- Tested on PC at night in total darkness with flaring legs
- Game purchased on Steam and finished in about 10 hours with wet finger
- Steam minutes are a bit like Windows minutes: they have their own temporality
- Prominent fact: the tester no longer looks at his corridor the same way since he finished the game
Summer 2014: a certain P.T., for Playable Teaser, makes its appearance on the PS Store. The Kojima Productions studio is in charge of a concept born from the collaboration between the film-enabled Hideo Kojima and Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. It is a short free demo that consists of exploring an apartment haunted by an evil presence. The goal was then to tease the future Silent Hills. The peculiarity? The player is trapped in a loop that forces him to return to the entrance of the home when he leaves. Each crossing thus allows you to collect cleverly distilled clues in order to find out more about the reason for how. The concept was crowned with success so much the experience proved to be challenging for the players sufficiently reckless to reach the end of the 20 minutes of this highly claustrophobic intent note.
Woe and damnation!
The sad suite everyone knows: Kojima and Konami divorce, Silent Hills is cancelled for a matter of rights and P.T. is withdrawn indefinitely from the PS Store following the turmoil (ah yes and also the author of these whiny lines for months because he did not yet have a PS4 that summer). The demo, however, resurfaced on PC later via amateur portages, some of which were very successful. These last ones still allow the late ones to live the nightmare of 2014, for as little as they smack a bit the international forums in search of an active download link. Seven long years later the community still hopes to see P.T. Reappear sor its original form or better still a resumption of the project Silent Hills - in vain. The haunted teaser, because of its intrinsic qualities in its subtle representation of psychological horror as well as its involuntary ephemerity, continues to be a reference among the fans of cold sweats.
If P.T. its concept has inspired other independent projects of varying quality, including the promising Allison Road, to the still visible gameplay prototype Here. Unfortunately the fate of acharne and the independent project is also cancelled, referring me back to the time in a fetal position on the floor of my bathroom facing so much injustice. It will take until winter 2016 that a small five-person Quebec studio decides to break the prophecy and launch its Kickstarter Face1 survival-horror who clearly claims himself as a tribute to the master. The development lasts a long time, almost as much as this intro would say, and finally comes to an end in autumn 2020 when the game comes outearly access. Successful bet?
Satan at home
The first seconds of Face set the tone by opening on a "shock" scene depicting a familicide to the first person. Dwayne Anderson executed in cold blood his wife and two children, tied up in a cellar, before turning the gun against him. The player, who is assumed to be in command of the murderer, is then teleported on the porch of his home, covered with blood. A few claudicating steps forward that already the wooden door locks behind us. We're alone in the apartment... unless? The first impression is amazing, as the home is excruciating in realism. From poorly arranged rooms in the basement still partially under construction, from small closets with personal effects to posters displayed in the room of the d-ado: the environmental narrative is skillfully told about the family's daily life before the drama. This surprises you to slowly slide the mouse along the horizontal axis of vision to soak up every detail of the decor. The calm will only be of short duration...
Are you there?
It will not take much time for the brave player to realize that something is definitely wrong in the housing. A feeling of malaise that probably felt the hero ofAmityville when he woke up every night at 3:15 a.m. Or when you-reader realize, squatting in front of the family dryer, that one of your socks is mysteriously volatilized and that it only happens when you're doing laundry. Proudly terrifying... Dwayne therefore seems to be in forced co-location with evil entities that will subtly manifest themselves at the detour of a corridor, closing a light switch as you explore a closet, or even squarely attacking yourself for as long as you have spent too much time in the darkness, darkness being synonymous with speeding game-over.
Indeed Face inspired by the series Amnesia by Frictional Games or even excellent Eternal Darkness: Sanity by fire Silicon Knights by landing a mental health gauge at the bottom left of the screen. Stay in the dark like a poltron as you would in Alien Isolation and your character will be subject to increasingly recurring hallucinations until death follows. So you quickly find yourself running from one light source to another, a bulb in one hand and anxiolytics in the other, to calm the thriller. Medication sesames actually allow the character to keep his cool, a very useful asset when you think you can distinguish a pair of feet through a door or a silhouette behind the blurred window of the shower cabin... It should also be noted that the character is vulnerable and never has any weapons to defend himself. So don't expect to get a 9 mm above a shelf.
The staging of paranormal phenomena constitutes one of the great forces of the game, which never cease to surprise us and feed a terrible apprehension, by ingeniously cultivating troubling musical tracks and beaches of silence. One can only bow to the goldsmith's work done by sound designer Jonathan Wachoru and composer Peter Wicher, and the best-equipped readers will be advised to adjust their bass box in order to take advantage of the lowest frequencies, which always provide their weight with chills.
Hereditary rather than Casper
At scenario level Face surprises in good and stands out from the competition and its usual clichés by skillfully evoking the harmful and sometimes tragic consequences of certain harsh mental pathologies. While implying rather than in long speeches despite a handful of clearly horrific scenes, each one will be able to make his own idea of the evil that gnaws the house and its inhabitants. We take this opportunity to note the regular echoes to the masterpiece (yes yes, I weigh my words) Silent Hill 2 symbolizing, among other fascinating themes, the famous abyss of Nietzsche. We are also obviously thinking of the disturbing Silent Hill 4 : The Room in which his main protagonist Henry Townshend found himself trapped in his own home overnight, doors and windows locked from inside, unable to be heard from outside.
Moreover the feeling of claustrophobia felt in Face is multiplied by a very incarnate camera whose realistic floats during interactions reinforce the player's physical involvement. Its regular focus between first and background during the cut-scenes, as if Dwayne bends his eyes, further reinforces the feeling of confinement. The Anderson family home turns into a truly hallucinated maze as if the player were evolving in the digestive system of an evil, mid-material and mid-organic entity.
"What am I doing now? ''
If you have Scrolled like a little goret until the verdict then you have noticed the ugly red-tomata boxes that contrast with the wonderful qualities of the title. Unfortunately, the increase in Face In the long run, he took his feet in the carpet, the fault having often somewhat blurred and poorly defined objectives. If the anguish of course arises in part from the detours in the building, we will regret that our character is dragging itself and that even at the pace of race. A really marked defect in a particular chapter where we are asked to break a dozen mirrors that communicate with different parts of the house and require a lot of movement. Then we find ourselves trotting asthmatically in the round without really knowing where to go, short of light bulbs and subject to hallucinations.
The tester even confesses that he had to take a look a few times in an online solution to see the end of the adventure, in the end rather abrupt for if we do not complete the conditions required to see the "good" end. Finally, it is impossible not to mention the inventory, which would pass that of the first Resident Evil on PS One for an ergonomic monument. We will thus find ourselves running in the house with a Zippo in one hand and a light bulb in the other, juggling by mistake between the two by pressing Space, like a makeshift prestidigitator in a tourist alley of Barcelona. It's harmful to the experience in general, especially when you stupidly drop your last lighter in the dark and when a devious demon takes advantage of the awkwardness for us occult.
Verdict
P.T.'s orphan, but with a unique identity shaped by a small, talented team, SadSquare Studio's production unfortunately falls the mask towards two-thirds of the adventure to reveal a frustrating face. Unfortunately, the staggered objectives of progression combined with the round-trips end up blurring the fear felt, giving way to a certain weariness. But if these few flaws are real, MaG encourages thrillers to embark on the adventure, why not with a solucée on which to squeak in case of blocking. Face subjugates by his science of directing and his raw realism. Its atmosphere has nothing to envy to its illustrious inspiration, as the atmosphere in Anderson's house is as tense as the diffuse seconds of silence that separate the thunderstorms from a summer storm. Finally, we surprise ourselves to rethink the ghostly appearances of the game in the middle of the night, while we grope in the darkness in search of the bathroom switch... what you will agree is undoubtedly the sign of a successful survival-horror.For
- An extremely heavy atmosphere, to cut with a knife
- Graphics that flirt with photorealism
- The chilling sound atmosphere, which skillfully manipulates the beaches of silence
- The camera you feel incarnate
- Science of delicate alchemy between light and darkness to create a deaf fear
- The house: more than a tortuous environment, a character in its own right
- The attention to detail in the different rooms
- The game avoids the poncifs seen and reviewed from the psychological horror
Against
- Many going back and forth in a particular chapter
- Sometimes difficult to understand where to go to progress
- The inventory as ergonomic as an unijambist wombat on a skateboard
- We would have liked the character to drag a little less when he "runs"
- Very rare outdoor passages, aesthetically less successful
I should be tempted. 😉