One of my biggest fears has always been that one day I’ll wake up and not be able to see. It’s an irrational fear but the idea of not being able to ever see again is frightening to me so when I heard a horror game about a blind person was being made, I was instantly filled with dread.
Perception is a game about a young blind woman named Cassie who goes to investigate an abandoned house that she has been seeing in her nightmares. Yeah, it sounds a bit silly that a girl who can’t see would go to a house all by herself but you just have to roll with it. As you play, you tap your walking cane on the ground which allows Cassie to see through the vibrations it creates (known as echolocation). Every sound makes an echolocation, so anytime there’s any sort of noise, it’ll allow you to see for a brief period of time. Once the vibration wears off, darkness consumes you and you can no longer see. You can tap your cane as much as you want and walking creates minor vibrations, allowing you to see just ahead of you slightly, but there’s reasons that you shouldn’t make too much noise.
There’s something lurking in the mansion. The game is of the horror sub-genre that puts fear into players by having a monster/enemy that you can’t fight, it’s like Amnesia, Outlast, or Alien: Isolation. Direct confrontation is not an option and unlike other games in this sub-genre, it works here to an extent. I wouldn’t expect a blind girl to attempt to fight back against this entity for a variety of reasons but the main one is because she’s blind. Yeah, Daredevil is blind but he’s the rare exception of a blind badass.
The entity I’m referring to is known as the “Presence” and it’s attracted to sound, so the more noise you make, the more likely it is to come after you. The problem is, it’s not clear how much sound you’re allowed to make. It makes it too unpredictable for it to be fun, once this thing catches you you’re dead, all for a mistake you’ll be making too frequently.
It becomes even more tedious because I figured that the way around this would be that you’d have to learn the environment and become more accustomed to it but that’s simply not the case. The house’s layout frequently changes due to some supernatural elements, it’s still the same house but objects will be in different places. You can’t memorize the house, something I imagine a blind person may do in their own home so they don’t have to constantly walk around with a cane.
The game’s ultimate downfall is within its story. It’s territory we’ve crossed countless times and it feels very insipid, tedious, and uninspired. It’s more of a walking simulator with an annoying antagonist and a gimmicky gameplay mechanic. It’s not awful, if you don’t play a ton of games or a lot of horror games you might not notice the repetitive narrative structure or maybe you simply won’t mind it. Going from room to room to listen to a voice blab on and on about a plot that isn’t incredibly interesting with the occasional spook isn’t exactly fun nor does it feel original. So many other games have done this and they do it much better.
The game’s biggest strength is its sound design, there were some moments where I’d be strolling through the house and I’d hear the most nerve-racking sound ever and I’d stop dead in my tracks with this uneasy feeling in my gut. In a game where you can’t see, it’s essential that the sound is high quality and it really is. It’s the moments that make me have to stop and let out a few deep breaths as the screen goes dark from my idleness where the game really shines. It creates a new kind of tension and fear because I don’t want the screen to go dark out of fear that when I start moving there will suddenly be something in front but I also don’t want to move forward because I don’t want to find out what horrors lie ahead.
Summary
Perception is a short experience but a bit of a dull one for those looking for a good story. It can be really frightening, especially if it manages to play into your own personal fears and crawl under your skin, but the story is nothing super fresh or remotely interesting. The game’s mechanics can be too frustrating and unpredictable which is a shame because there’s a lot of potential at the game’s core. If it weren’t for the game’s fantastic sound design, it may be a complete swing and a miss but it’s more of a foul ball in this case. If you’re looking for a really juicy new horror game, you may have to wait for something like The Evil Within 2 later this year.
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.