Developed by Red Black Spade and ported by specialist team Ratalaika Games, Fearnomium is a 2-D adventure game, delving into the psyche of a young depressive. After receiving enough positive feedback on PC platform, Steam, to give it an overall rating of “very positive”, console gamers have been graced with the obscure hit-to-be adventure.

Fearmonium – A Refreshing Premise

The first thing that struck me about Fearmonium was how wonderfully different the premise was. In a world full of cookie-cutter storylines, it was refreshing to see a game that stepped beyond the realms of the usual to explore a different approach.

Stepping into the over-sized shoes of a clown girl, you play a manifestation of a childhood memory. Occupying the boy’s inner-psych, you fight off his fears in order to take their places as the dominant existence in his mind. Along the way you will meet conflicting emotions in various forms including Depression and Sadness; you also get to meet and talk to an embodiment of Antidepressants, which was a nice touch to an already richly embellished adventure.

Fearmonium – Where Skull and Cuphead Collide

Of course, a game can’t rely solely on a riveting story and a quirky premise alone; we, as players, need to enjoy playing it too. Thankfully, the gameplay deserves the same shift as the outstanding approach to good, old-fashioned platform action.

Fearmonium allows us to revisit the games of our golden years but with a modern aesthetic that uses perfectly contrasting colors to make backdrops and sprites pop. The color pallets used reminded me a lot of one of my favorite modern side-scrollers, Skul: Hero Slayer, where hues of purple are made to stand out against the grey shades of stone and slate.

Where the colors used beautifully set the scene, the friends and foes that you will come across are reminiscent of Studio MDHR‘s 2013 gem, Cuphead. Varying from fear-to-fear and phobia-to-phobia, the inhabitant’s of Max’s mind proffer the same haunting quality that made this earlier title a talking point in the gaming circles. The slightly creepy and unsettling bosses and “Run ‘n’ Gun” enemies seen in Cuphead gave the game a unique edge and it’s apparent that Red Black Spade have drawn a little inspiration to create their own curiously imaginative world.

Fearmonium – An Aladdin’s Cave of Discovery

Throughout Fearmonium you will discover new abilities and inventory items to assist you in your quest for dominance of Max’s addled mind and curiosity drove me to find more and more different weapons and abilities to unleash on my nightmarish foes. New abilities can sometimes open the way to new paths and it’s not long before you’re traversing an ever-growing world inside Max’s head. As we all know, the mind can be pretty easy to get lost in, so the Meteroid-esque map provided proves to be a convenient companion.

The Menu Woes of Fearmonium

If there was a name for the fear of awkward menus, then I would be using it here. While pretty straightforward, the two radial menus (opened with the left and right triggers) don’t quite work the way you want them to. As gamers, we have long since grown used to using the left or right stick to instantly jump to radial menu items by pressing it straight in the direction of what we want to equip. In Fearmonium, however, I had to use the left and right D-pad buttons to cycle through all of my options to get to the right one. This doesn’t necessarily have any negative effect on the game as action is paused while using them but it does quickly become irksome. Maybe this is something that will be fixed somewhere down the line, my fingers are firmly crossed.

Summary

I really can’t recommend Fearmonium enough, it works to stand out from the magnitude of retro-inspired titles and succeeds with a triumphant flair. Whether it be stand-out visuals, well-designed characters and puzzles or addictive gameplay you crave, this game has it all and delivers by the truckload.