Sometimes it’s the weirdest combinations that go best together: bacon and ice-cream, pilchards and custard, erm … Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary. But surely no one has thought of putting Silent Hill and Fifa 98 together before now.
Billed as “the world’s first online survival horror football game,” Fear FA 98 (pronounced Fear-fa, like Fifa) has you pulling out knives, rusty scissors and syringes, summoning demons and using decapitated heads as the ball, in moves that make the likes of Diego “handball” Maradona and Luis “bitey” Suárez look like angelic stalwarts of the Fifa fair play guide.
The bowels of the world churn with insatiable horror … Fear FA 98. Photograph: Celery Emblem/Jacob Jazz
“People say this is just football with blood, but there’s a lot more to it than that,” says 55-year-old solo developer Jacob Jazz. “I’m mixing survival horror games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil with the gameplay of Fifa and eFootball Winning Eleven [Pro Evolution Soccer in the UK]. You need to play football to keep progressing in the story mode of a classic survival horror game.”
The plot goes like this: Earth’s core has become a nest of colossal twisted serpents due to an event called the Transmigration, which saw an invasion of monsters from a dark and forbidden civilisation. Now, the bowels of the world churn with insatiable horror – like the terraces at Old Trafford come the Manchester derby. There’s an array of modes – one player, third-person horror, story, competitive and online – and whichever you go for, you’ll want to arm your team with serial killers, sectarians and psychopathic nurses to play at stadiums including the Backrooms, Sematary Hill and Chainsaws United. A quiet kickabout down the park this most certainly isn’t.
Fear FA 98 has taken a year to develop and a successful Kickstarter campaign has now reached its €5,000 (£4,300) goal for a hopeful Halloween 2025 release on Steam. Switch, Xbox and PS5 ports may follow if Jazz can raise substantially more investment. A stand-alone tie-in with Nike – Nike Mare 98, featuring football-playing zombies in Nike trainers – is available to download for PC now.
Jazz has been making games for 17 years. His portfolio includes the Baobabs Mausoleum horror series, which features the 8-bit retro adventure series Flamingo’s Creek, on Steam, Xbox and PS4. His other project, horror game Tamarindos Freaking Dinner, is coming soon to the Switch. Until now, he’s been testing his skills in the lower divisions of the PC games scene. Fear FA 98 could help bring him to the premier league.
Fear FA 98 is set for release on PC in autumn