Visage (2020)

For context, I watched a friend play this game through its entirety while I followed along with a guide, in broad daylight on the living room TV with audio coming through the soundbar speakers.

Visage uses the Silent Hills PT demo as a foundation for its setting, characters, and storyline. The opening cutscene includes content that is normally considered taboo for the gaming industry in that it shows children being murdered onscreen. The story is split into chapters, each following a different family. Some of the stories were easier to follow than others, but overall I found all plotlines dissatisfying.

The gameplay had interesting mechanics but felt clumsy and not fully developed. One feature that Amnesia players will find familiar is making certain your character finds respite in lit environments. If you remain in the dark too long, there is a risk of being killed by one of the haunts lurking in the house. The game encourages you to stock your inventory with light bulbs and candles to combat them, and while candles were used quite often, we learned quickly that light bulbs seemed worthless to pick up because when the lights get turned off, you turn the light switch back on instead of replacing the bulbs. There were also sequences where the game would imply you needed to run to avoid being killed but we would turn around only to find there was no enemy, just loud and anxious music to insinuate one. Without a guide, the clues and directions for how to progress would've been too vague to understand and we would've ended up dropping it in frustration.

The game is fairly scary for a chicken like me but my friend was mostly nonplussed by the jumpscares. Overall this was a very average, forgettable horror experience that I wouldn't recommend.