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The Fabulous Fear Machine is a horror RTS video game developed by Fictioroama Studios (Do Not Feed The Monkeys, Dead Synchronicity) and published by AMC Games and Shudder. It released on October 4, 2023 for PC. A demo is also available.
Somewhere out there, in an abandoned warehouse or the middle of the desert, there is a machine - an old fortune telling machine with a dark power. Players step into the role of this machine's new master and use its ability to gain wealth and influence by spreading Legends - the dark, often frightening stories that plague mankind. With the aid of the machine's agents you will work to dethrone rivals and gain the rewards that come from spreading the machine's agenda along with your own… but be warned. The token price the machine asks of you may be more than you are willing to pay.
Previews: Announcement
, Gameplay trailer 1, Release date trailer, Black Summer gameplay
The Fabulous Fear Machine includes examples of the following:
- Apocalypse Cult: The third campaign centers around the Church of Santos, which is patterned after the real-life Heaven's Gate and Jonestown cults.
- Arch-Enemy: The machine and it’s spirit Kirlian have one in the Children of M, a paramilitary group dedicated to its destruction. They apparently used to be affiliated with the machine, as Kirlian regards them as traitors and Mae Ludd's portrait, found in their zeppelin, is wearing an Agent's mask.
- Area 51: "Area 19" appears as one of the rumors you can spread in the second campaign.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Downplayed. Santos, the third master of the machine, gets everything they wanted from their deal with Kirlian... but only because he foresaw his death by crucifixion, and welcomed it with open arms.
- Bad People Abuse Animals:
- Jen, the player character for the first campaign, is an amoral pharmaceutical scientist/executive who experimented on her pet bird as a child. This continues into adulthood when she experiments on monkeys and pig for her pharmaceutical company.
- In the second campaign, a utopia story about people taking care of animals can be corrupted into a legend about people cruelly poisoning animals.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: The Fabulous Fear Machine offers its users a chance to have any wish granted, at the cost of having their story become part of the Machine - forever. Naturally, the wishes are not quite what they wanted either. The first campaign's player character, Jen, wanted all the world's eyes to be on her, which she achieves when the world realizes the power she has over them by hoarding vaccines for a plague she created - and storms her office, ripping her eyes out to use her vault's retina scanner.
- Censored Child Death: Many of the Legends include threats to children or even explicit child death, but no deceased children are ever explicitly shown. This also extends to the main story where references and threats of child death abound like Jen claiming that the SHIV virus is particularly horrific when it infects children, or Santos trying to force his children to be part of his mass suicide but no children are ever seen dead.
- Chinese Vampire: In the first campaign, if the legend of the Returned (the undead) is used in Shanghai, the local rumors can evolve it into the urban legend of the jiangshi.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Jen, the player character of the first campaign, manipulates her way to become the CEO of her company and suppresses a report of the addictiveness of a drug, on top of using the Fear Machine and its agents to spread fear and crush her rivals.
- Double-Meaning Title:
- Jen's campaign, "Double Blind," is a reference to medical trials as well as the recurring motif of severed eyes.
- Jimmy's campaign, "Shaking Hands," is named for both political glad-handing and the persistent tremor he gets when he goes into withdrawal.
- Evil Versus Evil:
- In the first campaign, Jen's first rival is the equally conniving, but more practically-minded head of Hesel Pharmaceuticals.
- In the third campaign, Santos faces off against the leader of a military government responsible for mass oppression, mass murder of dissidents, and the "disappearance" of the island's legitimate President.
- Faceless Goons: At the player's disposal are the Fear Machine's agents - mysterious individuals in mostly blank golden masks. As they level up, the player learns their stories, eventually getting a super-powered Fear to use.
- Fortune Teller: The Fear Machine is a mechanical fortune teller machine with the incredible power to grant wishes by spreading fear though its legends and agents.
- The Fundamentalist: Santos, the preacher the final campaign follows, starts as a televangelist and gets worse from there.
- Homage: The entire game pays homage to the works of EC Comics - from a similar art style to comeuppance stories about villain protagonists. The main menu of the game even resembles an EC Comics cover.
- The Krampus: Fully leveling up the Boogeyman legend in Central Europe will allow it to evolve into the Krampus legend as a result of the rumors associated with it.
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- As a child, Jen would extract the eyes from her pets as part of a life long obsession with eyes. At the end of her campaign, her own eyes are taken by an angry mob to get past a retinal scanner and claim her company’s vaccines.
- Jimmy works on behalf of a far-right political campaign without really caring about their views or the terrorist tactics they employ - he's just in it to keep his opiate addiction satisfied. During a drug deal, he gets beaten to death by his own racist supporters, who fail to recognize him; they just see a black addict in a hoodie.
- Lighter and Softer: The second campaign Shaking Hands focuses on a good-hearted but easily manipulable insurance salesman running for public office. The protagonist is far nicer than the campaigns before or after, and the stakes only directly impact the city itself, making the whole campaign feel like a short breather between two intense stories.
- Mad Artist: Renée, one of the machine's agents in the first campaign, was previously a bohemian artist who killed her competition out of jealousy and developed a taste for murder.
- Malevolent Masked Man: As shown in the trailers, the machine comes with several mysterious "agents" in golden masks who can aid in your operations through spying and "neutralizing" targets.
- Monster Clown: One of the legends the player can spread is of a clown who kidnaps children.
- No Swastikas: The photo proving Hesel’s past as a Nazi collaborating company includes the CEO next to the famous dictator … August Henkel. This is especially strange since there are direct references to other historical genocidal dictators throughout the campaigns including name dropping Stalin as a user of the fear machine in the very same level.
- Not Afraid to Die: To Kirlian's irritation, Santos knew working with the Machine would end in his death. He just considered leading his flock to paradise important enough that he was ready to accept it with open arms.
- Our Gargoyles Rock: In the first campaign, if the legend about man-eating pterodactyls is used in Paris, it can evolve into a legend about living, man-eating gargoyles.
- Parental Neglect: Jen, the player character for the first campaign, has this in her backstory - her scientist parents were always busy with work, even being absent for her graduation.
- The Plague: Jen’s endgame after taking over Phadro Pharma is to engineer a plague, cause a mass panic with it, and develop a vaccine. The plague itself ends up being not that effective among humans, but the panic it stirs is very real.
- Rain of Something Unusual: The tutorial level has a rain of frogs as one of its legends.
- Reforged into a Minion: A fate of those who use the machine and receive a karmic punishment is to be masked and made an agent to the machine forever.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The Our Country party has its fair share of these.
- Rotten Rock & Roll: A legend introduced in the second campaign involves teenagers being brainwashed into becoming more violent through rock and roll music.
- Seers: Prior to becoming an agent, Eliphas was once a medieval prophet, reviving what he believed to be visions from God.
- Shout-Out: In the second campaign, a legend involving brainwashing video games can evolve into a legend about an expy of Polybius.
- The Sociopath: Dante, one of the agents in the second campaign. In contrast to the other agents, most of whom had sympathetic desires that drove them to commit vile acts, Dante was simply a rotten, violent person made even worse by the cruelty of those trying to reform him.
- Villain Protagonist: The trailers show the player character as this, using the machine to tear down rivals and spread fear for their own gain.
