The Fabulous Fear Machine Review (jeff)
Played it for 4 hours, thought "this is a slow start but I can see it getting good soon," played for another 2 hours, "wait it's not getting better, maybe there's some twist towards the end?" played for another 2 hours "oh it's over. That was mid." 2/5
Fun art style but gets old fast. Game basically plays itself on normal, and I didn't see an option to play a 'hard mode' - if it gets unlocked after beating the game, I'll pass; there's basically no replayability as there are only 10 missions total (12 or 13 if you count the tutorial, which you shouldn't), and nothing like a 'skirmish' mode that I could see. Maybe replaying a mission lets you skip the cutscenes/dialogue but I didn't care enough to see. I only lost a mission twice, once because I misunderstood the win condition (my fault, but not exactly an intentional challenge) and once because I deliberately picked the worst starting location I could find to see what would happen (the answer: nothing really, and then you lose)
I could be ok with mediocre gameplay if there was a strong narrative, but the game doesn't seem to have much to say besides "haha aren't people stupid and/or evil?" I get that the 'pulp' style typically has pretty flat characters and kind of nonsense plots, but it got boring quickly since it didn't have really meaty gameplay to fall back on - see Tropico for a game with a similar narrative style but (more) complex gameplay. There are hints of some more interesting stuff with the Zeppelin and Mae Ludd, but most of the narrative is just terrible people making quips at each other and then a page or two of a classic-style comic book.
The aesthetic is fun, and there are hints of interesting mechanics in the game - you just don't need to bother exploring them because there's so little difficulty. It feels like an overlong demo for a full game (I expected the "real story" to come after the three provided campaigns finished) but there is no full game.
Also, while the game is very unsubtle in its critiques of reactionary social movements (it lampoons evangelists and anti-immigrant nationalists), the first campaign being "An Evil Pharmaceutical Scientist Fakes A Worldwide Pandemic to Get Famous" is either just comically tone-deaf or deliberately playing into the same kind of reactionary politics the other campaigns make fun of. I think the former is actually more likely, because the campaign ALSO rips into anti-vax movements, but it's just an eyebrow-raising framing.
Also none of the critique (for any cause or ideology) is particularly funny or interesting; as I said at the top, the only thing the game seems interested in saying is "haha aren't people stupid and/or evil?"
Honestly I think that if this game took a pivot into being a roguelike or at least rogue-lite, it'd be a lot more interesting. Some of the design feels like that was part of the original intention (agent stats, 'Somber Place' location modifiers, cut+paste legends, 'rival' dialogue that's incredibly generic), but for whatever reason that's not what we ended up with.