Out of Sight Review for PlayStation 5
Developed by “The Gang” and published by Starbreeze Entertainment, Out of Sight is an incredibly inventive horror puzzle title that I really wanted to love. Now, I know that makes it sound like I hated the game, and I want to preface this review by stating that I quite enjoyed my time with Out of Sight overall. I found its atmosphere and central gameplay hook incredibly compelling, and I would love for more titles to experiment with player perspective like this, but I feel like, as a horror title, it falls flat in delivering the scares some gamers have come to expect from the genre.
Out of Sight sees players take on the role of Sophie, an orphan girl who has been blinded as part of a sinister plot by her mysterious caretakers. Despite this, Sophie has somehow gained the ability to see from the eyes of her favorite teddy bear, and she must now use her newfound sight to escape her captors before they use her for a mysterious ritual that seems to have claimed the lives of Sophie’s fellow orphans. It’s a simple premise for an esoteric story (the kind of esoteric that fans of indie horror games have come to expect), and I find that the game’s narrative owes a lot to the artstyle and presentation. The game’s color palette consists primarily of eerie blues and haunting purples that add to the disquieting atmosphere. Hallways are drenched in shadows that make every corner feel like a possible danger. Furthermore, Out of Sight’s character designs add a sense of uncanniness to its threats. The game harkens to the Little Monsters series in how it exaggerates the proportions of its characters to add to their sense of menace. The main antagonist’s face is veiled in shadow, but her arms and legs are stretched to accentuate how much larger and more powerful she is compared to Sophie. In general, Sophie is much smaller than everything else in the game. This keeps the fact that Sophie is still a child at the forefront of the player’s mind, which adds to their sense of dread.
I also found the game’s use of player perspective in a mechanical sense to be very compelling. In most games, the camera is either from a first-person or third-person perspective and is synonymous with or independent of the player character respectively. By making the camera an interactable object within the game world, Out of Sight has created an inventive new way through which players can interact with puzzles and other gameplay mechanics. The difficulty of puzzles is amplified by the fact that you must move and interact with the camera as often as you do other game objects, and many puzzles will have you place the camera in multiple places in the game world to solve them. Beyond the puzzle-solving applications, the game also uses the bear to deliver on its horror. Early in the game, one of the antagonists will pick up the bear and chase Sophie with it, letting the player act out the chase from the perspective of the monster. The sequence is both difficult because the attacker swings the bear around to throw off Sophie’s sight and terrifying because it reinforces the sense of scale between Sophie and the people chasing after her.
Unfortunately, I found this to be the scariest the game gets. Despite being a horror game, I found Out of Sight to be light on tension. The game tells you that making too much noise will alert your captors to your location, but I found that the times that they would chase after me were few and far between. Encounters with antagonists are mostly scripted, and traps that alert them to your location are easy to spot and avoid. Most puzzles don’t offer many obstacles that could alert them to your location, making the process of solving them rather tensionless.
Despite this, I still found Out of Sight to be a deeply compelling title based on the strength of its mechanics. The concept of making the game’s camera, an aspect of games most players don’t think that hard about, into an interactable object is incredibly interesting and makes for some outstanding puzzles even if the scares are largely lacking. It’s for this reason that I give Out of Sight a 9/10.
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Related: Reviews by Josh Freeman
I love games and love talking about games. Some of my favorites include action games (both 2D and 3D), metroidvanias, roguelikes, shooters, and Indies.
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