I’ve been playing First Encounter Assault Recon, or F.E.A.R. to its friends, recently. And while its acronym-based title is mildly cringeworthy — look, it must be scary, it’s called F.E.A.R.! — what I’ve discovered is that it’s actually a rather magnificent game that I’m sorry I haven’t got around to sooner.

I’m not normally a big fan of first-person shooters because all too many of them these days follow the Call of Duty model — linear pathways with no divergence punctuated with predictable shooting galleries coupled with a story which neither I nor the developers could give a shit about because the focus of the game is squarely on multiplayer. That’s not to say Call of Duty is necessarily a bad thing, of course — the millions of people who buy every single installment prove this fact — but it’s just not for me.

For me, however, I grew up with first-person shooters as single-player experiences: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, SiN, Half-Life… the list goes on. And while many of these had a multiplayer component, it was only really Doom and Quake that (arguably) pushed it to the forefront. Given the time they came out, it wasn’t practical for me to explore multiplayer at all due to the poor quality of your average Internet connection — most of us here in the U.K. were still using dial-up at that point, after all. As such, I still tend to prefer the solitary experience of a good first-person shooter.

Which is why I’m enjoying F.E.A.R. so much. While it did launch with a (now-defunct, save for a fan-run service) multiplayer component, the focus of the game is very much on its single-player story. While perhaps a little slow to get started, after playing for a few hours last night, I found myself well and truly enraptured by the curious tale it has to tell.

To say too much about the story would be to spoil it, but suffice to say all is not as it first appears, as you might expect. The story is paced extremely well, flip-flopping between relatively conventional “military types barking orders at each other” and some seriously weird shit going on. Monolith, the developers of F.E.A.R., clearly played a lot of System Shock 2 at some point as a lot of the “weird shit” going on in F.E.A.R. is of a similar ilk to the “weird shit” that goes on in System Shock 2 — hallucinations, ghosts and all manner of other quasi-supernatural phenomena, all of which is kept tantalisingly mysterious throughout most of the game.

F.E.A.R.’s protagonist is the very embodiment of a silent protagonist the player is supposed to superimpose their own personality over the top of. He doesn’t even have a name, for heaven’s sake, being referred to only as “point man”. Unlike many other first-person shooters, however, Point Man very much has a sense of presence in the game world — look down and you can see your feet; wander into an area where you’re backlit and you’ll project a shadow in front of you. While you never see your character from outside the first-person perspective, this gives a much better feeling of being “part of the world” than many other games of this type.

F.E.A.R. adopts a similar storytelling style to Half-Life in that the story unfolds as you play, and you never “break character” to see things from a third-person perspective. Much of the narrative is revealed through rather one-sided radio conversations between Point Man and other members of the F.E.A.R. team, but there are also numerous things throughout the game’s levels that let you delve deeper into the details of what is actually going on. By hacking laptops to recover data files and listening to voicemails, you gradually start to get a very strong sense of who is who in this game world, even though you meet relatively few of the characters involved face-to-face. While I initially thought the story was going to be somewhat throwaway when I started playing the game, after about 6 hours of the campaign mode, I’m genuinely interested in what is happening and what will happen next.

The voicemails and laptops are, of course, simply variations on the oft-derided “audiologs” that are found in games like the aforementioned System Shock 2 and Bioshock, but somehow they seem to make a lot more thematic sense here. Because you’re listening to messages — fragments of conversations — between people rather than someone inexplicably babbling all their innermost thoughts into a tape recorder, there’s a much better sense of context, and of these characters having relationships. Similarly, the laptops simply contain data files that gradually reveal the facts of the events rather than incongruous audio logs or personal diary entries. It makes a lot of sense, and gives you a very strong feeling of “following the trail” to unravel the mystery of the game’s strange goings-on.

I mentioned earlier that I disliked the Call of Duty way of doing things in single-player campaigns — linear corridors punctuated by shooting galleries — and it is in its level design that F.E.A.R. really shines. Most of the levels take place in realistic environments such as office blocks and service tunnels, but it rarely feels like you’re being pushed down a single path, because there’s often more than one. Charge into an enemy encounter and get shot to ribbons and it’s probably because there’s a better way to approach it. Come to a junction and choose one of two or three ways to get to your destination, some of which might offer some hidden goodies. Levels often require that you double back on yourself and discover pathways that have opened up as a result of various events, too, so there’s a real sense of being in a real place rather than simply running forwards until the end. Likewise, it’s not non-stop action — many levels feature long expanses of simply running around exploring and admiring the environment before coming across another squad of enemies. It’s hard to explain how excellent and satisfying the pacing is without simply plopping you down in front of it to experience it for yourself.

And my God, you don’t realise how much fun waypoint markers suck out of first-person exploration-based games until they’re not there any more — F.E.A.R. doesn’t once patronise you with a “FOLLOW” marker over anyone’s head, and instead trusts that you have the intelligence to explore the level for yourself and determine what the correct route is. While this could easily lead to confusion and running around in circles, F.E.A.R.’s levels are so well-designed that the correct way to go tends to feel very “natural” — highlighted in subtle ways through environmental cues rather than big flashing arrows or golden breadcrumb trails. It’s a good way of doing things, and one I wish modern first-person shooter makers would go back to.

Suffice to say, I’ve been having a blast (no pun intended) with F.E.A.R. and if you, like me, are weary of modern military shooters but still enjoy occasionally shooting the heads off people with a shotgun in slow motion, then I strongly recommend you check it out — particularly if you’re a fan of intriguing, creepy horror as well as action. I haven’t yet finished the game, but I’m hooked on the story. It’s dangling enough clues in front of me to keep me interested, yet keeping me in the dark enough that I can’t quite tell where it’s going. I’m looking forward to seeing how it ends, and if the expansions and sequels are even half as good as this, I’ll be very happy indeed.