Ex-F.E.A.R. devs’ spooky FPS Betrayer reappears on GOG for free, two years after vanishing off Steam
An immersive sim and horror shooter with Sin City’s style.
Remember Betrayer? I couldn’t blame you if you had, given that it’s been AWOL for a couple of years now after disappearing suddenly off of Steam. Here’s some good news, though: whether you missed it first time around or have been desperate to get back to it, Betrayer is back. And best of all, it’s back for free!
As you might or might not remember, Betrayer is the spooky horror first-person shooter-cum-immersive action-RPG from Blackpowder Games, the studio made up of former F.E.A.R. and No-one Lives Forever devs out of Monolith.
When it comes to games that can be described as “a bit like X meets Y”, Betrayer might take the cake. There’s a bit of Arkane’s Dishonored and Prey in its immersive first-person sneaking-and-or-shooting; some Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Return of the Obra Dinn in its unravelling mystery of a vanished 17th-century colony in Virginia; the antiquated, deliberately slow weaponry of something like a Chivalry 2 or Mount & Blade; and even a touch of MadWorld in its Sin City-esque colour palette of black, white and red. Yes, it’s even got a bit of Dark Souls in there to boot for you Soulslike fans.
The game tasks you with exploring a seemingly abandoned New World colony and working out what happened to its inhabitants. As you quickly find out, nothing good, because there’s now a bunch of ghosts, skeletons and other spooky monsters haunting its open world. It’s on you to blast them away with an assortment of muskets, tomahawks, bows and other period armaments, while also searching for clues in a fairly freeform puzzle-solving experience.
“Betrayer is an ambitious and very different experience, and one which very boldly avoids convention,” Alec wrote about it back in the day. “Singular of vision but faltering in execution and in need of some fleshing out - something's missing here, in terms of exploration and progression, but what is there is really quite special.”
Alas, Blackpowder similarly vanished not long after Betrayer launched back in 2014, with the game sticking around on Steam a while longer until 2021, when it too suddenly up and disappeared.
Happily, it’s now resurfaced over on GOG, where it can be picked up without costing you a penny - meaning, at the very least, you can check out what sounds like a remarkably familiar yet distinctively different game for free. (And if it leaves you craving F.E.A.R.’s more bloody and breathless action afterwards, maybe go check out Trepang2 - it’s pretty great.)