Fear The Unknown – Dave Story is a 2025 atmospheric horror game that borrows vibe and visual aesthetic heavily from Forest Ranger Services, Tales Beyond the Tomb, and Fears to Fathom game series. You play as a middle-class and salt-of-the-earth type of guy who gets a house cleaning job neck-deep inside a national park area with the offer to spend a week at the house and some extra bucks. A relaxing vacation in the lap of nature or something sinister that is sugar-wrapped.
There’s only one way to find out. We played the game and found a cure for coffee, i.e. this game wears off the alertness you get from coffee and helps you sleep like a baby. Here’s our review of Fear The Unknown – Dave Story.
Weird horizontal lines and lackluster plot
The visual aesthetic of the game has the pleasant, cozy, and warmth-inducing vibe of a VHS tape, but there are some annoying horizontal lines that you might get comfortable with slowly as the gameplay begins to mature. The visuals have an old-school nostalgic quality to them, but they also look like the hastily made blend of modern-day textures and VHS-style textures. If you’re a purist like me who doesn’t like pineapple on pizza, then you’re not going to like the horizontal lines or the identity-lacking visual aesthetic. If there’s something that misery loves more than anything, the answer is misery.
If we’re talking about misery, then we can’t forget the stale pickle plot of Fear The Unknown – Dave Story, which just keeps on spoonfeeding you and doesn’t leave anything whatsoever to explore for you. It’s boring, plain and simple. You might want to use the Men in Black Neuralyzer on yourself after playing this game.
Creepy done right but done less
The gameplay’s atmosphere is quiet to the degree of spooky and unnerving, but there’s not much in the game to support the atmospheric tension or elevate the scary factor of the game, to say the least. The amount of weird, terrifying, awkward or even remotely creepy conversations in the game is way below the levels of satisfying. And if someone has played Tales Beyond the Tomb, this game is not going to even make a sliver; forget the cut. There’s one creepy character in the game that looks like someone who hasn’t spoken more than 2 sentences to a breathing person in over a year – it’s the only saving grace for the game.
The game is deliciously creepy, but it’s done on a rare temperature.
Limited gameplay mechanics but still pleasant
You could drive a car in the game with extremely sloppy handling mechanics, but it’s fun to drive as you are on a solo adventure and there are huge pine trees as far as the eye can see – it feels like taking some time off your harrowing desk job and taking intoxicating gulps of fresh air while being on the road. There’s not much to do in terms of the gameplay mechanics. You drive a car, walk, do boring stuff, read the never-ending commentary on the screen, and hope that this ordeal ends soon. You might doze off during the gameplay.
Playing this game is like eating at a limited buffet after an entire day of being on a keto diet – you cannot skip the meal because your stomach is growling with hunger, but every taste bud on your tongue is screaming, “No, I deserve some respect. Please don’t feed me this.”. Overall, Fear The Unknown – Dave Story deserves respect for the atmosphere it creates. It’s a one-time play type of game.
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