Cold Fear

Cold Fear is a 2005 survival horror third-person shooter video game developed by Darkworks and published by Ubisoft for PlayStation 2, Xbox and Microsoft Windows. It was Darkworks' second game, after Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare in 2001. The game is centered on Tom Hansen, a guardsman of the United States Coast Guard, who aids a Russian whaler in the Bering Strait and finds a mysterious parasite has turned the crew into zombie-like creatures. Discovering the involvement of both the Russian mafia and the CIA, Hansen sets out to ensure the parasites don't reach land.

The game was first announced at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 2004. To make the ship roll realistically, the developers had to write a completely new program (dubbed the "Darkwave editor") to allow them to control movement on both the vertical and the horizontal axes. They also used real physics to simulate the movement patterns of inanimate objects on the ship. Due to the random nature created by this, the player character required nine times the number of animations usually seen in third-person games. Ultimately, the game contained more than nine hundred separate animations for all characters, allowing for over five thousand possible character movements. The game's soundtrack was composed by Tom Salta, with Marilyn Manson contributing a song from his fifth studio album The Golden Age of Grotesque (2003).

Cold Fear was met with mixed reviews, with many critics comparing it unfavorably to Resident Evil 4 released the same year. Although critics were generally impressed with the environments and the opening scenes, they found the game too short and felt it failed to live up to its promising beginning. The game was a commercial failure; by February 2006, it had sold only 70,000 units across all three platforms in the United States. Atari SA acquired the IP from Ubisoft in 2025, leading to the game being delisted on Steam and later re-released on GOG.com.