Perception, horror game with a blind protagonist, arrives May 30

This article contains affiliate links: if you buy through them, SavePoint may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change what we write.

Numbers first: Perception arrives on PC on May 30, 2017. It is a first-person horror game from The Deep End Games, a studio founded by Bill Gardner and made up of former Irrational Games members who worked on the BioShock series.

The premise is what sets the game apart. The protagonist, Cassie Thornton, is blind and suffers from nightmares about a house she has never visited. Determined to understand what is happening, she goes to the real mansion, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and discovers that something is inside. The region was chosen for the weight of New England in horror fiction.

In practice, that means an echolocation system: Cassie taps her cane on the floor and the sound reveals the surroundings for a few moments. Every noise helps to explore and solve puzzles, but also attracts the Presence, an entity that cannot be defeated. Translated from the jargon: the game turns the very act of seeing into a risk. The more noise, the more information, and the more danger.

The project was funded on Kickstarter in May 2015: the goal was US$ 150,000 and the campaign raised US$ 168,041. The game runs on Unreal Engine 4 and is published by Poland’s Feardemic.

What came next

After the PC, Perception arrived on PS4 and Xbox One on June 6, 2017 and on Nintendo Switch on October 31, 2017. Reviews were mixed, with a Metacritic average of 56 on PC and PS4 and 61 on Xbox One. The game was also nominated in the community-funded game category at the 2018 SXSW Gaming Awards.