The Sinking City

 


The Sinking City is a game with a weird and twisted history and reputation ranging from a barrage of legal publisher issues and confusions about what the "real" version of the game is. Its a third person, detective HP Lovecraft Cthulu inspired adventure/survival horrorish kind of game. Despite its weird history and reputation I'll mostly avoid going into details. The gist is, the publisher 'stole' the game from the developer Frogwares, and put it on Steam without asking. This Steam version is the very earliest 1.0 build, which is rough around the edges, has some bugs and jank, but the actual 'official' developer version is released elsewhere, like Gamesplanet, that version is much updated like 2.0. I have the game on Steam, because I kind of refuse to buy games outside of steam for consistency and ease of use, so thats the version I played.

The game has you playing as Charles Reed, a detective who hasn't been able to get a good nights sleep in a long time, his face is all sunken in and he looks edgy and malnourished. He goes to this city Oakmont to somehow figure out how to stop his nightmares and finally get some sleep, something like that. You get off the boat and are introduced to this strange man that looks like a half gorilla or something and he sets you on a series of quests. The characters, atleast at first, have a wide variety and lots of oddity to how they look, the game has a distinct artistic style with throwing weird surrealist characters and vibes at you just to fuck with expectations, like fish people, monkey men, a librarian with her mouth sewn shut for seemingly no real explained reason besides "a punishment" , guys with strange wounds etc. It's all very mysterious and makes you intruiged to figure out what's going on.

Now, the game at first, or the first quarter or so, is a total clusterfuck and almost seems impossible to figure out. Eventually, you figure out how it expects you to operate its various menus and UI elements and how to navigate the world, but for the first few hours you're totally lost. That's because The Sinking City doesn't operate like other typical games in trying to determine where or what to do. It's more akin to something like Morrowind where you are presented with pages of journal entries/notes that you have to read paragraphs of and try to piece together what you're supposed to do. Then, you need to open the map and literally read every single street name and manually place a marker on where you think you might have to go. Yeah, at first this seemed like a huge daunting annoying task, but eventually I started to figure out the cues on how to more easily navigate this stuff. For instance, when you look at your notebook of 'objectives' or journal pages, there will be a tiny yellow icon above the ones that are actually relevant that have things left to do in them. I missed this for the first few hours, so it resulted in just doing the same 'objectives' over and over without really knowing if I was finished or not. Second, these tiny yellow icons also have even smaller icons inside of them that signal exactly what it expects you to do. This can be things like, Explore the area, Go to a local archive to do research, Talk to a person, and a few other guidelines. This is extremely easy to miss for the first few hours because one big issue (among many) is the general UI design and specifically icon size is WAY too small. I mean these icons are barely legiable, even if you press your face to the screen. I'm talking like 32x32. So for the first few hours of the game you cant even notice they're there. Thankfully, if you press Escape and happen to notice the 'How to Play' section, it will show you these icons and what they mean. But its then up to you to figure out where these icons even appear (the notebook). After I figured that out, navigation became much easier and more straightforward. You still have to manually place the waypoint on the map, and read the street names, but you no longer need to endlessly re-read paragraphs of every single journal entry, you can even press a button to 'pin' the selected entry on your screen, which grants a condensed version of the entry. So usually something like "The intersection of Pleasent Lane and Montgommery st in East Grimhaven bay" kind of thing. After the 20 hour duration of the campaign, I'm still not sure if I even enjoyed having to constantly manually skim through the map looking for street names and guessing where to place the marker, but I have to admit it is a unique characteristic of the game that makes it unlike any other open world game and does make you feel a bit more immersed in the world like an actual detective. They could have just done a better job with the icons and explaining things better.

So from this introductiary 'case' you spend a large majority of the game constantly opening your casebook, looking at these entries, trying to figure out where to manually place the marker to travel to next, running around to fast travel stations to get closer to the marker, then you usually end up having to talk to some NPC's with closeup, multiple dialogue option choices, which are very well voice acted and the story is quite interesting and mysterious and dark with varied strange characters, or you have to go to some area and explore a close proximity looking at objects to piece together what happened there. There's also this supernatural minds eye kind of mechanic where if you get close enough to certain points, your screen will go all funny and you have to press a button to go into this supernatural vision mode where you can reveal more clues. Once you gather enough clues, this portal will open that you walk into then you walk into more portals which reveal what happened in the past, and you have to choose the correct order that the events took place. Its usually only 3 or 4 choices and you can fail unlimintely so its just a matter of correctly understanding the story, or using deduction to choose the right numbers. This mechanic is fine, but it does start to feel a bit repetivie having to do this same mechanic all the time, because its not all that engaging.

The game surprises you with a spin where it actually sometimes turns into a kind of survival horror type game, where you have very limited ammo, and these creepy mutated monsters come out of nowhere and attack you. The combat in this game is quite clunky and awkward, you rarely have more than 15 bullets at a time across all weapons, but it kinda works. You start with a basic pistol, then you get a revolver, a shotgun, a machine gun, and a rifle. For the first 6 or so hours combat is pretty awful, you're better to just run past everything until you can start to get more weapons and thus more total ammo. Theres melee but...the melee just isn't worth doing, it just does this one repeating stock animation of swinging a shovel and if you're lucky it will hit the enemy and do some damage but it just feels so jank and bad I pretty much ignored melee. Theres a decent variety of enemies, first it starts off with these bizarre little crab mutant things that dance all around and have animations that really fuck up your aim, but only take 1 of the weakest bullets to kill. I kind of like how the enemy AI is constantly fucking with your aim, taunting you to just waste ammo missing when you're already desperately low on ammo, it creates this good feeling of tension. The tension starts to go away when you realize how easy it is to exploit the AI, I mean the game really does feel rough around the edges, certainly not really a AAA experience. Basic things like just being able to run behind a door and the enemy wont follow you (haha modern Resident evil) to things like leaving the building which seemingly replaces the enemies back in their stock location, but keeping the same damaged health state. Other things like merely jumping on an object will make most of the enemies helpless and just stand around waiting to be picked off. But still, the first quarter of the game you'd better just avoid combat which I mostly did. There was one point early in the game where I'd wander into a side quest area that suddenly contanied dozens of enemies, me with just a measely starter pistol, then I realized you're really not supposed to always do combat in this game and just leave or come back later. But about halfway through the game you start to feel like you can take on combat encounters. This is because once you have a few different weapons, you can craft multiple types of ammo, giving you a decent 'net pool' of available ammo. So the way crafting ammo works is there are containers in the world like shelves, lockers, boxes etc that you can interact with that give you supplies. Remember earlier in this review when I said the icons in this game are way too small and you can't even see what's going on? Yeah thats a problem here too. You loot these containers and all sorts of icons pop up of items you obtained, but even 20 hours in I still didn't have a clue what any of them meant. Anyway, then you open your inventory screen and can just craft all the types of ammo you want using these resources. You can also craft med kits, up to 3 at a time. At first you can only craft like 6 bullets per gun, you can increase it if you want through the upgrade skills tree, but you wont be able to craft that many anyways so its not much point. But at this point, combat becomes kind of fun...mostly. You start to feel like you can take on the basic enemies, and they grant experience which gives you skill tree points so its not like you necessarily want to avoid them either. The movement speed of the monsters contrasted with your character movement speed makes it so its not really easy to get away either, you really need to plan your shots and movement carefully, theres some strategy behind it, reloading is especially important and you need to carefully plan out when youre going to reload and where youre going to stand etc. The combat is decent enough, overall. When I said its 'mostly fine' I just mean in relation to the bugs the game has. For instance, it seems every single time you shoot the Shotgun, the game literally freezes for 2 seconds. This is a confirmed bug, its not just me. Many people on Steam forums and I think even the developer acknowledged this issue, yet the Steam version is not being updated due to that strange publisher drama. Unfortunate. Like yeah it kind of takes some of the fun out of it when the best gun in the game freezes your screen constantly. This is especially bad because on the skill tree you can spec into getting shotgun upgrades, only to get the shotgun and realize it techincally sucks cause it freezes your game. Oops. Besides that, there is this one gigantic enemy that is a massive bullet sponge and doesn't really make sense. It seems like you have to shoot him 20 times to kill him, yet the game is designed for you to never have any ammo. You can try playing with the explosive options like molotovs or grenades, but it doesn't seem effective. You can try playing with the bear traps you can craft, but he doesn't seem to get stuck in them and you just find yourself instead walking into them in frustration. So you kind of just end up running around trying to complete the objective avoiding this guy and it feels like a mess. I killed him once and wasted all my ammo and I don't even think I got that much more experience than a generic monster it just felt like a waste of time. This guy pops up a few times throughout the game and it just seems like his balance needs to be tweaked. Another rough around the edges type oddity this game has, is you can trigger NPC dialogue scenes while being chased by monsters, and while youre talking to the NPC there will just be monsters running around behind you and it just looks stupid and out of place.

Speaking of the skill tree, theres three of them. Mind, Vitality, and Guns. Overall the skills are pretty uninteresting and don't really change that much about the gameplay, its minor stuff. Things like slightly more health, 10% more damage, reloading certain guns slightly faster, a 20% chance to reserve crafting materials - theres nothing that really stands otu or really feels like a big boost to your character. Even 15 hours into the game with a lot of the tree filled in, I barely felt much of a difference. Yeah I guess having more health was the big one, but it doesn't really matter if its a waste to use a healthkit to go from 80% to 100% and wasting half of the potential healthkit. It felt sorta exciting to get new skill points and gain XP from killing monsters, but ultimately I never felt like it made a huge difference. Only getting new guns and crafting more ammo helped really.

The atmosphere of Oakmont is pretty immersive, theres lots of npc's walking around, doing their thing. You'll find guys just vomiting on the sidewalks, beggers, sometimes people get mugged, it does feel like a living world but unfortunately you can't really interact with generic npc's much. Usually when you try talking to people twice they just repeat the same line over and over. Like I said before though, there is a plethora of interesting characters to actually talk to and they do send you on adventures that are interesting. Unfortunately another problem the game has is that since it introduces so many different characters and names, it gets really hard to rememeber who is who. A simple solution that would really help this, is just some ability in the menu to see a list of characters with their faces to help you remember. Sadly, no such feature exists. So you go through paragraphs of dialogue and journals reading name after name like Go to John then Decide the fate of James then did Jones commit the crime or did Dan? Then actually Jimmy may have had something to do with it ... you're just like wait, who the fuck is who again? So that alone kind of really drags down the ability to competently follow the narrative for most of the game.. This is especially bad on the menu where you piece clues together and then can do 'Deductions' to decide, I guess, the outcome of the story. And it asks you to choose between all these different names of how the story will play out, but more often than not I just felt myself confused trying to remember who is who so the choices I was making just felt rather aimless and meaningless because I was struggling to follow the narrative. Again, If the UI just had pictures of the characters faces with their names by the choices it would have helped a lot...So yeah, the UI really has some flaws that hamper the overall experience.

Still, the game definitely has a lot of character and uniquness to it. There's even a mission where you infiltrate a KKK headquarters and can choose to kill the racist grandwizard. You don't really see stuff like that in games very often, its atleast memorable. The kinds of adventures and mysteries you get tasked to solve are usually intruging and dark, disturbing and gorey. The whole atmosphere and tone of the game, being that there has been a massive flood that at some point sunk half the city, so theres this misty, murky water everywhere and every other street you go down will suddenly turn into flooded buildings where you can choose to take a vehicle section boat ride to get around, it really ties in the Lovecraft vibes. There's a lot of occult going around with the townsfolk and cults and people talking about what lurks below. There's even a handful of these sections where you put on a really archaic diing suit and dive underwater, with these creepy cutscenes showing your descent, then you play these mini underwater sections, slowly stomping around trying to navigate to the nearest above water cave. These sections are usually short, but can be pretty annoying and sorta janky because sometimes there will be these jet streams coming from the floor that damage you, but it feels like the hitboxes on these things are way too big and you take damage from too far away so it can be frustrating. But these underwater sections also have some of the coolest / most horrific visuals of the entire game - you can get attacked by these sea creatures and fight back with these shitty infinite ammo underwater guns, I dont think you can kill the but you atleast stun them or something it was kinda clunky but cool nonetheles. But also, you can often see in the distance gigantic nightmarish Cthulhu type monsters too. Then, at the end of the underwater section you usually go into this cave usually with crazed cultists and have to find some clues in there and you can escape back to above ground. This one time, there was what seemed like a boss fight of this giant center monster spitting shit at you, so I shot at it for like 30 mins dying and reloading, but it turned out I just had to run around and pickup a book. That was kinda awkward and incoherent also, but also cool in concept atleast.

Speaking of dying, the way dying works in this game is once again, clunky and incoherent. You kind of just wake up at the nearest fast travel location. But the thing is, you can also manually save. So you'd think its something like Fallout or Skyrim or you know quicksaving in classic games, where you just pickup back where you left off, but no even if you load your manual save it just loads you to some random nearest fast travel station. So its hard to even tell what save youre even playing. Am I wasting ammo everytime I die and reload? Am I wasting health? These are questions I had for half of the game until I finally deliberately tested it to see how the fuck it works. It's like, it autosaves before you do anything 'important' then if you die, it can spawn you minutes away at some random fast travel station so its just confusing. There's nothing in the way of any kind of explaination , no "You woke up from the hospital" or anything like that, I think it just instantly loads the last autosave.

Towards the end of the game you're tasked with a series of choices to decide the fate of the city (or world?) but its sorta hard to decipher and by that point (20 hours in) I stopped really caring all that much about the story because of the afformentioned troubles with following along so I kinda just picked the option that sounded the coolest (annihilation?) It gave a cutscene showing I guess what must be Cthulu so that was nice. After the game ends, thats it, doesn't seem like you can keep playing the open world to do side quests. I tried reloading my previous save to see the other ending, which I found another one, Im not sure how many there actually are, but the other ending is basically the same thing it seems like. Except this time hes standing in a bar and then it slowly fills with water. So its like no matter what you choose the place gets flooded anyway. I'm sure theres probably a bunch more endings that I will watch on youtube. And speaking of side quests, theres a ton of them, and doing them even unlocks different costumes for your character you can equip at the main hotel. I only did a few, and they seem just as long and winding as the story quests. I'd say the side quests are well done, it doesn't just feel like dumbed down fetch quests but the ones I did felt just as significant as the main story. But yeah I figured the game is already gonna be long enough at 20 hours I don't feel the need to drag it out with another 20 hours of side quests so I left most of them alone.

Overall its a unique game, with tons of unique mechanics, its got lots of flaws and jank around the edges, the lack of high budget is apparent in many ways, its got interesting weird characters and awesome atmosphere and its probably the best game I've seen that does the whole Cthulhu vibe. The publisher drama and perpetually outdated Steam version is so strange, but also that whole ordeal is entertaining as well. The main character is interesting, this jaded down to earth, no BS, detective insomniac with good voice acting. So, I'd say its a pretty decent game, overall.
 

8/10

 

Destroy All Humans! (remake)

 



Destroy All Humans! was originally a Ps2 game, but since I don't know if I'll ever get around to playing that version, I just got the steam 'remake'. So this is a remake from the ground up, using (who would of guessed) Unreal engine 4.

The premise is pretty simple, you and your alien buddies come to earth and want to take it over for resources. The game has a couple dozen missions where first you're shown a Upgrade screen, and a overworld map, and you can freely choose which mission you want to do. This part is kind of confusing though, because its like the overworld map shows you 'unlocked locations' and you can return to previous locations you've completed a main mission on, and once you return to these locations theres these copy paste side activities you can do, why? I'm not sure. I think it just gives you more money to buy things from the upgrade store. I never really bothered returning to these completed locations to do the side activities but I guess its a cool addition. So what the game really consists of is choosing 'New Mission!' from the overworld screen, and doing those.

The game is full of its own personality in terms of cutscenes, dialogue, humor, and writing. There game has its own unique artstyle which is kind of a mix between cartoony and...something else, I'm not sure how to describe it. Everything is just exaggerated. The main character even has that kind of macho badass vibe like Duke Nukem or something, he talks in that kind of deep tone and has all sorts of funny comebacks and quips. The games sense of humor is notable and somewhat misanthropic or something, where the humans are portrayed as tribalistic, dumb, clueless fearmongering monkeys. They'll constantly talk about the fear of Communists, how even the alien invasion is because of communism, they keep calling the aliens 'little green people' when infact, the aliens are grey. I guess hinting at the difference in how the species eyes work? Theres even some sections where you have to choose dialogue like for instance one part where you disguise yourself as a politician and you have to say the 'right' choices that people would want to hear, and it's always the dumbest and lowest common demoninator options. So yeah the game is pretty funny at times.

The missions have a few basic varities. The good thing, is they're all pretty short so it's a good game for quick drop in and out sessions, or passing the controller back and forth. But usually the missions want you to either go destroy some things, go Stealth by means of disgusing yourself as a human and enter some place undetected, go pickup some things, go turn some switches, go kill x people or enter your saucer and destroy everything. There are a few outliers besides this basic foruma such as Escort missions, or following some vechile to some location, but this is the bulk of what you'll be doing. The way the objectives work though, is on the HUD it will tell you what to do, but it will also say Optional objective and these will constantly shift and change as the level goes on which I found really cool and interesting. So for instance if your objective is to just kill people, it will also say Optional objective: Drown people. So it will keep giving you new ways to optionally do things, I think the only real reason to do these optional objectives is to get more money for the upgrades shop, but I did find it fun doing these sometimes. I didn't always do them, more often than not I just ignored them, but it was cool to have the option to complete the objectives in unique ways.

Unfortunately the game does have a handful of flaws and annoyances that on the whole made the experience less than it could have been. For example, a game called 'Destroy All Humans!' i wasnt expecting almost half of it to be about stealth and sneaking past people. Like what is this, Splinter Cell? almost every other mission would be some thing where you have to awkwardly fumble with these stealth mechanics swapping in and out of human bodies to progress to these restricted zones, and if you get caught its an instant fail. Suffice to say I didn't really like these segments, maybe once or twice is fine, but it felt like almost half the game. The actual combat parts are lackluster too for multiple reasons. There is only 4 weapons, and it felt like 3 of them sucked. Theres the default zapping gun thing, theres the Anal Probe which I couldnt even figure out what the point of it was it just felt weak, theres the Disintegration Ray which is like a typical sci-fi laser blaster projectile shooter which felt like the most 'gun' of them all, then theres a grenade launcher thing. Well I ended up just using the Disintegration Ray and fully upgrading it for the whole game because the other weapons felt so weak and annoying to use. The thing is, your guns have limited ammo, but getting ammo in this game is kinda the dumbest thing ever. To get ammo you have to run around looking for random objects to transform into ammo packs. So you just run around looking for Garbage cans, fences, pylons, random shit, then you press the transform into ammo button, then you have to wait for like a 10 second animation to play then you get like 20% of your ammo. It just sucks and is awkward and the animation is way too long. It makes most of the guns suck because for example the grenade launcher gun only starts with 5 bullets max, then you run out, then you have to transform random shit into ammo and wait 10 seconds, then you get only 1 bullet back.
So yeah I mostly just used the Disintegration Ray, that atleast starts with 60 bullets and can upgrade to 120+ and it kills enemies just as fast as the rest.

To make matters kinda worse, you barely even have to engage in combat in the first place. The game just feels like a clusterfuck where every combat encounter is just waves of hundreds of guys randomly thrown around the map, and you can just fly past everyone. Because your character has this super overpowered jetpack ability that lets you just constantly fly past every single enemy and go straight for the objective. Why would I sit there killing enemies if I dont have to if theres no point? So for most of the game I didn't even engage in combat I just used the jetpack and flew right past everyone..kinda disappointing. Don't get me wrong, the controls and the flow of the movement feels good, but when its not backed with much meaningful combat segments theres just not much here. The few forced combat segments there were was fun enough, but the disappointing weapon arsenal made it kinda redundant and boring. There's a few parts where its like wave survival where you have to protect this object from enemies destroying it, or you have to prevent the Senators from entering the white house or something, these parts were the most real challenging events in the game that had meaningful combat behind them. But they didnt last long. The game has lockon amiming so you kinda just hold the Left trigger and move the joysticks to let it auto lockon to the enemies constantly then when you run out of ammo you do that whole ordeal of running around turning trashcans into ammo. Rinse repeat. The game has typical Halo style regen health so whenever you get low you just fly away and hide behind something for 10 seconds until youre good again. So Thats the all there is really to the combat.

Besides these moments, you have a significant amount of 'vehicle' segments where you have to get back in your flying saucer and destroy buildings. I really didn't like these parts because the mechanics are so convuluted and clusterfuck, the controls are weird and kind of suck, it just felt like an annoying mess. Like for instance for most of the game I had no idea how to even get health back in the saucer, turns out you need to do a similar thing as regaining ammo you need to fly around and spam the Y button on random vehicles or moving objects to get health, it feels stupid. The saucer also has 4 weapons, but it encounters the same ammo problem where you run out of ammo really quickly and for the life of me I couldnt figure out how to fucking get ammo back in the saucer. So I just ended up using the regenerating Death Ray laser gun for the whole game in the Saucer segments. So what happens here is you have to fly around and destroy the marked objects on the map, while being shot at constantly with homing missles. You can press a button to put up a shield for a second to try to block the homing missles but the timing is really specific and the shield doesnt last long so it just turns into a mess of spamming buttons. I did not really enjoy these saucer segments they were more of an annoyance than anything else because of the mess of controls, mechanical bloat and confusion, bad mechanics, annoying spam etc..

Between every mission you can choose upgrades to buy. I mostly just upgraded my shields as soon as possible so I'd die less. Its notable that the game has no difficulty selections, just one difficulty. So I'd fully upgrade my Shields for both the alien and the saucer, then I'd fully upgrade that one weapon that seemed any good, then I'd just upgrade the Saucers Laser death ray because thats the only weapon that doesnt run out of ammo for the saucer segments. Theres a few other upgrades that are notable such as this Dash ability that lets you knock down enemies if you dash near them, or a 'Skate' ability which kinda gives you some invisible skateboard if you hold B which was kinda fun to traverse with. You can choose to upgrade your stealth abilities but fuck that. But overall the upgrade system isn't much to write about, it wasn't that exciting for me.

The game has a few boss fights but really all it amounts to is strafing in a circle, holding down the shoot button, running around and doing the stupid ammo pickup thing, repeat.

The game however is pretty short, I beat it in 6 hours, the last boss was a gauntlet of intense bullshit. A saucer segment with this giant mech boss you have to shoot in the middle, luckily I realized how to regen health at this point so it was just a thing of constantly flying around spamming the Y button trying to regen health from random objects, while trying to laser down the bosses health. I beat it without failing that much thankfully. Then its phase 2 with this on foot ending boss girl in this big construction site arena where she's constantly doing flips and jumps. If you get too far away from her she shoots you through the walls or some shit, Couldnt really understand what was going on. She starts to regenerate health if you hurt her too much so you have to destroy the health station things. But overall I beat it in only a few attempts, though it was pretty hard and frustrating (mostly due to the ammo pickup bullshit).

So yeah thats the game. I wonder if the PS2 original was better, if this remake fucked things up. It kinda feels bad playing the remake first but fuck it, I was tired of seeing it in my steam library being uncompleted. The game has fun movement, thats the best thing about it. Using the jetpack, flying around, the humor and the artstyle are all good things about it. The missions could of been better, being able to fly past most enemies kinda sucks. Oh and the overall UI/Hud is sorta a mess, theres way too much shit all over the screen, theres like multiple subtitle boxes at the same time frequently, theres all sorts of icons all over the screen and it didnt take me until almost the end of the game to start to make sense of any of it. The game could of benefitted from a more dumbed down minimalistic presentation. A game called 'Destroy All Humans!'  I wasn't expecting so much mechanical bloat, confusion, stealth segments, and really not that much destroying of humans but rather flying past them or sneaking around them. 

-Lot of stealth
-The combat parts you can just fly past most of the guys
-Only 4 guns and only 1 of them feels good
-Saucer sections suck too many confusing controls
-Overall just too many controls and mechanics clusterfuck UI is kinda bad too

6/10

Mirror's Edge Catalyst

 

I quite liked the first Mirrors Edge game when it released in 2008. Years later I knew they made a sequel but never got around to playing it or just waited until it was cheap. I finally got it on sale for like $10.

At first things are how I remember them from the first game, you do a short tutorial teaching you the basic controls, and it feels pretty fun at first the way your characters momentum and speed builds up as you hold the forward button. I played with a controller and the controls are a little odd, for example you press LB to jump. But the controls feel decent at first. After the tutorial is when I started to have some apprehensions about the whole thing. For starters, it plops you into yet another one of these open world type experiences. You have this overview map of the city, and all sorts of icons to look at and sort though. Thankfully you can press a button to bring up the Legend and see what all the icons mean. So the game has tons of optional side content and side missions, and frankly I never cared to do any of it and literally ignored every single piece of side content in the whole game because it just didn't seem to be a good use of time. I mean, I did one or two side missions but I could already tell it was the standard fare filler padding out copy pasted content. It's like they just made the game open world because "thats what mainstream games are supposed to have" - even if it doesn't service the gameplay experience. Ultimately, all the open world does here is add boring filler in between each main mission. I don't think the first game had any sort of Open world like this, it was just constant fast pace one mission to the next. So yeah, I never particularly enjoyed the whole open world vibe in this game and it only serves to ruin the pacing.

The controls are mostly fluid and fun, you get a good sense of momentum and always being so high up and vertical makes things feel intense. However a few things about the whole experience makes it feel kinda shit. For instance, the animation that plays whenever you fall from a slightly too high place (even when using Soft landing button) is just annoying and obnoxious. It swings your whole camera around wildly and it can just be nauseating. Like imagine someone grabbing your head and jerking it around as you're playing. Not good. Everytime you die, you get a big white screen, but for whatever reason it takes like 30 seconds to reload the last checkpoint, even on an NVME. Though, atleast the game is really generous with checkpoints and saves frequently so when you die you pretty much never lose more than 30 seconds of progress.

So then what the whole open world experience offers is opening your map,  setting a waypoint to the next Main mission, seeing if you can fast travel closer to it, then running to the main mission. Fine, standard enough. Usually what will happen in these main mission icons though is you wont be able to fast travel there and will have to run around mindlessly to it anyways. Then, once you get there, its just a cutscene and then it makes you run across the map to trigger another cutscene. Frequently. So youre just running from one place to the next, only triggering cutscenes and not much else.

Finally when you get into the actual core of the mission content, what does it offer? Well really the whole structure and content of pretty much all the main missions is simply run across this rooftop place, interact with this machine/press a button, escape from the guards, go to next mission. Thats kinda all you ever do. Sometimes you go inside these big office type complex buildings and have to figure out how to leap off all the walls , crawl through vents, and find a way to the objective, but its usually nothing more than just arriving somewhere and pressing a button or causing some kind of chaos. Now the worst part of this whole thing, is unlike the first game (from my memory) this game has mandatory combat segments. It will throw you into an arena and make you do this most god-awful melee combat to progress to the next bit. The combat here is just shit feeling.

 It feels like a really weird beat 'em up game where theres different enemy types and you have to constantly vary up your attacks or they block you, but the animations and annoyingness of it all just makes it really frustrating and stupid. You have these tazer guys that constantly taze you, you have a dozen guys shooting machine guns at you across the map, and youre just some unarmed girl suppose to meanderingly take them out one by one. It just sucks. To make matters worse, all I really ended up doing is spamming the Dodge button, and then the Heavy kick, over and over and over. For every single enemy. For the whole game, because it actually seemed to work and sort of confuse/glitch out the shit AI and made it a viable tactic to get past the shitty combat. These combat sections are no slouch either, frequently I would die 10 times in a row before I could fucking beat it, and it wasnt the kind of satisfying rewarding challenge it was more like "that was really stupid and annoying". You cant even pickup guns, which is something I remember being able to do in the first game.

Then theres these escape segments where youre kind of meant to just run as much as possible and absorb enemy bullets. There will be enemies everywhere shooting at you, and youre kinda just intended to soak up all their bullets in your 'runners shield' which is this shield that generates the more moves you do like walljumping and stuff? I'm not sure the whole idea and mechanic behind it just felt awkward and stupid. Like you're suppose to just get shot dozens of times while running, like what? Then it has this like GTA 4 kind of mechanic where it shows a GPS on the screen and the enemy bubble and you need to stand outside the bubble and hide somewhere to lose the enemies.

But...none of the missions really stand out at all, or even the locations make any sort of distinct visual impression.

So that's another thing:
The first game had a really sort of iconic distinct artstyle, and things did stand out in that game. You had all sorts of different coloured environments and areas, however in Mirror's Edge Catalyst everything looks the fucking same, and it almost (from memory) looks like a downgrade in aesthetics from the first game. Like the enemies look more like power rangers or something, everything has this overly saturated childish brightness to it. Its all super futuristic in a way that looks cheap and tacky. None of the locations of environments stand out, everything is just the same blur of corporate rooftops and office complexes. Its hard to describe exactly what I mean but it just comes across as bland and actually boring. Frequently I'd just find myself kind of an overall feeling of "meh" and boredom while playing this, so much so that I could barely finish more than 2 missions per sitting (1 hour tops). I had to really play the game in 1 hour maximum sessions or else I just feel like going to sleep. I think a lot of has to do with the game just not having any standout landmarks. You know like statues, memorable buildings, giant podiums - anything. Theres seemingly none of it. Its like the whole game is just copy pasted assets with no manual handcrafted care or charm, theres nothing that makes you go "Oh yeah, its this place" its a total samey blur.

In standard open world slop, it also has multiple skill trees, which just made me kind of eyeroll when I was introduced to it. Theres 3 different trees, Movement, Gear, and Combat. These are pretty much trivial. The movement one is already half filled out at start of the game, the Gear one gets filled up as you progress and it forces you to get certain unlocks, the Combat one is the one youll mostly be using as you save your points until the game forces you into these mandatory combat segments, then you dump points into whatever sounds like it would help you in combat like "more damage to enemies" and stuff. You get skill points after each mission or something, I don't know I barely gave a shit about it, towards the end of the game I had almost every single skill anyway, even without doing any side content.

And the story... well it's really uninteresting and dull. It's a lot of mumbo jumbo technology jargon talk about big corporations being evil authoritarians taking over the world, you and your gang of parkour athletes are apparently the only ones who can stop it, or some shit. I kept getting a lot of vibes of The Matrix,  take the blue pill or red pill kinda shit. The antagonist wants to create a blue pill world where all the residents are in  virtual reality bliss or something and Faith the main character wants to stop it and "give people the choice". I don't know, it all seemed really derivative and uninspired, but worst of all the characters are just not likeable. Almost every character has that modern gaming "strong independent empowered woman" trope with short flippy haircuts, and the men are just generic edgy guys or 'boss dudes' I dunno, the story really didnt do anything for me, more often than not I was just cringing at the dialogue and characters.

Thankfully, the game has a sort of objective marker button, when you press a button its called 'Runners Vision' which lets a red beam show up and guide you around the world. This allows you to just turn off your brain and mindlessly keep following this beam to constant progression. I liked that, because even if the game is mediocre, I can just use this feature to mindlessly rip through it to end credits. So I did. So it wasnt all that painful to make constant progress thanks to this. It can be really hit and miss, though. Usually it will highlight objects in Red showing you this is where you should go, other times it kinda just glitches out and shows you paths that are impossible to reach which makes you just scratch your head and think what youre missing.



Overall its not an awful game, its just really mediocre and could have been better. It's short, under 8 hours, and it does have an open world if for whatever reason someone is into that kind of thing after the credits roll. For me though, I just followed that red objective line mindlessly to end credits and towards the end of the game the last two missions were so annoying and frustrating I kept reassuring myself "its ok, only 1 mission left" cause I've had enough.

5/10

Visage

 


When looking for more horror games, I kept reading that Visage is the absolute peak. "This is it, it wont get any scarier than this" they said.

Visage starts off with a short cutscene of what seems to be a man taking his family hostage in a basement, tied to a chair with blindfolds on, and systematically one by one shooting them all with a revolver, and then killing himself. Then you "wake up" in a house, and thats the only introduction you get. Kinda brilliant and really sets the tone, no fucking around, in your face shock value.

From here, you sort of just wander around this really highly detailed (albeit Unreal Engine) house,looking for any sort of objects or clues which  will eventually trigger one of the 4 'chapters' in the game. It's a good setup, albeit a bit confusing because you can really play any of the chapters (except the last one) in any order. I find it kind of strange that you can for example play Chapter 3 (as in when the chapters were released, because the game was originally early access) before Chapter 1. What will happen is you will wander around the house, and pickup some mundane object, like a Splint or a Doll, and once you pick it up the game will say 'Do you want to start X persons chapter?" Atleast it tells you you're about to start a chapter, I liked that. It's like the game has a sort of Hub world main house area, and once you lock into a chapter, then the house slowly starts changing and shifting into all sorts of supernatural new areas. Even while you're in the 'hub world' pre-chapter house area, the game still constantly fucks with you. Lights will randomly turn off behind you, doors will slam shut, radio will turn on, Tv will turn on or off, Light bulbs will break, random crying noises, you'll randomly hear thumps from above you in the attic. The game does a good job at trying to keep you on your toes and having that paranormal, poltergeist haunted house vibe, even when nothing is happening - it's just dynamic.

So the game has four chapters, they are as follows:
-Lucy
-Dolores
-Rakan
-Mirror mask

I did them in order of release date, the game was originally in Early Access for awhile and it released with Lucy chapter first, then they slowly rolled out the other chapters + ending until it left EA.

So, the game does kind of a really poor job at properly explaining the mechaincs to you. Yeah, maybe they want the player to feel that sense of absolute confusion and bewilderment, but, atleast at first, the mechanics are just a clusterfuck of awkward ideas and controls, and to be honest during the first episode I basically hated the game and almost threw my hands up and just uninstalled it and abandoned it.

Because for multiple reasons:
A big one is the games Sanity system. The way it actually works is in the bottom left theres a brain and red gradient. The brighter that red gradient / brain is, the more insane you go, and what this essentially means is when you are insane enough, the enemy of the chapter will randomly appear and instantly annihilate you. So this kept happening over, and over, and over, and over again. I would just walk around and BAM! just get a jump scare and instantly die, reload last save. I was so confused, like what the fuck how do I stop dying? Like okay, the game has a 'Tips' menu where it tries to describe the sanity system, it tells you to regain sanity you must be in Bright areas, look at lights etc. So naturally what I took this to mean is that I can use lighters to regain sanity. Nope, not how it works. The game lets you dual wield items, so I would equip 2 lighters and turn them both on to try to regain sanity, but it wasn't ever working. Other things I would try is to stare at bright TV screens, or random lights, but nothing seemed to really work. It just seemed so inconsistent and random in how I would die or not. Once I actually learned how the mechanics work, that lighters DO NOT in fact count towards fixing sanity, It all started to make sense and I pretty much completely stopped randomly dying, or really ever seeing any enemies anymore. I don't really think the confusion during episode 1 was my fault, its just a bad awkward transition phase into learning how the games mechanics actually work, and the game not doing a great job at introducing these mechanics to the player.

I'll briefly talk about the core mechanics some more, then talk about some broad details of each episode.

More on the mechanics side, so besides constantly dying during episode 1, this is where I got introduced to the inventory system. It's actually pretty terrible. Since you can dual wield any two items you want, you also cant really easily drop items, you have to hold a button then this menu shows up asking you which hand you want to drop and look at a tiny icon of what item you wanna drop, or you have to open the inventory menu and try to fumble with putting one of your 'hand' items away. It's such a mess, its actually like one of the most clunky and awkward item/dropping/inventory systems I've basically ever seen. Even after 10 hours of playing the game I was still fucking up doing basic actions like putting items away / picking up items / dropping items. It was always some stupid juggling game to figure out what button I had to press. That whole system didnt give me a good first impression either for sure.

Besides the sanity system and inventory system, the rest of the mechanics are about carefully combing through the house, room by room, putting your dot cursor over anything that might stand out, inspecting it or interacting with it, picking up keys, puzzle items etc, then usually once you pickup something mandatory a script will trigger and something, somewhere else in the house will change. So it turns into this thing where the majority of the game takes place in this relatively small 3 story house, but every time you make any progress you need to recheck every single room, very carefully, over and over again. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but pretty soon I figured out the game loop and realized its about getting to know the house really well and carefully inspecting every room over and over again. In a way its kinda comfy because you get this feeling of really getting to know the house, almost as if you've actually lived there yourself, and then spiralling into this crazed, confused, psychotic mania where the house keeps changing and unfolding in new ways at you.  Unfortunately  though, its extremely easy to miss a very small important detail, and be running around in circles for possibly hours, making absolutely zero progress. Thankfully this never really happened too bad for me, and I never really had to look anything crucial up, but I think most people would get sick of running in circles making no progress and look things up to save time, but for me I just kinda pressed through it out of curiosity how far I could get without looking anything up.

The game has a generous autosave system, and also you can manually save almost whenever you want, except for a few crucial intense moments where it wont let you save.
Alright so thats the basic game-play loop and mechanics, now a brief overview of the individual chapters and its stories

So in the Lucy chapter, its roughly centred around a story about the daughter and the main item and mechanic you use is a camera to take photos and light up the area and reveal new areas. Its got some interesting locations like going outside into a tree house showcasing one of the few outdoors segments in the game. Its got another part where you get trapped inside a small room filled with furniture and bird cases where theres an enemy walking around  and you have to sneak past the enemy and find the key and open the door. This is actually probably one of the 'hardest' parts in the game, in terms of 'combat' or bypassing enemies. Rarely in the game do you actually have to sneak past enemies or do anything else like this, its kinda just this one segment. So I failed this part a few times until  I figured out the exact path, buts its a unique encounter that doesn't really show up in much of the later game. Other than that, there was one part that sort of tripped me up and it was the part where you had to open a random dresser and take a photo of the eyes on it to progress. I never opened the cabinet for awhile so I just ran around in circles missing progress, that sucked. After running around the house picking up this and that item and going through all the minor spooks and scares you jump in a bath tub, watch a creepy cutscene, and complete the chapter by picking up a 'Progress item' which is one of 4, one for each chapter.
There's a room in the house which is the Progress Room which acts as a way to check what chapters you have completed, which I really liked the idea of.

The next chapter I did, called Dolores, has you going through the house and uncovering the story of some elderly woman, maybe the previous tenant or something, im not sure, but you go around finding cassette tapes and playing back audio telling a tale of this woman riddled with dementia and delusional thinking. At first I couldn't find out what to do, but eventually realized you have to go up and interact with these big white sheet objects around the house, which then uncovers Mirrors. Eventually, you find a sledgehammer in the garage, and I realized you can use this to smash the mirrors which then open up portals to alternate realms. Theres 7 or so of these mirrors and it was always pretty exciting smashing them and seeing what sort of crazy place it would lead me to. Unfortunately, I think I got a bug with the sledgehammer where at first it wouldn't let me pick it up so I kind of just wandered around doing nothing for an hour or so. Later, the sledgehammer teleported to the basement storage room with a message 'The sledgehammer has been stored in the storage room' and then I could finally use it and realized what I had to do. So yeah, the game can be rough around the edges and a bit buggy from its early access days.  Still, I'd say this is maybe the best chapter in the game because of the amount of changes that the house goes through, the amount of crazy shit you see, everytime you smash these mirrors it takes you to more and more disturbing trials which you have to complete to progress. Some of these trials are things like using a baby monitor to navigate some almost Ocarina of Time lost woods puzzle, another trial is this gigantic womb where you carry a baby back to a crib, another one is this room of circular mirrors that you keep looking into until it finally spooks you with creatures looking back at you, and so on. Some of the puzzles here are clever and really head scratchers, like its not uncommon to find a puzzle but it be impossible to complete it until you later find a piece of paper telling you the solution, I thought that was kinda shitty but not really a big deal, its kind of obvious thats how it worked anyway.

Cool things about this chapter and game in general is all the amount of little random events you get. Like in Dolores chapter, out of the corner of your eye you can see the old lady peering her head out from a door at you randomly, the doorbell will randomly ring and try to fuck with you to come to the front door, stuff like that. Since its Unreal Engine, the graphics are automatically pretty high fidelity, but the assets as well are really well made and everything is carefully hand placed and it makes it feel like a real house thats been lived in with some character to it.

Theres a bunch more of these trials and puzzles in Dolores chapter that kept the game exciting and fresh, this crazy trial with a bunch of hanging guys and using a crank to shine sunlight at correct places, this place with a dead guy with a bunch of knives stabbed into him that you have to find a knife and insert into him, at one point you even get to sit down at a table with the old lady and she asks to bring some tea to her. This chapter has a lot of backtracking and running in circles and repeating cutscenes, like most of the doors are rearranged or locked with big chains, so to get back and forth to the basement you have to take some portal which plays a cutscene of you going through some tunnel and vice versa to get back upstairs from a bathroom hole. Theres a lady that tells you "bring me my child" so thats the general theme of the chapter, to do all these weird mirror trials to bring some old lady her child.

The puzzles are clever but also mildly frustrating at times, things like figuring out what to do with the baby monitor, or you find a Compass but it seems completely useless until you realize the only place that it works is from the mirror that leads you to some outside world, that part was cool though.

While the game is essentially set in one house, it still has lots of variety in that these chapters keep changing the house up and unlocking these crazy schizophrenic alternate realms you go to. Like towards the end of Dolores chapter its just this gigantic labyrinth of stairways and you have to figure out the path to the other side, its totally bizarre but  fascinating.

The game isn't totally without humour, either. It's disturbing dark humour, but nonetheless there. For instance theres a part where you hear talking through the walls, only to realize its coming from the kitchen. When you get to the kitchen, all the appliances start swinging open/turning on and talking to eachother. Like your character is having a psychotic break or schizophrenia and the appliances start talking to him, mocking him, taunting him etc. Its both hilarious but also disturbing , because some people in real life really do experience similar things as this.

By the end of Dolores chapter, you basically find out she was a mental patient and maybe her child died or something like this, and she just hung herself, which you get to see, then it plops you back into the default 'hubworld' house for you to find the next chapter. Pretty good, although after I figured out the sanity mechanic, I never actually felt like I was in much danger for the rest of the game, because as soon as the red sanity warning shows up, I kinda just sprinted to the nearest lightbulb and stared at it until it went away. If you do this, the game mostly has no threat to give you. Sometimes I'd still randomly die by some enemy somehow, but for the most part I felt like I had it figured out.

It's pretty funny/grim to imagine some schizophrenic crazed guy living alone in his house for weeks after killing his whole family, having insane delusions and hallucinations, and in order to prevent them sprinting up to nearby lightbulbs and staring at them until he calms down.


The next chapter I did was Rakan
which tells the tale of a mental patient who uses crutches to slowly hobble around, he always appears angry or frustrated and it has you going around the house, this time with these creepy eyeball doors blocking the path. Then you go around and realize some of the paintings on the walls have eyeballs that you can crush, it then unlocks these eye doors. The graphics for this stuff is awesome, the eyes track the player as they walk around and gives this really disturbing feeling of being watched, obviously. The bulk of this chapter is much more straight forward than the others, it has you sitting down in wheelchairs randomly placed around the house, then these teleport the player to alternate realms inside mental hospitals. There, you go through these mental hospital scenarios mostly walking around in a linear path, picking up keys and progressing to the next door. It's mostly standard fare horror game mental hospital stuff, but its well done, and I appreciated the change of pace especially with less emphasis on puzzle solving and more linear gameplay without as much backtracking and running in circles. The mental hospital sections have heavy usage of lighting and darkness, where the game introduces a flashlight you can equip, however theres a few moments in this chapter I thought were kind of bullshit mechanically, in terms of consistency with the rest of the game. For example theres a part with a dead end, with a table up against a door, and it turns out you have to just walk into the table and use physics to push it around. But unlike the rest of the game, you usually just walk up to an object and get a button prompt, but this time, you have to physically just keep walking into it. So that caused some confusion for awhile. This happens again at another point with a bookshelf up against a wall. It's just a bit  inconsistency in the mechanics here which make you unnecessarily walk in circles for a bit.

After the mental hospital section, you get put back in the house, and have to just walk around and look for another wheelchair to sit in, where it teleports you back to the mental hospital again and do something similar again. This time, you're going through the mental hospital but its much darker, and theres these creepy humanoid monsters standing around or lurking in the shadows, they dont really pose much of a threat unless you touch them though. Theres a few parts where youre being chased by Rakim but hes pretty slow so hes easy to avoid, but it is thrilling nonetheless. Theres kind of a shitty annoying part in the basement of the hospital with some laundry you have to figure out how to turn the power on for, but its not really obvious how you do that so I kinda just ran in circles for 40 minutes trying to figure out what to do, it was something stupid like just missing a door or button somewhere but the room design down in that basement was just annoying.

It's a lot of that kind of stuff in this chapter, it uses the same formula of finding a hospital chair, going through a hospital section, get teleported back to house, kill the eye paintings, repeat. But again, I kinda liked how it was more straight forward and more formulaic than the other chapters, it was a brief respite from constantly running in circles and puzzle solving. It's more of a just a keyhunt than anything else, with a bunch of cool cutscene events. Towards the end of the chapter youre locked in a arena with Rakim chasing you, you have to find a knife somewhere and destroy a giant eye to progress. Was pretty fun but it seems like when you die it maybe randomly respawns the knife somewhere? the game is really generous with savepoints so it wasnt that frustrating, and atleast the game introduced some forced threat for once again so I had fun with that section.

The voice acting and cinematics on the chapter is good, it puts across the feeling of confusion , frustration, and dread that such a disabled mental hospital patient might have, I'm not realy sure all the details of the relationship these characters have to the main character, Dwayne, so I guess theres some more 'lore' you can dig into if you're curious which is nice.
After the chapter ends, it gives you a eyeball trophy which goes into the progress room.

The last 'chapter' (which isn't really a chapter) is a series of collecting about 7 pieces of a Mirror Mask. In the Progress room, you see 3 trophies for the chapters, and then you see a stand for a mask with 7 individual pieces. So it lets you know that theres still something left to be done. So at this point in the game, its much more subtle and ambiguous for how you have to progress. I wouldn't blame most people for looking up a walkthrough at this point, but I soldiered on. So what happens is after every chapter, it usually also gives you a VHS tape. So at the end of 3 chapters, you have 3 VHS tapes at bare minimum. Theres  TV in the living room you can watch these tapes on. When you watch the tapes, it plays a random grainy old family home clips, interspliced with footage from the game showing various locations around the house. So what this means is you should watch these tapes, and try to find the locations the VHS is showing you. Besides these 3 tapes, theres also a bunch of tapes scattered around the hub-house as well. In total I think theres also 7 tapes, so at this point I had 4 or 5 or something. So what ends up happening is you kind of just running in circles checking every room in the house over and over once again, looking for either these tapes, or ways to trigger the events to find more of these mirror mask shards. Luckily, for me, after I beat all 3 chapters and explored the house a bit, I easily had all the VHS tapes. So it just became a matter of constantly watching all of these tapes and seeing what I possibly missed and going to the locations.

Actually obtaining the mask shards is just a matter of finding various event triggers in the house. Some of these are very short and simplistic and take no thought at all.
For example, one of them just involves going down a ladder and sitting in a big chair and watching a TV with a bird talking to you, and drinking some alcohol. After this 'cutscene' ends it gives you a shard.

Theres even this sort of secret little hidden painted wall you can break down and climb down into a room with a gun on the table, shoot yourself in the head, and 'respawn'.
At first its really bizarre and I couldnt figure out the point of it, but it turns out if youre actually missing any of these VHS tapes, upon shooting yourself it will play a little cutscene showing you where a missed tape is, I thought that was neat and clever way to help the player.

Another shard is obtained by getting a stool from the storage room, and using it to climb up into the vent. Luckily, the game tells you "Maybe I can find a step ladder somewhere" if you try to go into the vent, so its not like the game is completely without direction. After you climb into the vent, you find a room with a contract saying "I dont give a fuck" then you sign it and go into a room with a bunch of those weird humanoid monsters standing still and a dead bird in the middle. The bird has a piece of the mask. Very easy and short, its hardly a real 'chapter'

Another mask shard is by picking up a vinyl off the wall and putting it on the player, then it takes you to a grocery store, then a couch with a tv where you once again sit down and drink more beer and watch TV and it plays some more disturbing family drama, and thats another mask piece.

I found all of these without a walkthrough just by watching the VHS tapes, I think maybe once or twice I looked up a tiny detail I missed but nothing major. a VHS tape shows a hatch in the basement, and I found the handle for a hatch from some box in a garage, so this was just a matter of unlocking the hatch and dropping down into some crazy underground laboratory area where a gas leak springs out and you have to find a way to escape before you die. Pretty cool section. You have to just get the fire axe and break through the wall, then you get a mask piece. Takes like 5 mins.

Sometimes, you can only trigger these events by watching the vhs tapes, which is thankfully something I never seemed to struggle with. For example the 'Prison' tape shows you an area that looks like the basement hallways, and upon returning you there it takes you to this alternate realm where youre in a pitch black hallway and you need to keep reusing the light bulbs to create a path for yourself, get a sledgehammer and burst down some walls to progress. This was one of the scariest parts of the game because youre being stalked by some monster guy, but it seemed like if you just ignore him he wont kill you. Then you break the walls and get another mask piece.


Almost done with the game now, another piece is found by a tape showing you a room with a busted floorboard, I knew what room it was because it does a good job showcasing it, so I just went to the room and took the floorboard up and you drop inside some big factory area. This part kinda sucked because the factory was huge and you walk so slow, it was just a matter of walking around and finding a key, like needle in a haystack, using the key to progress and press a button doing a few more things and you get a mask piece.

Now, the last mask piece was pretty bullshit and kinda sucked. It involves picking up these paintings, 'Strange frames' and trying to find some place to put them. Well theres like 6 of these damn things, and theyre tucked in the most obscure places in the house. You gotta place all of these frames on some striped wall in the basement, which the VHS tape shows, but actually finding these damn things is more annoying than anything else. Constantly rewatch the upstairs TV, run around every room in the house looking for the frame you missed over and over. It was kinda shitty but I guess sorta satisfying when you finally figure it out. From here it takes you to this a new realm where youre locked in a room with a bunch of pills infront of you, like What pill do you want to take? Red pill , blue pill, pink pill etc. Turns out you have to take them all and then you open up a bunch of doors with little jumpscares and oddities, then to some really nice looking outdoors area, like purgatory scenery or something, then of course theres a little rowboat section (because every horror game needs one), then a big light tower you go through where at the end you get a disturbing cutscene of your family telling you how much you suck and you should die etc, then you get the mask piece.

Once you have all the pieces and return to the progress room and press the mask, the game suddenly ends very quickly, brief cutscene showing your family smiling at you in a white light and then end credits. Not really sure what to make of it, but its impactful atleast.
Is Visage one of the scariest games ever? Probably not, I was kinda stonefaced for most of the game, but I did really appreciate the atmosphere and attention to detail, I played the whole game in the dark with the lights off to really add to the mood. It's not really a short game, took me like 20 hours to beat it, most of it is just returning to previous rooms and double, triple checking, but I didnt mind much because you start to feel like you're actually this guy living in the house falling into madness, its an immersive game for sure, despite its quirks and flaws around the edges like the inventory and general controls and confusing mechanics at first.

8/10