Psychic Isolation

Sometimes the scariest situations are those where familiar places all of a sudden become creepy and dangerous, such as your own town or even your home. Naturally, this is more difficult to integrate into a video game where players have to identify with the main characters, but with enough effort, it’s possible to make cozy places appear downright terrifying.

Psychic Isolation is a first-person horror game with survival elements, in which you play the role of a young man returning from a trip. Things do not seem quite right in his town, but tthey get even worse as he gets home. The game focuses on the atmosphere instead of childish jumpscares, but there are situations where you might get startled, although you are free to disable such scenes from the options menu.

As mentioned before, most of the game is about the atmosphere, especially since the whole action takes place in the main character’s home. Hence, it would appear that his mother went insane while he was on his trip, and his dad left her alone in the house. Your goal is to find out what happened to her, but along the way you must avoid her vicious attacks by hiding and barricading behind doors.

Since there is no shooting involved and no kind of combat, you always feel exposed and vulnerable, which is great news in a survival horror game. Being defenseless amplifies the sense of fear,  and even more so when the main villain is your alter ego’s mother. However, this is still an early access title at this point, so there are things that need to be polished in the gameplay department.

Moving objects around is a bit of a chore, especially since there’s no believable physics engine at play. It’s difficult to empathize with the main character sometimes, which obviously hurts the overall experience. On the other hand, the graphics are not too bad, and the sound effects play their part in the grand scheme of things.

In the end, Psychic Isolation is barely the first episode in the series, so more is definitely going to follow in the future. The developers have nailed a few things in terms of atmosphere, but there is still work left to be done in the gameplay department.