Lionel Houde

Atmosphere, depravity and perspective: five stars. Combined, 6 stars. Item management: utterly infuriating and the most counterintuitive, button-pairing garbage controls I’ve played since 1977. Minus three stars. You can’t even simply drop something on a flat surface most times when it offers you to, and then you have to dig up the prompt just to get the second button press. I can pick off a pilot in a moving helicopter no problem in Far Cry 5 but this game brings you a near aneurysm JUST TRYING TO PUT A STUPID MUG ON A COUNTER. The microwave “puzzle” doesn’t explain why you can’t try to get a new mug out of a dozen in the kitchen to retry. Sometimes I feel like the object designers were cringing into their hands about the programmers... unless they were the programmers too. Neutral factor: the fact you might need a PhD to pick up on the event chains to progress. For example, if you have a tool needed to get where you need to (two actually) you have to trigger a phone call first. Do not pay $34 as recently advertised unless you enjoy being goaded into snapping your system, never mind your controller, over your knee for triple the going rate for flawed games. A major shame, because I’d have raved (positively, haw) about Visage. I still hope a patch can be issued for controls. It’s tough to be horrified and far more enraged at the same time. I bought Layers of Fear after this for about a tenth of the price and it has been flawless aside from very minor texture issues. Think of it as Everywhere at the End of Time meets haunted house.