Visage

SadSquare Studio’s Kickstarter-fueled Visage starts with a bang and never lets go, ratcheting up tension and delicious dread. For fans of horror games, Visage is a nightmare that you can’t miss; it’s the scariest game I’ve ever played. Through effective use of a chilling atmosphere, rising apprehension, and just the right amount of shocks and surprises, Visage is the haunted house from hell that scares your socks off. While the game suffers from poor inventory implementation and some of those indie “jank” bugs where you might get stuck in an environment or fall through the world, those annoyan...

Back in 2015, the world first experienced PT, the playable teaser for the now cancelled Silent Hills by Hideo Kojima. PT was a short but terrifying experience, managing to turn a single hallway stroll into a horror masterpiece, with some clever scares and a shocking amount of backstory. There’s been countless games that have tried to recapture this horror but have failed. After a long time in early access, Visage is upon us and is the best attempt we’ve had to a PT successor.

Still, with these minor annoyances aside, Visage goes far beyond cheap jump scares and will chill you to the bone if you give it half a chance. It might never completely shed its inspiration, but it spins it in enough clever (and unsettling) ways to keep you hooked. If you’re a fan of horror, you won’t regret stepping into Visage‘s suburban haunted house – even if your character might.

Visage wears its P.T. inspirations like a badge of honor. It takes place in a creepy house haunted by spirits that can jump-scare you if you’re not careful, has you solving puzzles with the environment to proceed and slowly unlock rooms, and is focused almost entirely on psychological horror and tension. Although it’s not a perfect horror game, more than anything else Visage is proof that this kind of horror can absolutely work at a bigger scale and can be genuinely terrifying to boot.

Visage is close to being of the best horror games of recent years, but it's held back by some annoying aspects. The inventory controls are awkward, there were still a few bugs that prevented me from interacting with the environment, and the chapters are far too uneven, with the third being particularly bad. That being said, if you are prepared to work through these issues there is a lot of spooky fun to be found here and it is more than just jump scares for streamers (although there are plenty of those). With a little more polish and a better third chapter, this could have been an essential pu...

Hideo Kojima’s P.T. sure has inspired a lot of imitators for a simple demo. When Konami cancelled Silent Hills, numerous indie teams stepped up to announce full games that would continue where Kojima’s teaser left off, but most of these projects either didn’t end up coming to fruition or weren’t all that great when they did. Visage is a notable exception to the above rule. Developed by a small team at Montreal’s SadSquare Studio, Visage exited Steam Early Access last month and deserves to be taken seriously. This is a full 10-to-15-hour survival horror game with ambition to spare.

An intriguing horror game with a memorable experience.