Deep Fear (Saturn) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Sega's 1998 survival-horror game for the Sega Saturn, Deep Fear.

This video was recorded from the UK release. Deep Fear was never released in North America, and since the PAL version is the only way to play it completely in English, that's the version I went with.

*Important note: This video does display the game in its correct aspect ratio. The game did not feature wide-screen support, but the pillar-boxed display only occupies about 3/4 of the screen. I merely cropped the black bars to better fill the 16:9 video frame - the proportions were kept completely intact. I think it looks much better this way - hopefully you agree!

Disc 2 begins at 2:41:05

In Deep Fear, you play as John Mayor (yeah, that's your actual name), an ex-Navy Seal who is working at a secret deep-sea laboratory named The Big Table (not Big Shell, though there are some very obvious comparisons you could draw there) as a contracted member of "Emergency Rescue Services."

And because it's a video game, things go awry pretty quickly. Drawing quite obviously on the movie The Abyss and the original Resident Evil, you are fighting not only against genetically engineered monstrosities in an enclosed environment, but you're also dealing with things like oxygen levels and air-pressure at the same time. It would probably suck to have the entire installation implode while you were in it, don't you think?

Quick note: it was developed primarily by System Sacom, who also did stuff like Lunacy and Mansion of Hidden Souls. If you are familiar with those, you'll likely spot quite a few tell-tale signs of their work.

There are tons of twists and odd-ball plot points thrown at you, and usually the more absurd they are, the better they tend to be - the ending of CD1 has to be among my favorite moments. I won't spoil it here, but let me just say it's pretty damn epic.

Everything looks and sound great. Being the last Saturn game to be officially released in Europe, it holds its own against its contemporaries. The prerendered backgrounds look great, the character and monster models are detailed and are full of personality (thanks to Mr. Nirasawa of Kamen Rider fame), the CGI-based prerendered cutscenes are quite good by 1998 standards (and there's a ton of them), and the music by K. Kawai (Ghost in the Shell) is fantastic - at least it is on the rare occasions that you hear it.

The controls are a pretty huge improvement over the original RE's, and inventory management is a non-issue. Ammo is rarely a problem, and if you run out you can just refill at a nearby storage area. It suffers from the same issue as RE in its tendency to make you backtrack over and over though - just this time, instead of watching doors open, you see elevators go up and down. Overall, it plays well, and it can certainly be creepy and carry an atmosphere, though its tone is markedly different from that of RE. In many ways, it feels like a precursor to Dead Space.

Even with the amount of effort that was put into the presentation, the quality of the writing and voice acting is absolutely appalling. It's far worse than that Resident Evil in that regard - major words are misspelled, sentences are awkward, everyone speaks in rants, cliches, or exposition dumps: I found it pretty funny that every single character has a dramatically tragic back-story that they usually decide to impart at the most inopportune of moments. And dear God - wtf were they thinking with Dubois? Sorry for my language here, but his characterization as a gay character is fucking offensive. He's not merely a comically insensitive bundle of camp - his portrayal would be akin to having black characters portrayed by white guys in black-face with prosthetic lips carrying buckets of fried chicken. He's really that bad - I'm amazed he doesn't set everything on fire as he walks. I usually laugh at crass insensitivities in games, but even if you somehow aren't offended by it, he's so over-the-top that he utterly ruins just about any scene he is in. It's hard to convey tension and dread when he's shrieking in a falsetto while strutting about in that god-awful purple suit of his. I wanted to heave when he told John, "you're a real man." I guess it was a different time, but damn! Okay, stepping down from the soap-box now.

Deep Fear would be easy to write-off as a Resident Evil clone, but despite initial appearances, it does quite a bit to differentiate itself. Even with its missteps, it's quite a good addition to the 32-bit survival-horror crowd, and if you can see past its shortcomings, you'll find a lot to enjoy about it. It's not a total classic, but it's well worth your time anyway.

And is it just me, or does the guy doing Danny's voice sound suspiciously similar to the announcer from Sega Bass Fishing? I almost expected to hear him say, "Please enjoy your fishing!" as I was getting into the diving suit.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.