What’s A Gun For?

There is nothing quite like the tension between a gun and a closed door. Maybe a tight turn or an opaque portal can replace the door, but they miss the feeling of turning the handle. Regardless, knowing what a gun is for and what ignorance can breed, videogames have used facing the unknown to birth fear for a while.

This came across strongly in my time with F.E.A.R., a first-person horror shooter which came out when I was five years old. I was inspired to play after its creator, Monolith Studios, shut down in February 2025, sparking several conversations about the dev studio’s legacy. It doesn’t take long to see how their game stood the test of time: it revels in the fear I detailed above, on top of a relentless enemy AI system, a satisfying slow-mo mechanic that turns enemies into bloody carnival ducks, and well-placed jump scares among an unnerving atmosphere. The tight rooms and enclosures I survived in as Point Man were full of cover to dive behind, walls to peek from, and doors to bust through. And yet, despite the enjoyable stress these combat encounters created, it is F.E.A.R.’s first level that I think of when I reflect on the most unnerving moments. And that is because this level flipped my expectations of what the gun was for.

F.E.A.R. stirred my unease before it ever gave me a pistol. Before any sort of interface popped up on my screen to offer a sense of security with a reticle and bullet count, I watched the horror called Paxton Fettel and his well-equipped army of military clones during a mission briefing. Any nervous laugh should be forgiven when you’re told to go inside an empty building that may host this psychic maniac. From the moment you open the back door to the building Fettel was last seen entering, every cranked-up sound, closed door, and sharp corner is a threat. I couldn’t even find peace in the emptier spaces, as years of first-person shooters have engineered me to expect a fireright to fill the silence at any point. It felt like Monolith expected this even in 2005, as FPS games like Wolfenstein 3D, Call of Duty, and more already helped propel the genre to a new stratosphere of recognition. It makes the studio’s decision to have a first level devoid of combat in said niche stand out.

I’ve never shot a gun that wasn’t loaded with water, Nerf darts, or paint balls, but everyone I know who’s held the more lethal kind says the same thing: you don’t aim at anything you don’t intend to hurt, or worse. Incredibly similar words have appeared semi-recently in the games news cycle, as their mention in a Slack channel potentially got an Activision QA worker fired. Plus, as someone who grew up in the United States, knowing our track record and facing our tradition-riddled present, this is a lesson I internalized well before someone spelled it out. While the stakes are very different, this core logic doesn’t disappear in videogames, especially ones where you are part of an assault team. Considering how often kills are rewards, whether they contribute to anything from weapon upgrades to Gamer social standing to a career in e-sports, the medium leans heavily into using guns for their intended purpose. They bring violence, and violence is frightfully unpredictable.

It is this storied relationship that made every second I didn’t pull the trigger agonizing. Another moment closer to danger revealing itself. This tension is also what made the inevitable more impactful. After seeing a brutalized corpse alone in a room, I made my way up the haunted building until I reached the rooftop. It was as I slowly walked across the roof that the inevitable hit me – literally. Paxton Fettel begins to pop out from behind a pipe. I try emptying the whole clip of my anxiety into him, hoping my hands will relax once his body lies on the ground. Instead, I get knocked out and wake to Fettel towering over me, mouth outlined by red, looking powerful and self-assured enough not to kill me then. The cutscene plays out, then leaves me alone and beaten on the rooftop, save for the updates being relayed from HQ about a situation developing at a harbor. I feel utterly disempowered.

This interaction teaches a core fact of F.E.A.R.: guns mean nothing when faced with the extraordinary. It is the most effective lesson from the first level, one that’s doubled down on as I got spooked in air vents, swam through corridors flooding with blood, and fled from a very angry ghost girl. No matter how many living obstacles the gun can remove, bullets are not enough to defeat the supernatural. By turning the tool in Point Man’s hands for killing and fear into just one of fear, the game wastes little time clarifying my vulnerability. It’s a trick that makes every heart-pounding encounter thereafter scarier, too.

While knowing that these scares won’t kill me (most of the time) alleviates worries about losing in-game progress, I’d argue that simply continuing the story is just as effective in creating anxiety. Players are forced to trek on with their frayed nerves. There is no blunting those moments because the game often auto-saves around them. There is no incessant dying to desensitize players who now know what to expect. Something unexplainable just happens, and outside of highlighting with a quick succession of muzzle flashes how scared I was, the gun is useless.

Sparked by the first level, it’s a dreadful momentum that sticks through most of the game. By understanding what assumptions to twist and which tutorials to save for later, F.E.A.R. regularly sets and adjusts tones that encapsulate why this game’s horrors have scared generations. While this is also a testament to guns’ continued chokehold on the United States and elsewhere, the now-dispersed team of devs managed to make an anxiety-inducing experience that often doesn’t care when you pull the trigger – it won’t be enough for what’s behind some doors.

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Wallace Truesdale is a writer who loves games and the many things they come into contact with. When he’s not ruining himself with sweets, you can find him blogging at Exalclaw, or hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch.