The F.E.A.R games, among other issues, are a bit of a catastrophe when it comes to bloodshed. Across four instalments of the FPS games, nearly 2,500 people are killed, in what is one of the more confusing storylines in gaming.
The science here comes from TK-576 on Reddit, who led a kill-count project across the mainline F.E.A.R series. The set up for these games, if you aren’t familiar, is that you’re part of the First Encounter Assault Recon team, a group of elite, covert operatives sent to take out a psychic supersoldier named Paxton Fettel. Things go awry when another psychic, Alma Wade gets involved, and, honestly, things get kind of incomprehensible pretty quick.
That said, for a series predicated on covert missions and underground bases, the death toll’s pretty consistently egregious. The first clocks in at 585, the Perseus Mandate expansion 383, F.E.A.R 2 with the highest, at 803, and the third with 661. Totting up the bodies wasn’t too hard, as most enemies require you to kill them, but as the post reads, figuring out the exact entries to use as “official” is a challenge. After the first, developer Monolith Productions was purchased by Warner Bros, and parted ways with publisher Vivendi, who made expansions against Monolith’s wishes. Monolith then developed the second for Warner Brothers, but the third was made by Day 1 Studios. It’s a whole thing, and it shows in the storytelling.
Nowadays, Monolith’s better known for Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. As the Reddit post notes, last year, Monolith tweeted that F.E.A.R won’t be coming back anytime soon, but never say never. Trepang2, from Trepang Studios, has been touted as a spiritual successor.
You can see the kill-count for the first game below:
Previous kill-counts in this series include Gordon Freeman of Half-Life, Max Payne, and Sam Fisher of Splinter Cell, all of whom commit a surreal amount of murder.