You know that urban legend about mischievous teens pranking a Walmart by painting the numbers 1, 2, and 4 on the backs of pigs, then letting them loose in the store, so security guards spend a ridiculous amount of time looking for a Pig #3 that doesn’t exist? Until now, the second-person perspective has been Pig #3. We assume it should exist because we have plenty of first- and third-person games. But where are the second-person games? What would a second-person game even look like?
Teddy Is The Second Person
Out of Sight offers one potential answer. In this debut game from Swedish studio The Gang, the second-person perspective doesn’t belong to a person at all, but a teddy bear. The horror game, which takes a generous helping of inspiration from the likes of Little Nightmares and Inside, casts you as Sophie, a young blind girl who, through some unexplainable circumstance, can be guided by her Teddy.
There are a few notable second-person books, including Bright Lights, Big City, House of Prayer, No. 2, and When You Reach Me. This means that the story is told from the perspective of the reader, i.e., “You do X,” instead of third-person’s “Tom Sawyer does X,” or first-person’s “I do X.”
In order to see the environment, you rely on Teddy. At the start, this means sneaking around with Teddy pressed to your chest, in an approximation of first-person — albeit with little fuzzy arms bordering the left and right sides of the screen. This is great for taking in the world, but not for solving puzzles. If Sophie is holding Teddy, she can’t interact with anything in the environment. But whenever you see a folded pink blanket in the environment, that’s your cue to set Teddy down. Once seated, he gives you a wide-open perspective on the play space, allowing Sophie to walk around and solve puzzles. But if Teddy can’t see it, you can’t either, so you’re on a short leash.
I asked the game’s lead, Per Hallros, about the difficulty of making a game that incorporates the two different perspectives. I was especially curious because Out of Sight began life as a student project. The proof-of-concept was made in six weeks and was only about 20 minutes long. Development began in earnest in early 2023, and two years later, there are still only 12 people on the team. How did Hallros feel about attempting something so new with so little experience?
“[It was a] stupid choice,” he laughs. “But also the reason why we did this is because we haven’t seen any game like this before, with this mechanic. So that’s the only reason why we decided to go for it, you know? Because we wanted to make something that stands out and has this unique feeling to it, right?… And of course we jumped into the deep end, right? Then had to solve a bunch of problems that we didn’t know how to solve at the time.”
Keep Your Eye On The Bear
Out of Sight seems to be building on Little Nightmares. Sophie is attempting to escape from a sinister mansion where she is held captive by evil adults. In the demo I played at The MIX, an indie-focused preview event held during this year’s Game Developers Conference, Sophie is pursued by an unnaturally tall woman with long, spindly limbs. Make too much noise and she, or her henchman, will descend on you. But, before you can escape any given room, you always need to double back to pick up Teddy — not unlike Yoshi needing to keep tabs on Baby Mario in Yoshi’s Island. Each level needs to provide a path for Sophie, while also giving her a way to retrieve her bear, which offers an interesting design challenge.
“That’s been one of the big struggles, to be fair. But it’s also very fun because you need to always consider where Teddy Bear is going to end up. [This demo] is just the beginning of the game, and now you’re very manually handling all this. That’s not always the case later on. There can be moving parts and stuff. The puzzles get more complex,” Hallros says.
“That’s always been a focus, making sure that handling the teddy bear never becomes tedious, that you never have to go far to pick it up once you are done with the puzzle, so to speak. It’s been a challenge, but it’s also been very fun solving it like every level is built with the teddy bear in mind. So it’s always the focus of getting Sophie the girl and the teddy bear forwards together.”
Out of Sight is not too far out of sight. It’s aiming for a release this spring.
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