As with all sequels, Project Origin faces that difficult task of advancing while maintaining continuity with the previous game. And also having to ask such difficult questions as what FEAR’s fundamental qualities were, whether they are still as relevant now, and whether after hundreds of J-horror Ring-alikes, are little girls with lank hair still scary?

“I hope so!” says lead designer John Mulkey, as you might expect he would. But while Project Origin seems as beholden to the horror clichés of cinema as ever, its status as a sequel has seen it necessarily delve further into the backstory of near-future psychic fury and shuffle it along towards something more grandiose.

“In the first game the player interacted with the child visualisation of Alma that she used to facilitate her escape from her imprisonment,” says Mulkey. “In Project Origin, the player now has to deal with the wrath of the woman, not the child. She is an adult and is driven less by intellect than by her more base emotions of rage and need. Alma is going to be more direct. She is going to touch you more. In the first game there were just glimpses of Alma, but the player will be more aware of her in this game.”

While it’s something of a relief to hear that Monolith isn’t going to slavishly regurgitate the iconic elements of past games, there remains a risk that the game will go off the rails in an attempt to be more edgy and shocking. After all, didn’t Monolith’s sequel to Condemned take a dive into the gutter in order to out-do the
grotesquery of the original game?

“The teams definitely feed off and inspire one another,” says Mulkey, sidestepping criticism of Condemned 2’s excess. “We have basically rolled the whole Condemned 2 team on to the project for the final push. We’re all brainstorming manically trying to ensure all the fear elements are encompassed in this game.”

But as Craig Hubbard, also a lead designer, points out, Project Origin is first and foremost an action game. “There are horror elements,” he says, “but it’s not meant to be an unrelenting experience in terror.” Hubbard points to the more open and varied arenas of combat and the procedural cover system as means of building on FEAR’s reputation for sharp gunplay and lively, improvisational AI.

There also seems to be the opportunity to hijack some of the larger mechanical foes, a la The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, and go on a cathartic rampage. “The value of something like the powered armour sequences is that you spend a lot of your time up against tough odds,” says Hubbard. “It’s gratifying to occasionally lay waste to all that you survey.”

There’s no doubt that Project Origin’s task is complicated by the legal wrangling over the possession of the FEAR brand, forcing Monolith to sell the game under a new name. Can the game both satisfy fans and convince the uninitiated of the merits concealed by the supremely insipid title of Project Origin? With a release slipping into 2009 to avoid the Christmas competition, it seems as though the game is still looking for that right hook.