Perception Preview: Wandering Darkness With Blind Eyes Has Never Seemed So Fascinating

The first game from The Deep End Games, founded by Bill Gardner, a Irrational Games alumni.

It's hard to believe that only a few years ago survival horror games were a dying genre. During the seventh console generation horror games basically became nonexistent and classic horror franchises such as Resident Evil were reinvented themselves as generic action games as some sort of misguided effort to appeal to absolutely everyone. Then Amnesia The Dark Descent came out of nowhere and single-handily revived the entire genre. Like most things in life this revival ended up being double edged sword. While it was great that survival horror was back and we have got a lot of great horror games in the bargain like Outlast and Alien Isolation, it also began the plague of low quality first person survival horror games that exist only to bait the likes of PewDiePie and Markiplier in hopes of making a quick buck. These days horror games are a dime a dozen and for one to really stand out it either has to be extremely well made or have a very interesting gameplay mechanic. Thankfully, it looks like Perception is looking to have both of those things.

Perception features a minimalist art style because its player character Cassie can see colors.

Perception is setting up to be the debut game of independent game studio The Deep End Games. The Deep End Games is made up of veteran game developers that have worked on games from big name franchises such as BioShock and Dead Space. Perception is a game in which players are placed in the role of a blind woman named Cassie who travels to a mysterious estate to try and unravel the secrets held there and how they connect to the mysterious force known as The Presence that seems to have followed Cassie for her entire life. While the game is shaping up to have the familiar trappings of other horror games such as hiding from unkillable enemies and finding keys to progress, it has one very interesting gameplay mechanic that I shocked hasn't been thought of before.

The central mechanic of Perception demonstrated in one simple GIF image.

Since Cassie is blind the only way the player can navigate the environment is through echo location. Cassie is armed with a cane that she can tap on the ground at any time to reveal a small amount of detail of the world around her. Wind and sounds from other things and creatures in the environment can also reveal some of the environment. Cassie also has a cell phone with a text to speech app that she can use to translate notes that she finds throughout the house. Being a survival horror game there are also enemies that Cassie has to contend with. So far the only enemies shown have be strange clockwork dolls that ramble nonsense as they attempt to kill Cassie with freaking pistols and the mysterious force known as The Presence that apparently hunts Cassie the entire game.

Cassie hiding from The Presence.

That is all anyone really knows about the game so far, but still Perception is shaping up to be one hell of a horror experience. I have a great deal of confidence with The Deep End Games given the staff's pedigree with other projects in the past. The game is currently set to release only on Microsoft Windows, but I hope that the game's sales are successful enough to facilitate its release on other platforms as well. The best of luck to The Deep End Games and to the hope that Perception will be a great game.