SadSquare Studio was awesome enough to let me experience the long-awaited spiritual successor to P.T. that had fans of the playable teaser excited, I’m talking about Visage. I got the game on Halloween but unfortunately, I have had issues with it at first but I simply had to just start a new game and now everything seems to be working fine, let’s see the faces of death in Visage.
Visage is about a man named Dwayne Anderson who is alone in his house, his family not present, and strange things start to occur in the house leading Dwayne to encounter hostile ghosts, and visions of past families that have lived in the house and met tragic ends.
Now onto the game itself. The controls of Visage are very involved (for a controller) as you have to use different combinations of controller buttons to look at, pick up, switch hands, store, drop, items you encounter in the game. You have limited item space in your inventory so decided what you need versus what you want as you explore the house.
The sound in the game is good and to get the most out of it, stereo headphones are a must as it adds to the creepiness to the game. The music is good too and matches the mood whether you’re just exploring the house, encountering foes, or running for your life!
Overall gameplay mechanics go like this: You have a sanity meter that shows in the corner of the screen, as you explore the house, paranormal events and being in the dark will cause your sanity meter to increase making you more prone to attacks from the ghosts. Throughout the house are items that if you pick them up, they will trigger a chapter to start where you will witness events of those who lived in the house before you, and seeing what happened to them.
Completing chapters will bring you back to the house and allow you to be able to explore deeper within. While exploring the house you will find VHS tapes that you can watch on a TV. You will also find throughout the house torn pages from a comic book that you can read up in one of the kid’s bedrooms, finally, there are creepy nesting dolls that you can find throughout the house.
Overall my experience with Visage is pretty good. The atmosphere of the game will remind people who have played P.T. of it, personally I never played it but I’ve seen many screenshots of it, the sound design is good, the music fits, the scares are decent. What affects my score negatively is the complicated controls, the hard to read subtitles (white subtitles against lighter backgrounds, you do the math), and repetitive haunts/scares in the house exploring part of the game.
On my scale of 1-10, Visage is an 8!
Visage is out now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Steam
