Visage (video game)

At times, lights may turn off or doors may slam shut, signaling paranormal activity. These events, as well as staying in the dark for long periods of time, will cause the player to lose their sanity, resulting in much more severe paranormal experiences.

Visage has a similar setting and gameplay as its spiritual predecessor P.T.. The game takes place in a large suburban home in the 1980s and utilizes a first-person-perspective. The player controls Dwayne Anderson, an inhabitant of the home who committed suicide after killing his wife and children. Dwayne is trapped inside the house and is tormented by supernatural entities. The objective of the game is to find a way out of the house and learn about the cause of all the paranormal activity.

The house is designed as a semi-open world, with large sections freely explorable to the player at all times and multiple pathways to reach each area. However, in order to fully explore the map, players will need to find keys to unlock each door first. The player must face several hazards while exploring. First, they will have avoid dark areas to manage their sanity. Sanity, like similar systems in games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is decreased if Dwayne stays in the dark for too long.

Secondly, ghosts will create paranormal events by manipulating the house as the player explores. Examples include light bulbs breaking, doors slamming or opening, and electronic devices malfunctioning. Witnessing these events will cause Dwayne's sanity to fall. Lastly, Dwayne must avoid being caught by the various ghosts and demons that inhabit the home. Being caught by these ghosts and demons means instant death, so players must carefully maneuver through the house to avoid them. The lower Dwayne's sanity, the more severe each paranormal event becomes, up to the point that a ghost or demon will appear and attack the player.

Players can use lighters, pills, light bulbs, and candles to help them avoid these threats. Lighters allow the player to move through dark areas without a light, taking pills can recover sanity, light bulbs can be used to repair broken lights, and candles are a light source that ghosts cannot manipulate. There are various other items the player can find and use, like a camera or a sledgehammer.

Dwayne has a very limited inventory and can store only five of these items at a time, and hold two more in his hands. As a result, the player must explore the house very carefully to uncover the truth.[1]

The fourth chapter of the game is divided into seven subchapters; in each subchapter, players must find VHS tapes scattered through the house, each labeled differently: Pride, Negligence, Indifference, Prison, Addiction, Greed and Affliction.[2]

In the 1980s at a suburban home, a man named Dwayne Anderson[3] shoots and kills his wife and two children before committing suicide. Moments later, Dwayne wakes up in an bloody, empty room. After exiting it, his neighbor Rose calls, saying she has not seen him out of his house in three weeks. He tries opening the front door but it is locked. Paranormal events begin occurring throughout the house, and Dwayne begins searching the house for a way out. In the process, he navigates through experiences centering around the people who once lived there.

One of the person is Lucy, a little girl who was befriended by a demon that communicated with her via television and radio. Over time, due to the demon's influence, Lucy's behavior became increasingly abnormal. One day, under the demon's direction, Lucy murdered her pet bird Peaco by biting his head off. Lucy's horrified parents took her to therapy; however, the treatment, which involved administration of medicine via syringes, only served to worsen Lucy's mental state. Further tormented by the demon, she locked herself in the bathroom and ripped off her jaw, subsequently dying from blood loss while her parents desperately bang on the door; the demon unlocked it after her death.

Former resident Dolores' mental illness (metaphorical "inner house" in the left) ultimately causes her spouse George to die (depiction in the right).

Then there are Dolores and George, an elderly couple that formerly lived in the house with their baby. Dolores was diagnosed with multiple mental disorders; one of the symptoms of which involved Dolores hearing her own voice originating from the baby monitor reciting a numerical sequence—the key to her "inner house." Via audio recordings, George believed that the remedies given to Dolores are unhelpful, as well as confessing that this is stressing him. As Dolores worsened, she became increasingly mistrustful and even hostile towards George, once attacking him due believing he was poisoning her tea. It is also revealed that George was a drug addict and an alcoholic. Dolores eventually murdered George, stabbing him with seven knives and leaving his corpse in his study. In the aftermath of George's murder, Dolores hung herself next to her baby's bassinet as the baby cries.

Next there is 28-year-old Rakan Al-Mutawa, who suffered from scopophobia and believed that an unnamed entity is spying on and attempting to silence him. He was attacked by a mysterious, shadowy entity and used a firearm to defend himself, after which he is interred in a psychiatric hospital. Believing the hospital to be part of the conspiracy against him, Rakan caused much havoc, including threatening the staff, behaving erratically and violently, jumping from a window, sabotaging the building's electricity, and even killing a staff member with a crowbar. Doctors were often forced to sedate him when he acts out. In response, Rakan was isolated from all other patients and staff. Months later, doctors concluded that Rakan is recovering, and that he is officially discharged. Sometime later, however, Rakan, now disabled and relying on crutches, declares his victory against the unnamed entity, before being locked in a desolate cell by an unknown figure.

Riversdale, fictionally a water treatment plant Dwayne worked at in the game

The next chapter first observes Dwayne's past family, consisting of wife Claire and daughter Sarah. Dwayne, an alcoholic, distanced himself from Sarah. When Claire discovered that Dwayne has been abusively consuming Chlorpromazine to relieve stress, she expressed concern, however through his present senses, Dwayne learns that Claire was a gold digger who hated him and wanted him dead, throwing suggestions of suicide methods, all of which are the causes of death of the previous inhabitants in the house. This chapter also has a scene where Dwayne sits at a sofa drinking a "wonderful" alcoholic "poison", as the television plays a live video of a masked man angrily seeking to find Dwayne's true self. There is also a scene set in Hell: a tall and wide cave, where people make themselves suffer; the masked man claims that thanks to Dwayne, everyone in Hell "enjoys their newfound home." The chapter ends with revealing that Dwayne was a scientist who started working at a water treatment plant in Riversdale, Maryland in April 1952. There, Dwayne drops an apple to a well, which causes dead bodies to float. He faints and wakes up at his house.

Logo of developer SadSquare Studio

Visage started development in January 2015 and was announced in September 2015. The game was successfully financed by a Kickstarter campaign running from January through March 2016.[4] They set the goal to CAD35,000.[5] In October 2015, a Steam Greenlight campaign was launched,[6] featuring a trailer embedded in the page.[7] In an interview with IGN, the developer, SadSquare Studio, stated that the game is conceptualized to mainly utilize "the uncanny" to create a sense of dread and fear. It was inspired by P.T.., the teaser for Silent Hills; graphics designer Jonathan Vallières stated that the project's cancellation motivated the creation of the game. Other inspirations include The Conjuring, Insidious, Sinister, Ju-on, Ringu, Kairo, and Phantasmagoria.[8][9]

The developers initially targeted the release date to be in January 2017, in both computers (PC) and virtual reality (VR).[9] On September 25, 2018 the developers announced that a demo of Visage would be released on October 2, 2018. The demo version for Visage was released on Steam on October 2, 2018, and that it was planned for release on early 2019.[10] After a long delay, on February 15, 2020, SadSquare Studio announced that "the main content of Visage is pretty much done", and that they were projecting for a fall 2020 release.[11] It was released on October 30, 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to PC, it was also released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.[12]

• Allison Road – another first-person horror game considered to be a spiritual successor to P.T.

• Official website