Game EXP: Perception (NS)

I first heard about Perception from The Deep End Games back in March of last year, when I emailed the developers to see the feasibility of receiving a reviewers copy.  Well, that ended up not panning out but it was shot in the metaphorical dark, and when I saw that it was also being released on the Switch, I decided that that would be the system that I would get the game on, partly to help show that there was interest for this type of game on Nintendo's still new console, but also because I was finding that I was more apt to play and finish games if I got them on the Switch.

As far as how the game handled on the Switch, I did not notice anything that made me even consider that this was sub-par port.  I primarily played the game in handheld mode, until the final push and finished the game in docked mode.  Everything looked great, had fluid movement and there were no sound issues.  While there might have been fps drops, if they happened at all, they were completely unnoticeable.  One thing that was not implemented for the Switch version was video capture, which would have been a nice, but far from necessary addition, especially from a writer's perspective when covering a story about a blind woman.  And after watching some trailers though, I do feel that I possibly missed out on some creepiness with the Presence that does not seem to have been taken out of the Switch port.  Or maybe I was just too good at not making any noises?

What peaked my interest in Perception is that I already love first person exploration games within the horror genre.  Games like SOMA, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and Outlast, I find to be of a particular length (5-10 hours), atmosphere, and writing that focuses more on the horror of the situation than trying to scare the player with blood, guts, and guns; although I do love the ever loving butts out of the Dead Space series, so there is that too.  So the idea of playing as a blind woman as a first person exploration game seemed that it could be more than just a gimmick.  And it really was.

So the basic mechanic in the game is that the main character Cassie, uses her cane a la Matt Murdock to create sound waves that work basically like echo location in order to explore a house.  The twist here, is that there is frequently a "presence" in the house that begins to hunt Cassie similar to 3D Monster Maze's "He is hunting you."  This presence is drawn to you by the sound of your cane, and admittedly at times, it can get pretty frustrating trying to navigate a two story house with multiple stair cases and locked doors when you all of a sudden hear the chittering of some massive insect and the screen turns from its serene blue hue, to an aggressive and stressful dark orange.  

One time in particular, after seeing the game saving icon pop up (and being done for the evening), I decided to see how long it would take for whatever it was that was hunting me throughout the house to find me.  After banging the cane around and the screen turning from orange to a deep red, I heard some god awful noise as I turned a corner and was overtaken by some kind of formless mass and "died."  I say died because Cassie either does not actually seem to die, or is brought back to either the last save point, shortly before you started banging this way and that.  I am actually not 100% clear on this point, and as it happened only twice, I will cease the speculations.

Now I have some criticisms that I want to get out of the way before I continue gushing about the game.  The biggest one is two fold.  When the game started out, I was a little confused as to what I was doing, besides exploring an abandoned house.  I seem to recall something about being driven by a dream about a tree, but that was about it.  Even after going through Cassie's cell phone listening to phone messages, reading emails (through a brilliantly use text-to-speech program), I still was not sure who people were (did the "Backer" that often appeared in the voicemails meant that that person pledged a certain level on Kickstarter?), how they were related to Cassie, or what my main objective was supposed to be.  The second part of this criticism, was that after I reached what I thought was the end of the game, "Chapter II: The Ticket" and thought, "Wait, there's more to this!?"  I had originally only mentally prepared myself for a short one act game (I did not look it up on How Long to Beat) and I recall putting the game down for a few days after that as it was pretty stressful and draining on my brain to focus on moving throughout a dark house and trying to remember the layout.  I should mention that due to my penchant for taking a long time playing games, that I spent well over an hour on the first chapter alone, possibly two.

One aspect of the game that I believe I only used once, was the ability to hide, and there were a lot of different places you could hide.  In a bathtub, under a bed, in a large trunk, behind curtains, in a closet.  Each place offered you a vantage point to look out on the thing that was hunting you, but the few times I used this mechanic in the game, I looked down out of fear that if I could see the thing, then it would some how see me and I would be caught/eaten/sacrificed.  The rest of the time, I would be very careful in conservatively using the cane whenever the screen turned the aggressive orange.

After picking the game back up and having events and locations in the house begin to change, I found that I was now fully engaged.  This was also where the game moved beyond using a gimmick to engage the player, than using it as a mechanic that I enjoyed.  Keeping that in mind, the game was still pretty difficult when I tried to keep my distance from the Presence, or figure.  Perception can be a surprisingly draining game until you think that a large portion of the exhaustion is from mentally recalling the 3D space that you are trying to move around in.  I also found that my tension would let up a little bit whenever I saw the Game Saving spiral, and around the same time was when I needed to remind myself to breath more frequently than I probably was at the time.  The biggest sense of relief would always come when the game would tell me "The House is No Longer Listening."  Then I would, occasionally, and mostly out of spite, bang the cane around to my palpating heart's content.  Take that stupid house!!

Something else that I really loved about the game was the attention to detail, or at least the amount of detail in order to remind the player that Cassie was blind.  It was coming upon a painting hanging on the wall when I first realized that, "Yeah, Cassie could tell that there was a painting here, but she wouldn't be able to tell what it was a painting of.  Neat."  This was done obviously because Cassie was blind, but I feel it is also a great workaround for having to worry about commissioning artwork or use pre-existing artwork.  Had there been an interaction with another character that involved mentioning the Picasso in the hall, issue easily fixed; except there was never that kind of interaction, but I loved the idea nonetheless.  Oh, and I realize that she probably would not be able to see the subtle wood grain, but those are the kinds of things I am willing to overlook when talking about things that I like.

In the end, Perception contained a much deeper and emotionally impactful story than I was expecting going into the game.  I am sure there was music to help with emotional level of certain scenes, but I sadly cannot remember anything about the music; I might have to look up the soundtrack later.  The voice acting was great too, with Angela Morris often providing the voice for nearly half of the cast (although that is not at all obvious).  And being able to inflict real sounding emotion into lines like "No, no, no, no, no.  Not children. . ." could very easily come across as either too corny, or too trite; or too Resident Evil-ly.  And kudos too to Nick Grava for giving me goosebumps during what was, I think, his last bit of dialogue in the game.  

And at the end of the game, reading the closing which contained a statement from the creators (Bill and Amanda Gardner), felt pretty deep and moving.  Especially in our current climate, having the game end the way it did with its final messages, was a wonderful thing to have come up.

Thank you Bill Gardener, Amanda Gardner for sharing your story, and everyone at The Deep End Games for making it happen.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Shrieking of Nothing

P.S.  I recently discovered that Perception was originally funded on Kickstarter back in May 2015, and I most definitely would have pledged at least the $20 tier, but I am still glad that I waited for the Switch release.

P.P.S.  I had some formatting problems post posting which prevented me from including some more pictures that I thought would fit, so here they are, plastered here at the end:

What's creepy about a wapiti skull on a doll?

Absolutely Nothing to See Here!!