Characters / First Encounter Assault Recon - Main Antagonists

Alma

Alma Wade

Kill them. Kill them all.

Voiced by: Melissa Roberts (F.E.A.R.), Alesia Glidewell (F.E.A.R. 2 and F.3.A.R.)

One of the primary characters in the series, around whom nearly everything revolves, Alma is an extremely powerful psychic (as in reality bending and world-ending power) who was connected to an Armacham project known as "Origin" to create psychic supersoldiers. Her psychic powers are among the strongest ever seen, and it's believed that she can sense people's emotions... namely, the negative ones. This combined with the horrific events of her childhood have left her traumatized and insane, and it's implied that she can't control her own overwhelming powers anymore.

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• Ax-Crazy: Oh god, is she ever. Her "Almaverse" is essentially her own mind taken form, and even a glance from the creatures spawned there can tell you that she is not mentally well. At all. That, and aside from the fact that most times she appears, she'll liquify/cook the flesh off everyone except you.
• Anti-Villain: Alma is terrifying and incredibly destructive, but it's really hard to blame her for being so.
• Big Bad: She's a candidate, especially in the first game, but even then the issue is complex.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The only real choices available if you manage to piss her off is Run or Die, and hope that something takes her mind off you in the time that you spend running.
• Came Back Strong: Already impressively strong before her death, after it she’s more or less achieved a warped version of godhood.
• Creepy Child: Her favoured form, because it's mostly how she conceptualises herself - an eight-year old child with long, dark hair, pale skin, and sunken eyes.
• Determinator: Alma is so determined and all-consumingly enraged that death made no difference to her at all. Locked up in a stasis tank since she was eight, held in for six days without life support before her body finally succumbed, but even then, no death, psychic attacks or even nuclear explosions will stop her from taking revenge on Armacham and the world.
• Disproportionate Retribution: She horrifically killed Jankowski just for mildly criticizing the Point Man. Don't mess with her kids.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Averted with a vengeance. Her rape of Becket is one of the most nauseating things in a very disturbing game.
• The Dreaded: Everyone at Armacham who was involved with Project Origin is rightfully scared shitless of her. Norton Mapes is so terrified of the thought of her being released from her grave, he advocates nuking the city of Fairport as being a better option.
• Eldritch Abomination: She is horrifically powerful, can turn people Ax-Crazy and make them worship her as a god, as the cultists can dictate in F.E.A.R 3. She can also spawn various other abominations throughout the Almaverse. Her pregnancy contractions can even manifest as unnatural disasters from red sky, thunders, and earthquakes.
• Electromagnetic Ghosts: Her presence will cause nearby electronics to glitch out or malfunction.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: No matter how tortured, she'll always have a soft spot for her sons. It's pretty much the only positive emotion she has left.
• Expy: She was obviously inspired by Samara Morgan/Yamamura Sadako.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Both her "real" emaciated corpse and her projected "seductive" body have no clothing, but for different reasons: the former is because it represents how her body was conservated in the Vault, while the latter is presumably a way to look... desirable.
• Godiva Hair: Her nude adult forms have her long, dark hair covering her breasts, presumably fortuituously rather than out of modesty, since it covers nothing else. Unlike many examples of the trope, this one is somewhat downplayed due to the fact that her hair doesn't entirely hide her nipples from view ^note Alma's "seductive" form features areolas just barely visible behind her hair, while her emaciated form's hair barely anything at all; besides, there's a reason her hair doesn't swing around and reveal anything — she's soaked in cryogenic fluid.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Everyone is nervous around her because of her unpredictable temper. She could go off her gourd and murder you in a fit of rage at any time, and every encounter with the madwoman feels like you’re walking on eggshells.
• The Hecate Sisters: In the second game, her three forms conform to the triplicate imagery - her child form (the maiden), her real emaciated form (the crone) and her attractive and healthy form (the seductress that becomes the mother, complete with heavily pregnant belly). She winds up switching between them as her mood and whims dictate.
• Humanoid Abomination: When she feels like making a personal appearance, she'll manifest in human form, but with Red Eyes, Take Warning and other signs that you are right to be paranoid when you do see her.
• The Immodest Orgasm: While raping player character Michael Becket.
• Invincible Villain: It’s not much of a stretch to say that the protagonists and their allies are not so much fighting Alma than learning how to work around her without getting themselves killed. She easily fights off anything brought to bear that could possibly hurt her to the point that she takes a point-blank nuclear explosion and doesn’t so much as flinch and simply reforms none the worse for wear after being exposed to the Telesthetic Amplifier. Anybody brave or stupid enough to get in her way is puréed on the spot and she ends up accomplishing more or less everything she set out to do, only stopping because she decided to stop. Even then, it’s still possible that she’s not gone for good and could just as easily pop up again one day.
• Implacable Man: Being sealed up didn't stop her from affecting the area around her to some extent, and when she finally does get out, everything up to and including nuclear detonations only just made her even angrier.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Her music box.
• Leaking Can of Evil: She’s so strong that even when she was still locked up in the Vault, a Tailor-Made Prison meant to keep her sealed away in both life and death, she still managed to influence the area around her to a lesser, yet still unnervingly powerful extent, driving all people out of the entire Auburn District. All the paranormal activity the Point Man witnesses as he journeys through the facility is all her doing despite being imprisoned at the time.
• Mama Bear: She really doesn't like people messing with her children. Her entire reason for sparking the Replica rebellion was in revenge for Armacham stealing Paxton and the Point Man. It's also implied she killed Jankowski just for mildly criticizing the Point Man.
• Mood-Swinger: Alma’s mental instability also manifests in the capriciousness of her demeanour. She can switch between playful, indifferent, sad, calmly angry or psychotic rage at any given moment, making her all the more dangerous to be around as she could snap and kill you within a second.
• Meaningful Name: It means "soul" in several Romance languages.
  • Also a part of a popular phrase that denotes one's university, also used in the Middle Ages to refer to the Virgin Mary: "Alma Mater", Latin for "nourishing mother".
  • This meaning is mostly lost for Hungarian players - 'Alma' means apple in Hungarian.
  • It can also mean "gentle" in Latin, making it a case of Fluffy the Terrible.
  • "Almah" is also Hebrew for "young woman". As in Isaiah 7:14, "The young woman [almah] will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel."
• Mind over Matter: Quite adept at it, too. She tossed a truck onto hapless Gavin Morrison with ease.
• Mind Rape: Something she has been subject to, and that she subjects others to, sometimes intentionally and sometimes otherwise.
• Misplaced Retribution: It is heavily implied that it was her who directed Fettel to kidnap and cannibalize her half sister Alice Wade down in the Vault while Alma watched. Likely she did this out of jealousy for the happy, peaceful life Alice got to live with Harlan Wade as a father that Alma didn't, despite Alice knowing nothing at all about Alma or her father's sins.
• Mook Maker: In-story example. Her unprecedented but uncontrolled psychic energy and broken mind creates creatures hell-bent on destruction and mayhem. They initially only appear during paranormal occurrences, but after her father released her, they simply appear. Interestingly, it's not clear if she directly controls her apparitions, and F.E.A.R 3 provides evidence that she doesn't, in the form of The Creep: the psychic remnant of her father, Harlan Wade. Any time it appears, Alma is paralyzed with fear, reverting to her child form if she was in adult form.
• Naked Nutter: Alma Wade remains completely naked in her adult form, and it's specifically stated that she'd been driven insane by her own powers long before she was locked in a vault for most of her life. For the most part, the only reason why she remains nude is because she was kept that way in the vault (and because it's pretty damn creepy). However, the second game in the series gives her a very good reason for being naked: she's lusting after Becket, and goes so far as to rape him in the finale.
• Omnicidal Maniac: It would not be an exagerration to say she wants to kill the entire world in revenge for what Armacham did to her. The only people she doesn't actively try to kill are her children and Becket. Even then, her sheer hatred still inadvertently harms them just through mere presence.
• The Ophelia: Alma appears to have many Ophelia-esque aspects, particularly in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. She is shown singing in several hallucinations, and in the prequel videos she dances around a doctor who she's been gleefully mindraping. Water shows up often in her hallucinations, which makes sense, as, like Ophelia, she died by drowning (in her case, in amniotic fluid). Also, her hair in her "child" form tends to be wild and frazzled.
• Orcus on His Throne: In F.3.A.R., Alma is not the active nemesis she was in the first two games because she's pregnant and in the process of going through labour. That said, her presence is still felt, from mad cultists to reality-warping effects to creating entities like the Creep, even if she is not actively fighting the players.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Aside from the usual powers of teleportation and laughing off physics, she is perfectly capable of mind-raping people into gibbering madness, flash-liquefying their flesh and leaving their skeletons behind, creating numerous psychic abominations and paranormal entities and raping a player character to successfully bear his child, which seems to be an entirely corporeal infant.
• Playing with Fire: Alma possesses an affinity for pyrokinesis, manifesting in her ability to render large areas engulfed in flames within the blink of an eye.
• Personal Space Invader: Towards Becket in the second game. There's a reason for this.
• Posthuman Nudism: Psychic superbeing Alma Wade is always naked in her true form, though this is partly due to being imprisoned naked. Once released from captivity and growing more powerful than ever before, however , she never bothers to wear a stitch of clothing - the better to emphasize her primal nature as a Person of Mass Destruction.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Her powers were always hard on her, even as a child. Being locked in a vault and forced into a coma at eight-years-old, subjected to experiments and forced insemination and birth (twice), then seeing her children dragged away from her before she could so much as hold them in her hands, then left in the dark to drown in the vault - all these traumatic experiences left her emotionally stunted, knowing only a very limited set of primal urges. One is rage, causing her to lash out at what she perceives as a threat (which is almost everything). And, unfortunately for one Michael Becket, another is an aggressive urge to sexually reproduce, which sees her raping him in order to conceive another child. It's easy to read her as an abuse victim with apocalyptic psychic power, and the developers of F.E.A.R. 2 actually described her as such.
  Harlan Wade: She's a woman now, and she doesn't even realise it.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Even when she was locked inside The Vault Alma could easily turn entire hallways and office buildings into a raging inferno. When she finally gets out they nearly cause The End of the World as We Know It, sending reality through a chaotic tailspin with just her presence alone.
• Reality Warper: Comes apparently with being a very powerful psychic in this series.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Child Alma's eyes are dull orange/red in the second game.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: An entire city (and its outlying suburbs) annihilated, most of its inhabitants vaporized and those who survived turned into slaves to her mind as a result - and her destructive fury burns as hot as ever.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Sealed in a telesthetic suppression field and left for dead in the dark in an abandoned underground facility for decades. Implications in the first game are that she still had an effect on the environment - though very mild - until she found a link to the outside world in Paxton Fettel. But when her vault is opened, she's free to burn whatever she sees without that crutch.
• Stalker with a Crush: In Project Origin towards Becket, overlapping with Stalker with a Test Tube, since it's not clear if she really grasps any other way or reason two people might become sexually involved.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: She's clearly made to evoke the imagery, being based off of Japanese horror stories.
• Tragic Monster: Obvious, given her backstory.
• Tranquil Fury: She dips into this from time to time, if she's not outright going berserk.
• The Unfettered: Although Alma's more concerned with short-term planning (kill captors, covet Becket, have child with Becket), she takes what she wants, whether people want her to or not.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Even when she was alive, she had little to no control of her immense power. In death, this has worsened to the point where simple proximity can kill or destroy the minds of anyone around her, along with the added side effect of tearing open holes in reality and releasing her literal personal demons upon the mortal realm. As for strength, she’s more or less completely unassailable, with nuclear explosions and the telesthetic amplifier doing little more besides annoying her, and anyone or anything that dares to stand against her is turned into paint with just a simple glare alone.
• Undead Abomination: After being sealed up in the Vault to drown, she eventually grew from merely being an unusually strong psychic into a dimension-warping phantasmal entity of unparalleled supernatural power and fury, her mere presence unleashing ungodly horrors into the mortal realm from her tormented psyche and twisting people into undead monsters when it isn’t driving them mad or killing outright.
• Unstoppable Rage: Which is the whole reason behind the plot of the entire series. Rage defines her.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Having been driven insane by your own psychic powers as a child, experimented on and locked up since you were eight years old, medicated into a coma and locked away in a shield vault for most of your life, forcibly impregnated and then having both of your children taken away, then killed once the project was terminated, all by your own father can turn someone into this.

Paxton Fettel

Commander Paxton Fettel

"He deserved to die. They all deserve to die."

"They tried to bury their sins, but instead planted the seeds of their doom. But, she would not be forgotten. WE will make them remember. They will die. All of them. A war is coming, I've seen it in my dreams. Fires sweeping over the earth, bodies in the street, cities turned to dust. Retaliation."

Voiced by: Peter Lurie

The prototype commander of the Replica soldiers. Primary antagonist of the first F.E.A.R. game and the first expansion. Makes a non-canonical comeback in the DLC F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn. He then becomes a playable character in F.3.A.R., but as a similar sort of post-mortem psychic projection as Alma.

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• Abusive Parents: Where his brother was pushed to more and more extreme physical feats and subjected to emotional abuse, Fettel's childhood often consisted of him being strapped down with electrodes in his head to push his telepathic powers. Eventually, his desperation to escape from the pain put him into contact with Alma, and it only got worse from there.
• Ax-Crazy: He hides it behind a well-spoken and mannered façade, but at his core, Fettel is a violent, unhinged madman who enjoys the act of killing and making his targets suffer out of pure sadism.
• The Bad Guy Wins: If Fettel's score outweighs the Point Man's by the end of the third game, he takes over his brother's body, horrifically devours Alma to take her power, and finally takes her baby for himself, intent on raising it to serve him.
• Big Bad: Once his true intentions for Alma are revealed in F.E.A.R. 3, he becomes a very compelling candidate for the true antagonist of the entire series.
• Big Bad Ensemble: In the main timeline, his endgame was to consume Alma and acquire her power for himself. The Vivendi timeline had Fettel in direct conflict with Alma and the Point Man encounters Alma's apparitions battling Fettel's Replica Forces a few times across Extraction Point.
• Blood Is the New Black: He spends much of the first game smeared and splashed with blood, none of it his. His mouth and teeth, especially, are red with it for obvious reasons.
• Boom, Headshot!: How he died the first time, courtesy of the Point Man. Even when he returns as a revenant, he still sports the wound as a scar.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: By his mother after they psychically link. While he does regain his mind and acts largely on his own accord from then on, the difference isn't readily apparent.
• Cain and Abel: He and his brother toss the roles back and forth like a pair of jugglers.
• Child Supplants Parent: He hates his creator, Harlan Wade, though not without good reason. His ending in F.3.A.R. implies that he'd have fathered Alma's child if Becket hadn't already - adding a really disturbing dimension to his killing of Becket.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Though it's hard to see with all the blood on his face, but he seems to resemble Nicolas Cage.
• Demonic Possession: One of Fettel's primary means of attack involves grabbing enemy troops and taking control of their bodies.
• Dissonant Serenity: He talks a lot, rarely using a tone more emotional than coolly intrigued or close to beatific (but still soft and even). His topics of conversation are things like his visions of the world burning in retaliation for what's been done to him and "Mother".
• The Dragon: For Alma in the first game; everything he does is in service of freeing her. However, later installments reveal he was never very loyal, after all.
• Dragon with an Agenda: It turns out he was feigning subservience to Alma in a bid to get closer to her, so that he could usurp his mother and steal her power for himself. It's possible Alma caught on to this in Extraction Point, which would explain why her apparitions battle his Replica throughout the campaign.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Or so he says; he dreamt of the explosion that took out most of Fairport and the first Synchronicity Event, and may even have picked up the idea that he could devour human flesh to take memories from foreseeing his future self doing so.
• Et Tu, Brute?: By the end of the third game, Fettel is outraged when the Point Man opts to kill Alma in a preemptive measure to prevent her baby from being born. Fettel did not take kindly to what he perceived as a betrayal of his family.
  Fettel: What are you doing?! Has family never meant anything to you?! Are you going to continue to follow the orders of that woman or stay true to your own blood?!
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In spite of his murderous insanity, he's shown to care about his brother, saving him several times throughout the third game. Even in the ending where Fettel possesses him, he actually expresses regret at this.
  Fettel "It never had to be like this, Brother. We could have been... like Gods."
• Expy: Is basically one-to-one with Darryl Revok. A psychopathic murderer with psychic powers created by a MegaCorp as part of a shady project who's ultimately killed by his own brother.
• Faux Affably Evil: In F.3.A.R., with a dash of Deadpan Snarker.
• Freudian Excuse: To say Fettel had a shitty childhood would be one of the biggest understatements of the series, alongside Alma's. From his very conception, his psychic abilities were exploited by Armacham and often resulted in extremely painful experiments that left Fettel mentally unstable. He finally snapped after making psychic contact with Alma.
• Full-Name Basis: His first and surname are both pretty distinctive on their own, but you'll see him referred to in full as "Paxton Fettel" as often as not. Likely because it just rolls off the tongue.
• Evil Laugh: When possessing bodies. And at other times. Whenever he laughs at all, really.
• The Heavy: Of the first game. Although Alma is the bigger threat, Fettel is the driving the plot and the Point Man battles his soldiers for most of the game.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: His sugnature red and black leather jacket.
• I'm A Humanitarian: Subverted. It's less about nutrition than it is about consuming memories.
• Kick the Dog: When he and the Point Man reach Becket, Fettel possesses him, knowing that this will kill him, simply because invading his body and taking the memories by force is faster than trying to chat him up.
• Mask of Sanity: Notes in F.E.A.R. 2 as well as the non-canonical Perseus Mandate indicate that, between the 1st Synchronicity Event in which he kills several Armachem guards as a child and the 2nd Synchronicity Event that kicks off the events of the first game, Fettel was more or less an entirely docile and cooperative employee.
• Mind over Matter: He can create psychic blasts, lift people/objects and throw them around, make human bodies explode, and possess people to turn them against their allies.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Downplayed and justified. Although he's willing to get his own hands dirty, Fettel never actually fights the Point Man himself in the first game and is usually seen killing defenseless Armacham staff or letting the Replica do the heavy lifting. He's killed rather easily when the Point Man finally tracks him down at the end of the game. However, since his death would put an end to his entire rebellion, Fettel likely knew not to put himself in unnecessary risk if he had disposable cloned soldiers to do that for him. Also he likely was hoping to win over his brother to his side while psionically revealing their connection in the first game, and deluded himself into believing the Point Man wouldn't kill him, hence not actively fighting him with his powers. He becomes much more hands on in the third game after returning as a powerful revenant with enhanced psychic abilities.
• Over-the-Shoulder Murder Shot: With the cannibal imagery.
• Possession Burnout: His host bodies don't last very long. The moment of their expiration is...noticeable.
• The Scream: The first we see of Fettel in the series is him kneeling in his cell, apparently listening to something, before falling forward and howling in agony as he makes psychic contact with Alma.
• Squishy Wizard: Is notably more fragile than the Point Man, and lacks his slo-mo abilities, making him far more vulnerable to gunfire. On the other hand, when in a possessed body, that body's death won't kill him, and until that happens he has use of whatever guns, blades or bludgeons are on hand. Also, while he can't use weapons as an incorporeal spirit, he has ranged psychic blasts with effectively limitless ammunition and can hurl around heavy objects or immobilise people.
• The Starscream:
  • Played with in Extraction Point. Through unknown means, Fettel lives on as an apparition—much like Alma—and reactivates the Replica soldiers. Halfway through the game, the Point Man will encounter Alma's apparitions actively attacking Fettel's forces, who are hampering his progress. Whatever happened between Alma and Fettel, it becomes clear that their goals and agendas don't seem to coincide by the end of the expansion.
  • At the end of F.3.A.R., Paxton reveals that he wants to consume Alma and gain her power. Word of God is that this was his goal all along, but the relevant scenes in the first game that would have revealed this were cut for time.
• Tyke Bomb: He was raised by Armacham from birth to be the psychic commander of a battalion of cloned soldiers. When he went rogue with all of their soldiers under his command, it bit them in the ass hard.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: F.3.A.R. shows that he was a completely normal child until Harlan Wade started subjecting him to painful psychic experiments including inducing him to use his powers to kill, setting him on the path to becoming the Ax-Crazy madman he is in the present day.
• Villain Protagonist: Counts as this when you play as him in the third installment, making the Point Man a Hero Antagonist in his ending.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: He had an incredibly shitty childhood, so when he finally goes on a rampage, gets killed, and comes back as an apparition, he's really annoyed and quite willing to destroy or subjugate the world in revenge.
• Would Hit a Girl: Or rather, would murder and cannibalize his own innocent, unknowing aunt, likely at the behest of his insane mother.

The Creep

The Creep

Just as easily as I CREATED YOU, so I will DESTROY YOU!

A monstrous, human-like creature that appears in F.E.A.R. 3, actively hostile to ATC, the Point Man, and Paxton Fettel. It repeatedly attacks and attempts to sabotage the efforts of Paxton and the Point Man to reach Alma. Surprisingly, and disturbingly, even Alma seems to be afraid of it.

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• Antagonistic Offspring: Despite it appearing to be Harlan Wade at first glance, it’s ultimately just another one of Alma’s monsters spawned from her traumatic memories thanks to her power, albeit an exceptionally powerful one. It’s also the only one of them that’s directly hostile to Alma herself.
• Ax-Crazy: This thing is more unhinged than Alma herself, and that’s saying something. All of it’s appearances have been it either threatening, attacking, or killing anyone it encounters, and only growing more violent and insane in demeanour as the Point Man and Fettel get closer to Alma.
• Big Bad: Of F.E.A.R 3.
• The Dreaded: Alma is afraid of it. Because it's the mental representation of her father.
• Final Boss: Of F.E.A.R. 3.
• Humanoid Abomination: A twisted, humanoid monster born from the traumatic memories of Harlan Wade’s abuse and driven to continue its template’s reign of terror over Alma and her sons.
• Interface Screw: Damage inflicted by the Creep doesn't regen until either the Creep is driven off or the player gets out of the area it's lurking in. In addition, the player is warned that the Creep is about to attack when black spiderweb patterns appear around the edges of the screen. He's also invisible.
• Lean and Mean: Spindly, emaciated and horrible in both appearance and personality.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: Its first actual appearance involves it slaughtering five ATC troops with about as much effort as crushing ants.
• Super-Persistent Predator/Implacable Man: It doesn't leave you alone. Ever. At least until until the end of the game, where you kill it.
• Teleport Spam: It's main fighting tactics throughout the game until the end, where it decides to have a growth spurt and come at you with pure brute strength.
• Villainous Breakdown: During the final confrontation with it, the Creep goes on a series of massive, enormously loud rants as it flails away at the Point Man and Fettel.