* denotes a replay
January (12 Games Beaten)
February (5 Games Beaten)
March (3 Games Beaten)
April (7 Games Beaten)
May (9 Games Beaten)
June (17 Games Beaten)
July (31 Games Beaten)
August (2 Games Beaten)
September (6 Games Beaten)
October (6 Games Beaten)
99. Visage - Xbox One - October 23
Seven years ago, a first-person horror teaser called PT dropped on PlayStation 4 and turned the horror world on its head. While the game it was supposed to tease was canceled and PT itself subsequently pulled from the PlayStation Store, it sparked a horror renaissance that saw a plethora of copy-cat games emerge and try to recreate that specific feeling of dread that PT evoked. Some of these were laughable attempts - the pathetic Apartment 666 on Steam - while others were absolute masterpieces like the god-tier Resident Evil 7. None quite emulated and even enhanced the experience and the terror quite as masterfully as SadSquare Studio's Visage, though.
Visage follows a man named Dwayne Anderson. In the game's opening, you can see him shoot and kill his wife, son, and daughter before shooting himself. He then awakens, however, in a small and desolate room before exiting and finding himself back in his house. As he makes his way through the house, he starts to experience paranormal events that slowly chip away at his sanity. From there, the game is divided into four chapters. The first three chapters can be completed in any order and are initiated by interacting with a specific object that shows you the fate of the house's previous residents. The fourth chapter takes place through seven segments each of which are initiated by playing a VHS tape. These reveal elements of Dwayne's life, and going through each gives Dwayne a piece of a mask that triggers the ending cutscene. The game's story is deeply evocative, and the fact that it's told through glimpses into the lives of other people and other times gives players the feeling that they're not experiencing the story of a person so much as the story and history of the home itself.
Visage is an absolute exemplar of horror done right. There are some minor nitpicks that I have with the game upon which I'll expand in a moment, but as far as the atmosphere, the tone, the story, and the overall sense of dread and terror, this game does everything right. It's probably the scariest game I've ever played and is the only game that's taken that title away from Outlast. On four separate occasions during my playthrough, I screamed like a girl and threw my controller, and that in itself proves that SadSquare knows exactly how to do jump scares. All too often, jump scares are overdone and used too frequently as a cheap substitute for making a game genuinely scary, but Visage uses them sparingly to enhance the experience rather than fake it. The jump scares in this game are infrequent enough that you never start to expect or predict them, and they're timed and placed so perfectly that they always get the desired effect. With all the horror games I've played in my life (and that's a pretty substantial number), I've never seen a game use jump scares this masterfully. It's also extremely difficult, and I don't mean difficulty staying alive; some of the puzzles are straight-up Myst levels of obscure and hard to figure out. I feel zero shame in admitting that I had to google what to do on more than one occasion. I, personally, don't consider this a bad thing at all as the feeling of helplessness and confusion adds to the tension of the game, but it's definitely worth noting that Visage will put your deduction and reasoning skills to the test.
The only real issues I have with the game are extremely minor and are mostly proofreading issues. There are a number of places where the spacing is off in dialogue subtitles; a line will read something like "The doctors said therewas nothing they could dofor him." With only one or two exceptions, the sentence itself makes perfect sense and is just in need of another pass of proofreading. There were a couple of instances where either a translation was off, or the writer's brain just moved faster than their fingers and led to a nonsense sentence, but I only saw two or three instances of that in the entire game, and it was never in an important story piece. My only other criticism - and the only one that I think really matters - is that the game's physics can get a little wonky sometimes. There are a few instances where you have to carry a large object - a chair, a wooden plank, etc. - and walk through doors or narrow hallways. These objects can get stuck in the doorway or lodged into the wall of the walkway and just sort of stay behind. The game doesn't make you automatically drop them thankfully, but it can take some jiggling and finagling to get the object where it needs to be. Sometimes this even happens in very small tunnels and crawlspaces with objects like lighters (these are important since darkness lowers your sanity). It's not a major issue as it never caused me to die or become stuck or anything, but it definitely is an annoyance.
Visage is one of the most impressive horror games I've ever played, and that's especially true when you consider that this is an indie studio's first game, and it got its funding from Kickstarter. As great as those series are, no big-budget horror game in the Resident Evil, Silent Hill, or Fatal Frame series has ever scared me the way Visage did. The timing and sparing use of the jump scares, the subtle touches with the atmosphere of the house, and the random occurrences of the paranormal events rather than pre-scripted events all combined to make a true horror masterpiece. I rarely give games with identifiable issues a perfect 5 out of 5, but between the issues' being pretty minor here and the absolute master class in video game horror that Visage represents, I couldn't not give this game a perfect score. This is, without a doubt, the finest example of video game horror that I've ever experienced.
