Perception

With only four chapters, Perception is a short game that doesn't justify its launch price. However, its unique gameplay mechanics are genuinely smart and imaginative and its quartet of narratives are morbidly engaging. After having been a little put off by its initial negative reception, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's actually pretty good.

Perception builds upon one unique gameplay element throughout its entire brief run but fails to see what makes a horror game memorable.

Play Perception if you’re in need of a quick horror fix, and not for what could be perceived as something larger.

Strip away the game's echolocation feature and you're left with a rather lackluster ghost story adventure game. The path through the game is extremely linear, there's little in the way of interaction, and what puzzles there are in the game are simple and far and few between, For the dark to be scary, you have to believe that there is something lurking in it somewhere, but in Perception the darkness felt about as scary as my bedroom does at night.

Perception is as much a disappointment for the clever and inherently frightening idea it wastes as it is for the mistakes it makes. At its heart, there’s the promise of playing something genuinely new, from a perspective that could help teach and thrill simultaneously. It’s unfortunate that, like its echolocation mechanic, the more I saw of Perception, the more there was to worry about.