Fear The Timeloop review for PC

I feel like I’m intruding on Benny’s turf by writing about Fear the Timeloop. It’s a survival horror game, which is a genre that he’s rather fond of and that I…well, I’ll put it this way: my idea of watching a horror movie is turning on something from the 1930s like Frankenstein, because I just can’t take anything scarier than that.

So you’ll want to take my impressions of Fear the Timeloop with a grain or two of salt. But even I’m confident in saying that this is a pretty solid survival horror game – albeit with one massive caveat, which I’ll get to in a bit.

But before I say what the game does wrong, I’ll say what it does right: it has a fantastic premise. Your character, a sheriff who wakes up in a hospital filled with corpses (and, as you’ll soon discover, much worse), has a wound that’s going to kill him in fifteen minutes. If he doesn’t escape before he dies, he’ll be sent back to where he woke up to do it over again.

It’s a great idea, and it generally works pretty well. It turns each run into trial and error, where you build on the knowledge you’ve gained to go a little further each time. The downside, of course, is that each time you get to a new place, you’ll probably die pretty quickly – but you can then use your newfound knowledge to push on a little closer. It also helps that each run is a little different, as you’re periodically faced with sets of doors where you can only choose one, and the other is locked off to you for that run, which makes exploring and building up your knowledge of the hospital essential.

Along the way, of course, you encounter all kinds of creepiness. Not only is the hospital filled with a good number of lurching horrors, it’s also got the dark vibe you’d expect from any good horror game, with jump scares and a constant sense of dread to keep you almost fully engaged.

But, as I said up top, there’s one major drawback that prevents Fear the Timeloop from being a great game: for some reason, the developers cheaped out when it came to voice actors. Whoever they got to voice the sheriff main character sounds like he couldn’t care less what he’s saying, and he’s in a rush to finish his work as quickly as possible. Every time the cop opens his mouth, you lose all immersion in the game, as he’s unable to sound remotely afraid or panicky about what’s happening.

And that’s a real shame, because Fear The Timeloop otherwise is a very good game. It may not be my preferred genre, but I can tell when a game knocks it out of the park – and if it weren’t for its one glaring drawback, I think it would be safe to say that Fear The Timeloop did just that.

PlayWay provided us with a Fear The Timeloop PC code for review purposes.