” Psychic ” is a third-person horror game developed by Bloober Team. Speaking of Bloober Team, many players may feel unfamiliar, but their ” Layers of Fear ,” Observer “and” Witch Blair “, even if you haven’t played them, you should have seen the suffering scenes of major hosts. Can this” Psychic “continue the excellence of” Layers of Fear “? What new ideas will the production team add? Let’s take a look together!
Play the role of a medium
The story of “Psychic” begins with the death of the stepfather of the female protagonist Marianne. At the beginning of the game, players have to pretend to be Marianne and go to the funeral home to say goodbye to her stepfather. Before leaving, they have to find her stepfather’s tie clip. This leads to the female protagonist’s first superpower, “psychic vision”. Simply put, the ability of psychic vision is perspective . Apart from the use of perspective, players can also find important leads to solve puzzles through psychic vision in the game. During the process of finding the tie clip, players can also develop a photo of their stepfather Jack in the bedroom. Here, the process of developing photos is mentioned. Players need to expose the negative for 5 seconds, then soak it in developer for 3 seconds, then soak it in stopper for 3 seconds, and finally soak it in fixer for 3 seconds. Only in this way can a photo be developed. Interestingly, if the soaking time of the negative here is too long or too short, it cannot be developed successfully. This setting can be said to be
Turn on the vision
After finding the tie clip and developing the photos, the player can go to the funeral home to say goodbye to Jack. After saying goodbye, the funeral home suddenly had a power outage. Marianne went upstairs to check the situation and had a splitting headache after entering the office. At this time, Marianne’s world was divided into two parts: the “material world” and the “spiritual world”, which led to another superpower of Marianne. The person who appeared in the office was none other than the stepfather of the female protagonist, Jack. The female protagonist showed reluctance towards her stepfather, but in the end, she bid farewell to him and let him pass away. After the stepfather disappeared, Marianne sat on the chair in the office. Suddenly, the phone rang, and a man’s voice came from the other end of the phone. The man said himself named Thomas needs the female protagonist to come to the Niva Resort to help him. The story also unfolds…
▲ Two worlds
The story that follows is that Marian comes to the Niva Resort and meets the little girl Xiao Ai. During the process of searching for Thomas with Xiao Ai, they also encounter the monster Jukou, which also leads to the background of the female lead and others. The storytelling of the game can be considered excellent, but due to the involvement of the backgrounds of many characters, it is easy to confuse the plot if there is a slight deviation. In addition, many important plots in the game are told in the files, and many players cannot understand what kind of story the game tells after the first playthrough. Because the story is the most important part of this work, it will not be elaborated here.
▲ Xiao Ai
▲ Jukou
[Two Worlds]
Compared to other first-person horror games, this game adopts a relatively retro third-person fixed perspective. The official explanation is that if the First-Person Perspective splits into two worlds, players are prone to 3D dizziness. However, this perspective is not very user-friendly for keyboard and mouse users. When players switch scenes, they often have the problem of moving in the opposite direction, which is particularly obvious when being chased. The biggest feature of the game “Psychic” is the appearance of two worlds at the same time. At the same time, all the puzzles in the game are based on the two worlds. One puzzle that left a deep impression on me is that in the later stages of the game, players need to send two corpses trapped by a giant mouth to the afterlife. The premise of sending them to the afterlife is to obtain masks and know their names. Masks need to be obtained by Marian repeatedly crossing the spiritual and material worlds through a mirror. When investigating the name of the deceased, players go to an office and use their vision to obtain information about the deceased’s seat number before death. Finally, combined with the list on the work desk, they deduce the name of
In the game, there are monsters such as moths and giant mouths in the spiritual world that can cause harm to players. The way to deal with moths is to activate the spiritual shield for defense. When encountering large monsters like giant mouths, players can only use hide-and-seek to detour. Near the end of the game, players can trick giant mouths into a closed room through out-of-body activities, and then quickly let the soul return to the body to turn on the electric switch and shock the monster. This way of solving monsters through out-of-body activities is interesting, but it is regrettable that it has only appeared once in the game. Here, I want to complain about the running mechanism in the game. The female protagonist can run in the game, but it does not indicate where she can or cannot run. In the game, there is a place where you need to activate the spiritual shield to pass through two moth zones. The room in front of the moth zone cannot run, which causes players to subconsciously walk straight through the moth zone instead of running. When they reach the second moth zone, the female protagonist will die due to insufficient energy
In terms of sound effects, in addition to the original Bloober Team team, the music work of “Psychic” also brought in Shan Ganghuang, a composer famous for the “Silent Hill” series, which can be said to be full of sincerity. In terms of graphics, supporting ray tracing directly pulls this work into the ranks of the next era, but the optimization of the game is really not commendable. After the dual-world perspective is turned on, you can feel obvious frame drops, and there are also card situations after the material world travels to the spiritual world.
Fake photos
There will be cards in the Double World
Finally, let’s talk about the most concerning issue for everyone. Is the horror game “Psychic” scary or not? My answer is no. For a game that focuses on storytelling, there are only a few jumps in the process, and the whole story is not as creepy as “The Shining” or “Silence” (compared to movies because the game focuses on psychology and storytelling). In addition, due to the third-person perspective, the sense of immersion can be greatly reduced. However, it is commendable that the production team will ask players to evaluate and improve the game after completing it.
The scariest part of the whole game should be the mid-game Jump Scare.
[Review Summary]
As a horror game, this game can be said to be excellent in storytelling, and the exploration of the dual-world setting is also impressive. The excellent details are enough to make some scenes look real, but the difficult problem of optimization still needs to be further solved.
