Steam Next Fest is in full swing and there’s no shortage of great game demos you can try out for free. We’ve been keeping track of the best Steam Next Fest demos and doing deep dives into games like Skin Deep and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown throughout the week. If you’ve been following along with us so far, you probably have a full wishlist by this point.
But with Steam Next Fest winding down in just a few days, this is the part of the event where I’m going to let you in on the sicko stuff. You know what I mean: the kind of forbidden goods that are locked away behind the counter. If you want to get really weird before Next Fest ends, let me introduce you to Fear Fa 98.
I don’t think there’s ever been a video game sales pitch that’s as easy to write and difficult to describe, but here goes: Fear Fa 98 is Silent Hill meets FIFA 98. That’s the kind of sentence that should make you say “that makes sense,” pause a moment, and then say “wait, what?” I will say it one more time so you know you didn’t hallucinate it: Fear Fa 98 is Silent Hill meets FIFA 98.
A passion project from solo developer Jacob Jazz, Fear Fa 98 is the unholy union of the arcade sports games of yesteryear and PS1 horror games. Imagine NFL Blitz with demons and you’re mostly there. The demo offers a very early look at the concept and warns players that it’s just a rough teaser, but it’s just bizarre enough to warrant a try before Steam Next Fest ends.
The basics are easy enough to grasp. It’s a fast-paced soccer game where I pass the ball between teammates, run across the field, and shoot to score goals. The only difference is … well, okay, there are a lot of differences. For one, my team is comprised of zombies and occult monsters who shamble around a field covered in pentagrams and flame. They bark out canned one-liners along the lines of “You’re gonna die!” while an original song that belts out the game’s title soundtracks the match. I can occasionally pick up power-ups around the field that trigger slow-motion time vortexes or give my creature a burst of speed.
Also, sometimes players’ heads get cut off. That’s probably important to mention too.
While the demo does indeed feel very early, I already appreciate what Fear Fa 98 is going for. It feels like the kind of forgotten bargain bin game that a major studio would have released in the late 90s. This would have been the kind of commercial flop that became a cult classic among kids because there one friend had a copy of it that an out of the loop relative bought for them. It’s like when I played the crap out of Criticom on PS1 as a kid because my godmother gifted it to me after buying a game at random. I loved it and assumed it was a big game everyone knew. I only discovered as an adult that it was a critically panned fighting game at the time (IGN gave it a 3/10 in 1996). It has since been forgotten to time, making it feel like a secret that only I know about.
That’s kind of the vibe I get when trying Fear Fa 98, and I mean that in a good way. It really captures the spirit of games from the industry’s Wild West era, before every big budget release was an enormous undertaking engineered to be a multi-million dollar success. It’s just a goofy elevator pitch that’s authentically janky and ultraviolent for no reason. That’s exactly the kind of game I probably would have owned as a kid, and one I still yearn to own now.
Fear Fa 98‘s Steam Next Fest demo is available now.
