Hello, players!
Fear Mythos: The RPG is a short RPG Maker VX game by LizardBite, author of the Castle Red series, and released in 2012. The game is listed as complete even if oddly the file is called "beta" anyway nevermind, let's start with the plot of the game... that's practically absent! Well, more or less!

The Fear Mythos is a Creative Commons writing community spread over countless blogs, vlogs, creepypasta, canons, games, songs, role-playing sites, and audio plays, an open online writing project spun-off from the Slender Man mythos and the game takes inspiration from this community: we play as a group of quirky characters that have to team up to defeat 23 Fears in order to leave the mysterious dark city in which they are trapped.
Ok, that's not a lot of story, despite this the game in 2014 was followed by a sequel called Panopticon: The Fear Mythos RPG, about the Panopticon organization (and from the pictures I noticed that it probably has far more dialogues and story, or so it seems) but I guess this be another story for another day!

Now, the game: we have these characters that range from a masked maniac to a wizard, a healer and a martial artist, each one with his/her own abilities that are earned levelling up. Some will target a single characte, others will hit everyone, there are debuffs, elemental attacks and so on. What left me puzzled is that in some cases they made no sense, I mean, it's ok for the wizard to have elemental powers and to the martial artist to have a double attack but WHY the maniac has Falconry series of abilities related to... electricity? Some classes also have odd names, but that's ok, what is really strange is that the equipment they possess is what you can expect from a fantasy game, not a modern setting, like the game suggest.


Jack of All always makes himself useful healing for free... but the price for the equipments is excessive!

Uhm speaking about the setting, let's say that the city is a mess because it seems floating in space with missing parts, and while that's partially ok I find mapping to be pretty bad due to passages that you cannot actually use to confused maps where the various resources and assets are used indiscriminately. These are all RTPs so there is no style dissonance, still the chaotic nature of the setting with random things (like boquets of roses scattered everywhere!) and effects like rain indoors is quite off-putting. Was all this done on purpouse? Well the final result is, in my opinion, pretty bad.

Now the battles: these are pretty standard except for some cases in which you have to use some strategy, by the way in the beginning you have to find and battle the weakest Fears, but that's a matter of luck (the first time I chose badly and was outnumbered and defeated, then I reloaded, picked to easier targets to level up, and then got my revenge!). Some enemies also have lairs in which you have to reach the final area fighting their minions in random battles (sigh!), luckily there is a kind soul, Jack of All, that heals for free and can sell useful items, and he will teleport here and there to give some support, and you can also save anytime. The game includes also some mini-bosses that are nor Fears (they apparently serve them) and even some puzzles.

If mapping is bad, music is meh: while I appreciated some of the music used in some battles, there are some terrible choices like the fantasy fanfare in the intro that takes us inside a nightmare. Well that's not very appropriate isnt's it? At least facesets (that unfortunately seldom match with the charset) and monsters looks like to be hand drawn, and while the style is a little too cartoonish, it was better than using Rtps.


SORRYYYYY??? How much damage are we talking about?

Final Verdict
This game is sadly not what I expected: I was aware it was about battling Fears, but as I stated in the title, it's all about exploring and fighting. There is no story, no horror, no atmosphere of dread, characters have no personality, they're just battlers we have to use to beat the enemies. All reduces the game to a series of battles in order to unlock the road that leads outside the nightmare but I found doing this not really fun. Who are our charaters? What are we battling? What's the purpouse of this city? Sadly there will be no answers to these questions and it's a pity because the idea was good and the battles where ok. Uhm standard I'd say, unfortunately this means that the game has no particular appeal or feature or gimmick that makes it interesting. Sigh.