Deep Fear has accomplished the act of developing a tangible sense of drama in the early attempts of horror gaming.
Such aspects however were accomplished in earlier titles and Deep Fear was one that accomplished the act of developing a tangible sense of drama in the early attempts of the common horror-adventure game genre and what better way to express such terror of thinning paths and options with a number of character connections than in the unforgiving depths the Pacific ocean, featuring a number of different innovations to keep the players on their toes.
The game takes place at the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean in a Naval research base known as The Big Table. When an object falls from space into the ocean, a local submarine known as the Sea Fox, which helps The Big Table out from time to time, delivers the object to a select portion of the base, but before departing after the delivery, the submarine crashes into that part of the base. You assume the role of John Mayor, a member of the Emergency Rescue Services who aids in extracting injured civilian personnel and ceasing any further damage on the base, who with his pilot and good pal Mookie Carver are sent to the part of the base the submarine crashed into in order to save anyone injured in the crash and to extract the head researcher of the Medical Institution at the base Dr. Weisburg. From here, the appearance of rather disturbing monsters encroaches on the underwater facility and it's eventually up to John to stop these creatures from advancing any further.
The story sounds inspired by a number of underwater suspense films, though mostly by concept and the story itself is a bit unique as the twists at every turn are a bit unexpected and even intriguing. The story and even narration delivers the feeling of a sixties science fiction film with a high level of intrigue regarding the creature's biological backgrounds delivered mostly through dialogue (even the occasional biological blooper fact is included). It's easy to see the game occasionally tries to deliver a slight action hit feel to the game with a few predictable death scenes and oddly placed comic relief characters, but both aspects are squelched with through the game which is good, because if the latter were allowed more focus the drama and atmosphere would become transparent; Deep Fear brings a terrific sense of adventure to the player's hands with what it delivers.
The graphics in Deep Fear bear a few similarities to Bio Hazard in the sense that all backgrounds during play are pre-rendered, but boast heavy amounts of graphical details with a large assortment of well made Full Motion Videos that mostly make up for the graphics during the normal game play. Looking back on the graphics, you can see many signs of how Deep Fear's full motion videos would improve today, especially after seeing at least one character's thumb go through the grip of their gun, newly grown appendages sprouting over character's clothes rather than ripping through them (save for one shoe and sleeve), stiff movement and the insanely flat rear-end of the protagonist, but the FMVs are marvelous regardless.
The many moments of tension and drama really come to life because the graphics deliver the scenes with superb graphics for character models either it be a character's last moments or the vast extenuation on traveling through and around the base that the protagonist does. The in-game graphics come off as very blasé as the characters appear with good detail, but it's hard to see practically everyone's facial features except for John and Mookie's with so many different camera angles and everyone's shadows are merely black blobs which follow their bodies. The blood spurts which occur when you strike a monster and like all blood spurts in the game are plentiful, but it tends to be too crisp at times, even lacking detail especially when a creature falls over and spills a classic puddle of blood to indicate its passing which looks more like a sequin design being quickly stretched out against the floor.
The controls for Deep Fear are a solid factor as the controls for movement and combat are simplistic yet stronger than most horror games offering a Resident Evil style control scheme. You move the main character in a 3D control set-up which works very well with the set-camera angles in every area as the up button moves you forward and the down button moves you backward, holding the B button allows to run when you move, The A button allows you to examine objects and fire your weapon, the Y button draws your map and the Left trigger reiterates your current location. What separates Deep Fear from the basics are its combat controls as you must press the Right trigger to draw your weapon out rather than hold it down and, here's the zinger, you can walk and run forward or hop backward while aiming and firing any weapon you carry, an option even Resident Evil has yet to offer, the obvious fault of doing so could mess up your character's aim, not making it easy for you to shoot the creatures down in a hurry.
Additional buttons include other uses such as the X button allows you to use or set any items you have in your inventory as you can quickly select a key item to use without having to enter the Pause screen or you can set a health item or grenade in your Set Item capacity, which is used by pressing the Z button. Being in an underwater area that's suffering major damages also boasts another innovation as you must constantly refresh the air supply so as to avoid choking to death. You can do this a number of ways either through tossing an Oxygen grenade (this is the future after all) into an O2 weak hallway or by refreshing the air via Air System boxes scattered around the base. It's here that you can perform other tasks including refreshing an air respirator you gain later for traveling while submerged and saving your game either in three available slots on your memory card or by making a quick save if you don't have a memory card!
Sadly, there is a little flaw in saving which is familiar to most gamers who are used to adventure games and older Survival Horror game entries in that you can save when you have one hit left and around enemies and the moment you load your game the enemies will have ample time to send you to the game over scene. Thankfully though, this is avoided by more than one save point being available and if not those then enough health sprays to keep you healthy enough to save your game... plus, unlike previous games, you also have a full-load of ammo nearby.
If there was any major flaw in the game play of Deep Fear, it's the physics of various areas that under abnormal circumstances are made to appear normal, something that would never get past most drunks once seen. For instance, the first time John is submerged underwater and allowed to move around, he moves around as if he were not submerged. That's right, without proper diving equipment the hero can WALK and RUN underwater!
Such a screw up is actually permissible seeing how John's movements underwater is constricted by speed as you move slower than you would out of water, but it makes one wonder why the developers never rectified such a blatant error. There's also the fact that you cannot discard key items such as a fellow character's ID card after using it and DV cassette tapes you can watch yet never discard, but you start out with twelve inventory slots, so it's not a major gripe. It just would've been nice if you had the option of discarding items once they're useless.
The sound quality to Deep Fear is a bit flawed, but with no serious consequences. Some noises will sound unique from each other as the numbers of different monsters you encounter make different noises, making it easy for you to identify which enemies you'll be facing up against if you can't see them at first. The noises of the monsters are also quite creepy to hear as they range from an assortment of raspy growls and guttural snarls. While average noises such as radio beeps and footsteps sound fair, these noises are very repetitive and lack variation unlike the monster's breathing noises, though their movements, despite logical locomotive sounds, are repeated every time (creatures crawling on ceilings make the same foot-dragging noise as the first creatures you encounter… great).
Gunshots on the other hand tend to fall somewhere between fair and poor as shotgun blasts and automatic gunfire sounds appropriate, but pistol shots sound quiet and oddly weak. Though the FMVs often incorporate noises from the main frame of the game, they also include a stronger array of sounds such as the sound of water flowing around ubiquitously and metal objects popping from the amount of deep-sea pressure. One factor in regards to noise that gave me some ambivalence was the assortment of ambiance used for every different area. Now this ambiance was actually very good as the sounds varied from each area and occasionally emitted a sense of uncertainty for every new area. The only problem with these ambient sounds was that they often muffled out scenes of dialogue and sounds where an actual song plays over during specific scenes and we rarely get a break from the ambiance when we're forced to run and back track from area to area.
Composed by one of Japan's top composers Kenji Kawai, Deep Fear's soundtrack adds a powerful level of intensity, tragedy and mystery to various events in the game, though the music applied to the majority of scenes during actual game play is a bit lackluster. If there is one feeling the soundtrack truly evokes in Deep Fear its the feeling of watching a classic science fiction movie right from the beginning of the game as we watch the object descend from the loneliness of space accompanied with an eerie feminine chant and haunting tones which appear later in the game. There's also a number of touching tones which adds to the level of sympathy in the game which creeps its way into a variety of scenes. Specific moments of sadness in the game are successfully fulfilled with the soundtrack with an array of violin strings and moments that require you to take action (boss fights) or run from an unstoppable threat are also brought to our ears with strong composition.
What the soundtrack truly lacks however is an equal assortment of atmospheric songs that would accompany the moments of game play when you have to run to various points in order to progress. By atmospheric songs, I mean the type of songs that would make your skin crawl when you traverse a new area, not knowing what type of new mutations you'll see next in your all ready strange enemies, songs that add to the atmosphere to the horrors around you.
There were only two areas which offered such atmospheric tracks in the whole game, only one of which was accessible more than once. This does seem odd seeing how the soundtrack all ready accomplishes a sci-fi movie feel, yet it only tries meekly to fill the rest of the atmosphere with what few horrific songs are offered. This ultimately made running from point A to point B in the game feel menial when it should have at least been discouraging.
Before diving into the quality of the voice acting, let me first clear a few early beliefs that have lived today despite their falsity. Back when Deep Fear was released, it was easy to compare with the first Bio Hazard game in most aspects especially seeing how both games were two out of the three 3rd person survival horror games available for the Saturn and seeing that Deep Fear was the very first game of the genre to copy the basic pre-rendered screens and few movement details from Bio Hazard (which I'm sure got its camera angle inspiration from the Alone in the Dark series, but that's another story). That being said, it's easy to juxtapose the horrid quality of the very first Bio Hazard/Resident Evil game to Deep Fear's which, though shining in some parts, often gives the voice acting in Bio Hazard a run for its money.
What really saved the voice acting in Deep Fear even without comparison were the few voice actors who actually brought the character's dialogue out clearly 100% throughout the game, the specific characters being Commander Clancy and the well trained, shotgun totting, dog loving deep diver Anna as well as one or two extras who end up dead moments after their appearance anyway. The rest of the voice-overs give the impression that they had not practice their lines before recording, just reading the lines for the first time. I will be fair though; there are moments in the dialogue where the protagonist and the head researcher will bring a less amateurish, emotionally appropriate tone to their dialogue in either a scene of succinct remorse, jolly gregariousness, solace and sometimes even urgency, but such moments run few and far between.
You will often find some voices for specific characters to be down right agonizing to hear, such being the cute Sea Farm caretaker Sharon who's supposed to be nineteen years old yet sounds like the voice actress that was chosen to voice her lacked nine years from the character's age (makes me wonder what Rebbecca Chambers would sound like if you hired a kindergartner to voice her) and the famous of this lot going to the Naval craft/facility designer Dubois Amalric who, instead of carrying his character's appropriate French Alsace Lorraine accent, he has a bizarrely effeminate, oddly mild British accent which sounds like a young lad doing a weak John Cleese in drag impersonation, beginning and ending his sentences with hilariously worrisome exclamations ("Oh, no accident should've occurred, OH")! As much as I learned to appreciate the character later in the game, I found myself groaning every time Dubois had a line, knowing my ears were going to regret hearing him talk because the lack of quality applied to the voice just sucked the life out of a few events, making one's sense of dread of a new threat become a fortuitously hilarious feat of silly voice acting.
Oddly enough, there was little to no gore in the game; if anything, you get to see a heavy amount of literal blood shed as characters spray blood from fresh wounds like miniature geysers, though most of the wounds are inflicted off screen. The only true gore permitted in the game was mostly a very succinct yet graphic death scene involving the gratuitous impalement of one of the characters I found myself hoping he'd live in the end. The variety of violent creatures you encounter in the game are ultimately creative and very unsettling with all variants accounted for; it's worth noting that Manga artist Yasushi Nirasawa, who worked earlier with WARP Studios on the bizarre alien creatures in Enemy Zero, helped design the number of creatures in the game and as extravagant as his work is, the array of elaborate strangeness in the creatures designing certainly adds a level of discomfort to combating them as you don't know what they're going to look like next!
Perhaps the biggest point of atmosphere in Deep Fear however lies in its sense of desperation and vain attempts at one's escape from the inevitable; The Big Table can only take so much damage that eventually the forces of nature will start working against you to the point where you feel like the rope you were dangling from was reduced to the width of a shoe string. Also, what Deep Fear accomplishes so well in the line of unsettling circumstances are the backgrounds of the majority of characters, making us sympathize with some of them and, even in my case, appreciate them more.
I especially enjoyed the level of personal tragedy that the character constantly carried with him as he forced himself to move on as it made me like him more than most survival horror heroes/heroines of biologic mayhem, though other games certainly took after it. With this and the factor of desperation working together in mind, and the game creates a sense of insecurity as to what will happen next, how much dread it will bring, who will be most affected by it and who much damage it's going to cause.
Oddly enough, Deep Fear is a fine game despite its notable flaws. Though there's obvious room for improvements, the game is entertaining and often times thrilling to play through for its sense of involved length and drama. What's really depressing is that it's hard to find direct copies of the Bio Hazard games as good as Deep Fear in the majority of its attributes.
It's certainly recommendable for anyone who still owns a Sega Saturn that is either a Japanese make or has a converter that allows import games to be played, though it apparently makes a great collector's item. I personally hope that more games of the survival horror genre take similar turns in the sense of drama so we can at least care about the characters in hopes of their survival because, let's face it: the more we care about the characters, the more it means that the developer's cared about the characters.