‘Sanity meters’ are a well-worn device in survival horror, whether that’s in genre peer Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Eternal Darkness back on the GameCube. You have to avoid losing your sanity – a device that, as a mental health advocate, has never sat particularly well with me – by staying out of the dark, and using candles, pills and lightbulbs to keep yourself mentally well. As you navigate your house, secrets about the spirits’ violent ends are eked out of the shadows. Made by relative unknowns SadSquare Studio, Visage – in which your own home is besieged by restless spirits – is essentially a spiritual successor to the aforementioned P.T. It’s called Visage, and it might actually be too much.

He continues: “I haven’t seen a movie that comes close…”Īnd yet I must report that I’ve now played a video game scarier than either Fatal Frame II or Outlast. The Last Of Us creator Neil Druckmann, a person who knows a thing or two about terrifying video games, describes the game as “the scariest kind of experience in any medium”. Until that game, I’d spent years telling people that the scariest game I’d ever played was 2003’s Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly for the PS2. I will probably always be there, because I can’t imagine ever playing Outlast ever again. I made a pact with my wife to only play it when she was in the room, but as it turned out, the game creeped her out as well so I am currently trapped in an asylums basement, in the dark, with something horrible creeping around. might have finished me off if it had lasted just a minute longer, but it was Red Barrels’ Outlast that saw me shrieking like a squirrel in a bonfire.

The first few hours of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard ran me close and the playable Silent Hills demo P.T. The closest a video game has ever come to breaking me was 2013’s Outlast.

READ MORE: A case against the most overused of all the horror game tropes: the jumpscare.

I’ve been looking for video games to scare me in new and innovative ways in all the years that have followed.

Then, in 1996, I played Resident Evil on the original PlayStation for the very first time and the deal was done. I vividly recall standing in an electronics shop as a child, watching a rolling demo of the pioneering survival horror title Alone In The Dark and feeling an excitement I’d just never felt for Mario or Sonic.

I love being scared – within video games at least.

Visage horror game commands