Cold Fear

About Cold Fear

Cold Fear was made by the French studio Darkworks and first published by Ubisoft in 2005 for PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Atari bought the rights in 2025, the old Steam release was taken down, and the game came back on GOG in November 2025 as part of its preservation program, patched for Windows 10 and 11 with widescreen, high resolutions, cloud saves and modern controller support.

Tom Hansen, a disgraced former hero now serving quietly in the U.S. Coast Guard, is sent with his crew on a rescue mission to a Russian whaling ship drifting in a storm. The ship is not empty: something has taken its crew, and soon Hansen is the last of his team still standing. The trail leads from the ship to a nearby drilling platform, a scientist named Viktor Kamsky, his daughter Anna and a CIA agent who has been watching all along.

You play in third person, from a fixed camera or over Hansen's shoulder, with a flashlight on your gun. The ship sways from side to side, which throws off your aim; swinging crates and crashing waves hurt, and a big roll can send you overboard unless you grab a ledge. Russian mercenaries and the infected crew, the Exos, stand in your way, and the Exos grow more mutated as the game goes on. An Exo only stays down when its brain is destroyed, by a headshot or a stomp, and the parasite inside can crawl out and take over another corpse. You fight with pistols, shotguns, a flamethrower and traps you set up. There is no inventory: health is used as you pick it up, each gun holds only so much ammunition, and progress saves at checkpoints.

Critics in 2005 liked its storm and atmosphere and complained about the distance between checkpoints and the lack of a map; players have been kinder to it since. It suits anyone who likes Resident Evil 4, Dead Space or Still Wakes the Deep and wants a lesser-known survival horror from the same years, set at sea.

One run takes roughly six hours. The heaving ship is the highlight. One GOG player's review warns that the back two thirds move somewhere else, reuse rooms and lean on a goofy B-movie plot. Go in for the storm.

How to play Cold Fear

1. Buy and install the game from GOG; it runs on Windows 10 and 11.
2. Choose the fixed camera or the over-the-shoulder view, and raise your gun to aim with its flashlight.
3. On deck, grab a ledge to steady yourself when the ship rolls, and keep clear of swinging crates and breaking waves.
4. Aim for the head, or stomp a downed Exo, so the parasite cannot raise it again.
5. Collect ammunition and health as you search the ship and push on to the next checkpoint to save.

Tips

• Finish every downed infected: a parasite left alive can crawl into another corpse.
• Health packs are used the moment you pick them up, so leave them where they are when you are already healthy.
• Watch the Resistance gauge: running drains it, and running out while hanging off the ship's edge is fatal.
• On Windows 11 play the GOG edition; older copies of RenderWare games can have sound problems there.
• The game has no tutorial prompts and the options menu can't be opened mid-game, so set things up first. On keyboard, Space sprints, right mouse plus F reloads and right mouse plus E is a melee strike.
• The first save point can be close to an hour in while you learn the controls, so don't start a session you can't finish.

Questions