The Great Horror Machine is a tried-and-true strategic machine that teaches us how to spread fear and hatred.

Fictiorama Studios is a highly underrated software house, despite always putting on bold work with challenging themes, starting with the graphic adventure Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today, going through the ‘perfect Do Not’ and stamping authorship on all the genres it touches. Tackling a theme close to the plot of their new game, Feed the Monkeys is a management strategy with a strong focus on the narrative side, focused on the mechanics of spreading false news, created only for the benefit of economic and political realities acting for their own benefit. areas of interest Therefore, with great curiosity I tried The Fabulous Fear Machine demorelevant and curious.

game mechanics

The demo of The Fabulous Fear Machine presents a mission from the first campaign in which we will play the role of a scientist hired by a pharmaceutical company who wants to become a monopolist, in addition to the tutorial that explains the game mechanics very well. in the UK and Ireland. This game mechanics They look complex, but in reality taken as a whole they are very simple. Once you have planted the seed of fear (literally a light bulb) in an area, you can start building a fake news network by deciding which ones to spread in certain areas depending on the message you want to convey. To do this, you need to look for suitable broadcasting places in the main cities, which are clearly visible on the map.

Each city can contain several locations to produce elements (the essential resources that can be spent on them to raise their rank) that are used to raise the alarm and develop individual stories. Production speed depends on the level and skill of the agent used (we’ll explain later). The more stories activated in a region, the higher they rank (perhaps by guessing keywords to make them more effective), the more stuff it fills. fearvisualized on the map as a bubbling mass spreading without escaping, a kind of tumor slowly filling the entire nation.

When the fear reaches a certain height, different for each province, you can transmit the message chosen at the beginning of the mission, which will give us control of the territory. Opponents will think we’re going to have to put a spoke on the wheel, try to deliver their own message instead of ours, and have their agents infiltrate their bases to find and deprive them of elements to blackmail them. from the possibility of acting. From time to time, some events will also appear on the map, which must be handled in different ways depending on the wishes. We didn’t face any particular challenges in the demo, but we imagine things will get complicated in the final version and you’ll have to face tougher opponents and more complex events.

As you read, we mentioned agents. These are slaves that can be used for almost anything and are portrayed as idiots necessary for production.

For example, we can have it spawn resources in a city, have it research to unlock a new location to spread false news, or order it to stop a particular event. Each action takes a certain number of days to complete, so it should be considered according to the priorities of the moment. For example, it is better to stop an opponent before producing a resource, otherwise there is a risk of irreparably losing a certain territory. The more agents move, the more experience they accumulate as they level up. This makes them more capable at certain tasks. For example, they can produce faster or give more effective results during leaks.

gameplay

from perspective gameplayThe title of Fictiorama Studios looks really interesting, at least on the underlying assumptions that govern it. To highlight the focus on the narrative side of the development studio, which makes everything between the hilarious cutscenes and the personal stories the agents tell as they level up all the more engaging. Having said that, The Magnificent Horror Machine, as interesting as it is, inevitably runs into a pretty obvious paradox: it stages conspiracies to try to uncover the dynamics of spreading conspiracy theories and false news. Now, it is not possible to tell just from the demo where the game will go, narratively speaking, so no conclusions can be drawn about it.

However, it is worth highlighting how a mysterious association that communicates through a fortune-teller puppet, complete with a turban, sparkling eyes and a glass ball, and fulfilling its functions according to the orders of the unknown, came into contact with the hero of the campaign. the actual objectives are not clarified in any way. He too has an obscure past that oppresses him and guides him down to hell. From this point of view, it is also interesting to use a graphic style such as pulp, which refers to the style of execution of the story chosen for the game.