Being trapped inside a house that has plenty of paranormal activity to make the bravest ghost hunter cower is a concept that never gets old in the horror genre. After the release of the famous PT demo, many developers found themselves inspired to make a unique take on the haunted house approach. SadSquare Studio is one of these developers to be inspired and thus they created Visage. Keeping players lost within a house they can’t escape, this game is easily one of the more challenging horror games to get through, but the experience was one I won’t forget.

Story

You find yourself in a house stained with the horrid past of the atrocities that happened to all the families that once resided within. Each room bearing the story of another lost family, be it to insanity, murder, or suicide, and it is you who will relive their past through memory fragments that reveal the truth behind their stories. Will you be able to handle the truth that hides behind the shadows in this broken home?

Gameplay

As far as this game goes, it is pretty straightforward with how you handle situations. Runaway from the scary stuff, avoid being in the dark for too long because it drops your sanity, raise your sanity with drugs, and learn the layout of the map during each chapter the best you can to avoid being lost too often. There isn’t going to be any combat so be ready for more of an experience than anything else with the gameplay.

This game doesn’t lie during the load-up screens when it warns you that it is going to be a hard game though. Solving the puzzles, finding your way around, and locating what you need to move forward are going to be challenging. You don’t necessarily have a time limit, but taking a long time puts you in the dark more often and thus lowers your sanity, so you don’t want to just aimlessly walk around the house. Plus, when something scary happens, it isn’t clear if it is dangerous or a clue and it is on you to figure that out.

I did come across an issue during the first chapter I played where I put down the sledgehammer I found while playing with the controls and it disappeared with a note saying it went to the storage room. This was an issue because they don’t tell you where the storage room is and when I found what I thought was the storage room I couldn’t find it. Luckily, a reload of the file put the sledgehammer back in my hands, but when you find essential tools, just don’t put them down.

You are going to have to think out of the box and step out of your comfort zone if you want to move forward through this game. Facing the ghosts, following signs that would naturally tell you to leave, and so many other factors just guide you in a way that you won’t appreciate until the section is complete. For a horror game, this approach gave a unique turn on solving my way through the game and so I did like the experience, but my comfort box was exposed often in my playthrough.

Visuals

While this game does its best to give a realistic environment, you should be prepared for multiple flashing lights. They do a great job at making you feel like you are in this house and make the experiences you have with each memory, or story, look accurate to the pain behind it. Definitely helped provide a surreal experience throughout.

Sounds

There are plenty of times that you are left in the silence of an empty home. This silence is only filled with the small sounds of the paranormal activities happening throughout the house, the creaking you would expect from an old home, and other various sound effects that bring the environment’s surrealism further. Music is really only used for climactic reasoning and to push the emotional seriousness of specific moments, but when it is used, it is very fitting and tastefully made.

Replayability

Since this game doesn’t hold your hand, you can play it in any order that you want to. If you are looking for anything specific or want to go through any specific chapter again, you can simply do that at the beginning of the game by going to where that chapter began the first time you went through it. While I didn’t notice anything different happening in a second playthrough start-up, the ability to experience the game in any order helps give it some replayability, although not a lot.

What Could Be Better

I understand being a difficult game and not wanting to hold the player’s hand, but there should still be some sort of guidance or hint system to help the player continue to move forward. There were times that I found myself completely stuck on what I was supposed to be doing and it felt like it took a while for me to figure out how to proceed in my playthrough progression. It is already a slow-paced game, so when you don’t progress then you only have the small, minor paranormal instances there to scare you and a light turning off over and over can only be scary so many times.

Conclusion

Visage is an intriguing horror game with a memorable experience. It definitely isn’t like other horror games I have played and they took the “this game will be hard” statement very seriously. I enjoyed my playthrough of it and hope to see more games like it in the future, but I hope they give some kind of guidance system for players that want to use it. All-in-all, this is a horror game I would recommend any fan of the genre try out themselves, given they have the patience to solve their way through it.