The Haunted Hoard: Visage (Xbox One)

Visage is a horror game that takes place in a single two-story house. As you unravel the mysteries of its dark history you’ll become intimately familiar with every hallway, staircase, and even light switch, but at the same time, you learn the layout can never quite be guaranteed. A door might open into a brand new landscape, the house’s interior can become twisted by dark new features, and a previously safe place can become the haunt of an anguished spirit. While you may step out into brand new locations at times, you’ll always be pulled back to that single house, but its unreliable nature hardly makes that a comfort.

 

Visage opens with a bit of a morbid first scene that at first doesn’t seem to have a connection to anything, but as you awaken in the household that will serve as the focus of this story, you will find your path forward can split in a few different ways. You are Dwayne Anderson, and on this particular night you’ll be experiencing the stories of three former inhabitants of your home who all were plagued by terrible personal demons. A mysterious outside force has seized onto the mental instability of the people who once lived in your house to manipulate them, the stories of the old woman Dolores, the young girl Lucy, and the nervous man Rakan experienced through a distorted reality where you witness some moments from their lives but also see the darker forces at play manifest as disturbing and surreal visuals. You can tackle the tales of these three characters in whatever order you like, but after you’ve seen their unfortunate stories, it becomes time to examine Dwayne. While you can achieve a bad ending if you don’t use the VHS tapes around the house as clues to find strange subliminal spaces tied to Dwayne’s past, such a bad ending actually requires an incredible degree of stubbornness to achieve and you’ll get hints to nudge you towards even the harder to find tapes if you try. The bad ending isn’t too interesting either, Visage trying to guarantee you’ll go and seek out the more personal tale of the four you experience, although after selecting your chapter of choice for the other characters you still get to know them well enough that you can become invested in their plight.

The early moments of the game give you some time to understand the basics of the house and more importantly the systems at play in this first-person horror game. Other than key items you can carry very few items with you about the house and a balance must be achieved between useful tools like a crowbar and back-up items meant to keep your character safe. You cannot fight any of the strange beings lurking in the distorted and abstract spaces your home may become, but you do control some of your safety by managing a sanity meter. Spend too much time in the dark and a brain indicator in the lower left will solidify and become wreathed in red indicating that your mental state is deteriorating. Low sanity can lead to apparitions appearing from the dark, many outright deadly if they get a hold of you. You can sometimes escape once you spot one, but if your sanity is too low, the only way to make the strange spirits disappear is to take some medication. Carrying some around with you ends up good insurance, but around the house there are spots for candles you can place or light bulbs that might need fixing if they break, and having back ups for those as well as a lighter that can be used to light candles or illuminate a space causes your small inventory start to strain. Five items can be stored and then two held in your hands, but while at first it seems like this system could be quite bothersome with these limitations, the game isn’t as cruel as an opening warning implies.

 

Before the action starts you are told you’re about to experience a difficult game, and this disclaimer perhaps eases those few moments where things do threaten to be a bit difficult. Normally, going around the house won’t really strain your sanity as long as you’re safe in the light, and while the resources available are limited, unless you struggle to find what to do next, you won’t need to burn through many candles, light bulbs, or pills to keep areas well illuminated and Dwayne’s mind calm. There are some moments where it seems the sanity system struggles a bit with determining how well lit the area is, but that opening warning feels like it encourages a good degree of caution that prevents the player from being too foolhardy in how they tackle dark spaces or waning sanity. There are admittedly times where it becomes rather unclear what the player is meant to do in Visage, sometimes even having a solution that uses available items in a one-time form of interaction that can be hard to intuit, but save options mean you can guarantee little lost progress to the moments where something might be a bit too dangerous. There are times where you’re meant to outrun a character or creature that can instantly kill you if it reaches you and sometimes it can appear remarkably close to the point you might sprint into them or a functional dead end by mistake, but you’ll pop back to a reasonable earlier point and know what lurks ahead now. An odd choice exists where the pause menu doesn’t stop the action and you need to select to actually pause the action from that menu and there’s a short countdown before it actually happens, perhaps an effort to prevent scared players from pausing and exiting when ambushed, but while it is mostly a harmless idea, it can also lead to pausing during a seemingly safe moment only for some monster to appear during that countdown while you can’t do anything to avoid them.

Visage’s patrolling spirits and sanity management may be some of the most present mechanics, but it is the inventiveness in its total presentation that elevates it beyond just trying to outrun deadly pursuers. In fact, those pursuers are spaced out fairly well across the four tales being told so that they can have some impact rather than being persistent nuisances. You don’t know when your forward progress can make some sort of malicious character roam the halls of your home or whatever odd space you’ve ended up in, and the dangers aren’t all cut from the same cloth. Rakan’s chapter for instance focuses heavily on his fear of being watched, and while this manifests in heavy use of disturbing eye imagery, it also has creatures with sunken empty eye sockets who can be found standing in packs and will strike only if you look at them while trying to shuffle your way past them. Strange noises and supernatural activity can make you jumpy while you explore, and while sometimes it is practically more like a prank as a light switch is flipped and you go over easily and just turn the lights back on, other moments will completely throw your understanding of things out of whack. Your reliance on lights can be used against you later on as a certain chapter takes away your safety nets while others can have extended periods where you step from the house to some unknown location like a hospital where you are learning new layouts while still in active danger.

 

Puzzling out what the game wants from you at times can be a little obtuse, but in some chapters like Dolores’s you get a surprisingly intricate set of interconnected activities where it is satisfying to start to link together the disparate pieces as you uncover hidden areas around the home. Puzzles ask for good memory and problem solving and don’t always need the pressure of danger to make them interesting, but since you’re never absolutely sure if they will take a turn for the deadly, there’s still tension hanging over moments that otherwise seem relatively calm. Some moments focus more on impressive visuals to bask in or be disturbed by, the twisting reality allowing Visage to create unnerving scenes or ones that just fascinate with the unusual ways familiar places become strange. At times it can even shift into demented comedy, the ridiculous moments few and far between but still combining with the straight horror into quite a cocktail of strange and diverse experiences. Having such sights and situations tied to the developing stories of the four central characters also provides some reasonable basis for these unfolding visuals, their fractured nature a reflection of the deteriorating mental stability of the subjects and the actual source of the horror for a section usually tying closely to something that troubles the characters.

THE VERDICT: The psychological horror of Visage manifests wonderfully across the four tales it tells, the game managing a good sense of space for the house at the core of the stories while also able to twist it and briefly take you elsewhere without feeling like it’s fully abandoned the residence as its focus. The chapters provide a new way to try and uncover the tragic tales of those who were caught up in dark affairs and the twisted reality continues to fascinate with creative new ways to represent obstacles to unraveling the truth. The sanity management and items are a bit cumbersome but also manage the game’s difficulty well, and while it can be difficult to glean what you’re meant to do at times, when you are working on a puzzle or running for your life, Visage effectively balances its atmospheric touches and direct dangers to keep you on edge but interested in pushing through the fear to see what lies ahead.

 

And so, I give Visage for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. While a bit touchy for the wrong reasons at times like with the sanity detection (one time I went insane because Dwayne glitched into a piece of the environment in the dark and couldn’t dislodge from it and another the danger music was stuck on loop until I ran myself into the arms of the pursuer to clear the state with a refresh at last save), the encouraged caution by the opening disclaimer and the distribution of helpful items prepares you for a game that can make you feel like you’re in danger without always having to directly apply pressure with some roaming creature or active threat. As long as you’re wise with how you utilize your resources it won’t be too much of a burden to manage them, but if you do find yourself without a lighter in a dark space you can find yourself panicking and struggling until you find some refuge or resource to put yourself back into relative safety. However, not every danger is tied to the dark, and Visage introduces new concepts well to keep its chapters distinct and make overcoming their trials stand out. If it had done a little better at indicating what you need to do at certain points it could remain a more consistently creepy but compelling experience, but exploring both the strange shifts the main household undergoes and the ethereal spaces it sometimes connects to allow this horror game to keep a sense of mystery while giving you that growing mental map of the residence as a weapon to use when things become perilous. There’s a sense of foreboding often present, like you know something is watching and waiting to throw your work off-kilter, and while sometimes it’s the harmless interruption of a door slamming behind you, it also might be something horrifying and out to hurt you ready to appear in your path.

 

Mystery and pressure pushing in on you make Visage an effective horror experience that isn’t badly wounded by some of its deliberate cumbersome elements. More often then not you’ll be able to continue forward into unknown territory even when just moments ago that room was a safe space to walk through, one chapter will introduce secondary aspects of the house only for the another to take you to spaces that represent a tortured mental state, and the puzzles put in your path to solve while trying to survive whatever new scares await you come in a wide enough variety that it doesn’t grow repetitive. While its name perhaps implies a focus on the face, what really impresses in Visage is the environments and how they play such a role in the tale, both because a space you become accustomed to can undergo surprising changes and because the traumatized minds of the four main characters can influence the surreal spaces the house forms new connections to.