In Fear I Trust Review
PROS
- Unnerving and atmospheric story
- Sound and visual design effectively build the world
CONS
- Movement is frustratingly slow
- Limited supply of vital resources
- Puzzles not optimised for smaller devices
VERDICT
In Fear I Trust successfully infuses a sense of dread into is abandoned rooms and grimy corridors. However, it undermines its own atmospheric efforts with awkward controls and unintuitive puzzles.
- Full Review
- App Store Info
In many ways, Black Wing Foundations' take on survival horror ticks all the right boxes. Spooky institutional setting: check. Freaky sanity and fear effects: check. But at some point during the process of freaking us out, In Fear I Trust shifts from unnerving to frustrating.
Waking on a rickety bed in a Russian prison asylum, the hero of the tale has no memory of the events that lead him there. The door to his cell is locked, but everything he needs to escape is dotted around the room. Freeing himself, he begins to search for a way out of the deserted building.
Employing typical first person controls, In Fear I Trust has you using virtual control sticks to guide the action. You can interact with items and puzzles with a tap, while other commands are handled with a selection of pinches and swipes.
Among these additional abilities is the all-important Retrospective Vision. Activated by pinching the screen, this viewing mode allows you to peer into the institution's sinister past. Often this will reveal people and events, along with demented graffiti – all of which offer clues to the institution's secrets and your connection to them.
Retrospective Vision also highlights points of interaction, and reveals information to solve the games many puzzles. Unfortunately the longer you use this ability, the more warped the world becomes, causing audio and visual effects to build until the hero eventually passes out.
The need to constantly manage the use of this ability is unnecessarily irritating. Trying to solve the game's more ambiguous puzzles - which already suffer from poor controls on smaller devices – is hard enough without needing to constantly flip back and forth between modes for risk of falling unconscious.
In Fear I Trust's slow pace and fiddly puzzles undercut the tension generated in the game's creepier moments. However, if you're a horror fan, the game eerie atmosphere and story might be enough to keep you playing through these irritations.
Screenshots
$2.99
