Remember—let me see here—one week ago? When 2005 survival horror shooter Cold Fear disappeared from Steam completely out of the blue? Well, disregard that entirely. It's back in GOG Preservation Program form.
In other words, GOG's done some work on this one. "The new GOG release of Cold Fear isn’t just a reappearance on a storefront—it’s a quality re-release with extensive under-the-hood work," reads the blurb.
That means Windows 10/11 support, support for 4K and high refresh rates, modern controller support, and patches for common crashes and glitches—just generally the gubbins you need to launch a game with confidence on a PC in 2025. You can find the full changelog on GOG.
Also, it's not alone. Alongside the Cold Fear re-release, GOG's adding Ubisoft's 2012 action-adventure game I Am Alive to its storefront and lineup of preserved titles. That game has gotten a spit-polish too, with support for online achievements, cloud saves, high refresh rates, modern controllers, and various bugfixes and such.
As a 2005 game, our review of Cold Fear is lost to the mists of time (that's what we call the closet filled with the last 30-plus years of magazines), but our review of I Am Alive is very much online. Julian Benson scored it 73% and called it "A dark action-platformer which shows fleeting signs of life, but lacks the vivacity to climb above the competition." Solidly okay, then. Who knows? Maybe it will find new life in its revived GOG form.
This all shoots my theories to shreds, anyhow. When Cold Fear disappeared from Steam, I theorised that—given that the licence had just been picked up by Nightdive parent company Atari—we might be due a gussied-up Nightdive-ification of the venerable old horror game. I guess we kind of were! It just wasn't Nightdive doing it—it was GOG. I should've tossed a coin.
