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The house is littered with items and 99% of them have no game use.
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But that comes at an incredibly high cost. It’s admirable, and is one of the big reasons that it gives us the willies.
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It’s at pains to strip out as much UI as possible and for you to focus on the game screen, rather than a game map, for example. Visage is not one for guidance and hand-holding. There are two design issues that could, feasibly, dwarf everything I have already written, and it will be personal taste about whether they’re debilitating. It’s about time to raise the two major caveats with Visage, and they both make it incredibly hard to score the game. This is a game of smoke and mirrors, and your own fears will be the greatest obstacle to getting through the game.Īctually, that’s a lie. Puzzles, once you know what the game wants from you, are also reasonably simple. Keeping to light sources (more on that later) and paying attention generally saves you. There aren’t that many enemies at all, for one, and the majority are triggered by the game’s Sanity system, which punishes you for staying in the dark for too long. This last one is odd from my perspective: this isn’t actually a hard game, not in the traditional sense. All of the indicators were that the monsters would be non-stop: the superb trailer was a creature-feature, the opening text in the game says “Visage is designed to be difficult”. It should be noted that Visage isn’t actually a barrage of monsters and jumpscares – just tension. I’d say that the pacing could have done with some relaxed moments, but I’m a wimp. I mean, I hated the game for it, but the number of times that the game unsettled me, exactly when I didn’t want to be unsettled, was magnificent. It can get a bit much – even opening a drawer can release a guttural roar – but Visage does a superb job of layering rain, creaks, moans, camera clicks and radio static to make this a constant, threatening soundscape. It also has one of the most effective audio designs in recent memory. A moment with a shotgun will stick with me. SadSquare Studios clearly didn’t leave their humour at the door, as so much of Visage can even be funny, and I laughed out loud more than once. The world drops away to leave you in a dark room and a single ring of mirrors. This is a game that has a lot of fun messing with reality, not only when shifting things around the house to mess you up, but also in creating memorable scenarios that will stick with you. Reality warps and twists to become horrific Escher paintings. An imaginary sewer runs beneath the house. Mirrors will suddenly appear across the house, acting as portals to alternate, Silent Hill-like versions of the house. But it has another brilliant tool in its toolbox: this is a psychological horror as much as it is a pure horror, and the house will flex and bend with the chapter’s themes. Visage does obvious stuff, like opening locked doors, and letting you bust through areas with a sledgehammer. It must have been a fascinating level design challenge, as each of the different chapters plays out in the same house, with the same layout.