Is Out of Sight worth a look, or should you close your eyes and hope it goes away?
Out of Sight daubed a “second-person horror adventure” developed by Starbreeze Entertainment and Published by The Gang has arrived. I’ll be honest I’ve had my fill of first-person horror games and wasn’t keen on playing another, that is until I watched the Out of Sight trailer.
I’m a sucker for charm, and by its nature charm can’t really be explained, but seeing the trailer for Out of Sight left me charmed. The premise is simple but immediately intriguing, you’re Sophie. A small orphan who’s unable to see, it’s implied that this is due to the games primary villain ‘Mother Janna’. Sophie is trapped in an rundown old mansion come foster home and needs to escape before Mother Janna enacts some sort of ritual. Well, how is poor Sophie going to escape without her sight? This is where Teddy comes in, turns out, Teddy can see, and Sophie can use his POV.
You’ll navigate this creepy mal masion through Teddies eyes (hence the second-person moniker, for what it’s worth I’m glad were finally recognising Teddies as people). I really enjoyed the adorable way you can see Teddy’s paws while Sophie carries him around. Sounds simple enough, but Mother Janna and her lackey Clayton aren’t all that keen on the idea of Sophie breaking out. They’ve littered the orphanage with traps and obstacles in the hope of delaying Sophie enabling them to catch her. This is where the Puzzles in ‘Out of Sight’ come in. Dotted around the mansion are little pink clothes on which you can rest Teddy, you’ll need to do this as firstly Sophie can’t interact with objects whilst holding Teddy and secondly sometimes Teddy can be moved through the environment to places Sophie can’t reach. While sat down you can have Teddy look around using his unique perspective to complete the challenges and foil Mother Jannas little schemes.
As always I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, Out of Sight isn’t War and Peace, it’s essentially an all ages horror story with some very dark and twisted themes and some daunting emotional undertones. Mother Janna and Sophie are actually voice but a mother and daughter duo, Vicki-jo Eva and Lily Turnbull respectively. While playing the game I was consistently impressed by the natural tone of a child Lily was able to achieve and it added hugely to the suspense and concern for Sophie’s safety. It wasn’t until researching for this review that I discovered that Lily is in fact 8 years of age, I guess you’d call that natural talent. Lily coupled with the way Sophie’s dialoguen is written make moments of this game incredibly emotionally jarring. One prime example being when Sophie is caught. Sophie knows she shouldn’t be sneaking around like some toddling solid snake, and when she’s busted by Clayton she’ll often shout “I didn’t mean to”, as this somehow excuses what she’s done and makes no logical sense, but through the eyes of a child, or in this case a Teddy.
Out of Sight isn’t a difficult game at all and all the puzzles follow a consistent logic, it’s excellently paced and it took my around 2hrs to complete the game. Now, there are a few collectibles I may go back and get, but as long time readers will know, I don’t enjoy collectibles in games, especially when actively looking for them distracts from the game, and let face it, stopping to look for collectibles while on the run form villains that could be straight from the mind of Roald Dahl doesn’t really make sense.
While the short runtime of the game may put some people off I’d advise you to give the game ago, it’s tightly packed and perfectly paced. It’s certainly an experience that will stay with me for a while and it’s delightful to see horror represented not through violence and gore but through the abuse of the innocent.
A review code was provided for this article.
