to do so. You have an inventory for carrying items, some necessary tools like gasoline for a generator or a sledgehammer to bust a lock while others like flashlight batteries just help you keep that lifeline around and on so your heart rate doesn’t start spiking. As you’re poking around for important items though, sometimes a random scare might pop up to give your character a little fright, not that he reacts visibly to most of them. Sometimes you might glance a strange figure out of the corner of your eye, but most of the time these scares are incredibly plain like a cross on the wall flipping. Even words appearing on the wall seem to lack impact because the game does so little to sell them as terrifying, and yet at times it will start dramatically zooming in on you and it’s hard to tell what the scare in that moment is even meant to be. While some are set to occur during exploration, others are random meaning you can’t really account for them. There are a finite ways to calm down like taking medicine or grabbing a drink too, and this leads to an incredibly short-sighted choice in Breathing Fear’s game design.

Breathing Fear is an adventure game about very light inventory puzzles most of the time, there being no combat and it’s all about learning where important items are and using them properly. This means completing Breathing Fear is a process mostly set in stone, there being no variance involved in the steps taken save for when you’re first learning the right actions and then when the random scares get involved. If you’re unlucky, the random scares might be too much, and almost inevitably in that first run you will meet your doom before you know every step required to complete the adventure. This is where you’d hope on your next attempt you can do better, but Breathing Fear not only has you start a run from the very beginning after death, but it refuses to allow you to skip steps. Your character needs to have knowledge of an item’s importance to pick it up, so you need to reread every note you found. You can’t grab items out of order even if you know they’re important, meaning you have to repeat all the steps from before and you do so unopposed because the only danger are random events that just happen on screen rather than influencing your actions. The game even makes sure to swap some vital information like safe combinations between runs meaning you can’t even carry over that simple information to speed things up, and things only get worse because the game features three bad endings that can also end your run prematurely.

For the most part in Breathing Fear, if you find an item or peculiar object, all you can really do is take it or interact with it. You can never know what contains a vital clue, especially since sometimes it won’t be available until you’ve looked elsewhere and triggered the action even if it wasn’t a direct hint that something else was now important. The bad endings of the game where you meet your end rather than seeing the story to its unsatisfying finale actually prey on this, these being the only times where you aren’t supposed to immediately perform a possible action or head to an area that you had little reason to suspect would lead to an instant failure. On top of that initial run to learn the game a bit, this almost guarantees you’ll have a minimum of four runs, and there are other ways to make the game unwinnable like not finding an important item or failing to find the computer password before the fuel for the generator runs out entirely. If you do finally manage to tolerate the game’s constant resets enough to see the adventure through to its true finale, that last run might take somewhere around twenty minutes so it’s not unfeasible, but it does come off the back of many potentially longer runs as you’re still learning necessary actions or rubbing up against brick walls since you weren’t aware one action allowed others to be taken.

You would hope there would be a fascinating plot to at least give you a reason to keep diving back in to try again, but Breathing Fear squanders its few moments of intrigue by having a story that is overall fairly thin. While it’s easy to critique a horror plot for being oblique or leaving too many questions unanswered, most will also at least do a better job of posing those questions. The scraps you’re offered don’t really energize the exploration, especially since even the game’s proper ending sweeps things up in a fairly blunt manner rather than digging deeper into its areas of promise. As such, you’re left feeling rather hollow after you finally earn that ending, all that work paying off rather weakly. Since that work was often just carrying the right items all about after reading the right notes and object descriptions and very few scares had any real substance behind them, it’s hard not to sit back and wonder why you put time into figuring out the proper sequence of actions to complete this game in the first place.

THE VERDICT: A repetitive mechanical march through the same required actions makes playing Breathing Fear enough to see how it ends bad enough, but when the plot barely has anything to justify redoing the same actions in the same order to reward you with, it’s hard to find much that works in this horror game experience. Managing your heart rate sounds like a neat survival mechanic until you see the unimpressive ways your character so easily gets terrified, and since their randomness is the only factor that can throw off a nearly successful run, it’s hard not to resent their boring simplicity. Breathing Fear requires you figure out every action in an unbending chain but also doesn’t make repeating them more convenient. Couple that with some premature endings that are essentially traps for playing normally and it starts to feel like Breathing Fear is outright hostile to you extracting any enjoyment from its weak investigative adventure.

And so, I give Breathing Fear for Nintendo Switch…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Before you know the depths of the game’s issues, the first time you play Breathing Fear, it might be tolerable and a little tense. You don’t know yet how paltry its scares are, how weak their random appearances are despite them being a threat on your life, and you certainly have yet to know the game’s greatest sin in making you repeat a sequence of actions that lose any interest after you first figured them out. The only way the process is sped up on a second go is you know what not to look at, and the limited area you can explore will still require you to take long slow treks to spots like a gravestone every run rather than letting you retain valuable knowledge to use on a second attempt. Most puzzles are just about having the right inventory item so it’s not too deep, and your character will automatically use it provided he knows he can so it’s not even a matter of logically figuring it out. You just need to make sure your pockets are full with pretty much everything you can currently carry, the only real choice being when you use your few ways to calm down your heart or if you want to grab some battery backups.

A tedious sequence of tasks without the rewarding payoff for learning the proper order, Breathing Fear funnily enough ends up comparing poorly to Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure. While not the most evocative comparison, that game, despite its flaws like needing to get pixel perfect jumps, actually involved figuring out what actions can be skipped, making informed choices on what optional items you should divert your course for, and made constructing the adventuring schedule a little interesting despite not being worth it all that much in the end either. Breathing Fear is frustrating because nothing you’re doing remains interesting after you’ve figured it out and yet you’re tasked with doing it again because of forced repetition without any wiggle room. If there had been even one checkpoint or if you could carry knowledge between runs then the game could at least be brisk and you might not resent the heart rate mechanic for its minimal contribution to the affair. Instead it’s a barebones horror narrative stretched out by shoving you back to start repeatedly, and since this game doesn’t value your time, you shouldn’t give it any of yours.