For a long time now, I've been a big fan of the Silent Hill series. I love the series because of it's great gameplay, atmospheric horror, fun and sometimes challenging puzzles, and it's usually great story lines.
Silent Hills was supposed to be the next main series Silent Hill game to come out. It even had a playable demo that many people seemed to enjoy. I never got to play the demo myself, but from what I'd seen of gameplay videos, it looked awesome. Sadly, the game got cancelled and never came to light.
That's where FM comes in. This indie game was made by a single developer (Jordan Cutler) and aims to be a spiritual successor to Silent Hills. I'd seen it mentioned online as it just came out a week ago and being the Silent Hill fan that I am, I just had to give it a try. Plus, it's only $4.99 on Steam so I decided it's worth a shot.
First off, this game is dark. I'm not even talking about horror yet. To be able to see where you're going and what you're doing, you'll probably want to turn the game brightness all the way up otherwise your experience will look like the image shown here. With the game's brightness turned all the way up and with my computer's brightness turned up a bit, I was able to see well enough to play the game. The first few rooms of the game seemed darker than rooms later on, but maybe that was just me.
I know that many horror game developers like to make the game dark as it makes the game more scary, but if a game is too dark then it just becomes a pain to try to play and navigate.
As far as the gameplay itself goes, I thought it was pretty good. It really does feel like a spiritual successor to Silent Hills especially when you consider that it was made by only one person. If you played the Silent Hills demo then the gameplay and story should seem rather familiar to you.
The game took me around an hour to beat, but for the short time that I had with the game, I actually quite liked it. In the game you'll mostly just be walking around, listening to the radio announcer tell you about what happened, and then you'll use what he says to solve puzzles in the room that you're in. I never found the puzzles too hard, but they were fun and fairly well executed.
The game isn't as scary as Silent Hills, but I really wasn't expecting it to be. It certainly had it's scarier moments though for sure. The game does a decent job of using atmospheric horror which I wish more games really used. It's too often that I see horror games rely on cheap jump scares, but true atmospheric horror really immerses you into the experience.
I've thought about what score to give this game all things considered and I think from me it gets a...
7/10
"FM is a great little indie horror game for those that have been looking to scratch their Silent Hills itch. It's not nearly as scary as Silent Hills was, but it does a decent job of replicating the atmospheric horror that the Silent Hill games are known for. For $4.99 you really can't go wrong here. If you're a fan of Silent Hill or horror games in general, I'd say buy it. You'll probably enjoy the experience."