The Childs Sight | PS4 Review
Updated: Nov 19, 2021
The Childs Sight, developed by HannMade Studios and published by Forever Entertainment is currently available on Windows PC, PlayStation, and XBox. It is a first-person horror game, but from a totally new and fresh perspective - a baby. For the purposes of this review I was playing The Childs Sight on the PlayStation 4.
In The Childs Sight you start each level in the attic where the baby's bedroom is. You are given the opportunity to free roam about the attic and discover pieces of lore through the optional objectives and clues about the things that may have happened in this dark place. Then once you've finished exploring, you head back to your crib to actually start the level where you're transported into the baby's memories. As well as the story mode there is also a time attack mode where you can go back and replay the levels and try to complete them in the fastest time possible.
Your main task in The Childs Sight is to make the baby fall asleep. However the room you're in is dark and shrouded with unexpected dangers lurking in the dark shadows. The gameplay itself felt quite bizarre to me and felt increasingly like I was having to juggle various mechanics just to get by and at first none of them really made sense to me. They still don't exactly, but here's my summary: your main aim is to fall asleep so you have to fill up the sleep meter to end the level but it's not as simple as this. You have a creepy little carousel toy that plays eerie music and if it stops playing you have to restart it and there's a little bedside lamp that you have to turn on. If the light is OFF the shadow/entity will come and kill you but if you leave the light ON there's an ominous knock at the door and you need to turn the light off again before a totally different entity comes for you. This all just felt overly confusing for me and it really took me far too long to make sense of it. As you progress there's even more of the juggling kind of feeling as you eventually add other features to the list or things you need to contend with whilst falling asleep.
The eerie, creepy atmosphere in The Childs Sight was well built up particularly by the sound effects. I was using my gaming headset which really allowed me to feel every creak of the floorboards, every clap of thunder and brought the game more alive for me. The visuals were also pretty good, using the perspective of a baby really gave an extra element of horror because you're so small and defenseless and your move set is very limited, giving you a form of urgency to get things right because who wants to see a poor innocent baby suffer?
Overall, I feel like I spent the bulk of my time in The Childs Sight feeling frustrated and confused rather than scared and tense. Yes, there were some fairly decent jumpscares, but very quickly all power and suspense was sucked from them. I don't know whether I'd say it's because they became overused or if it was my own frustration causing it. I'm not sure. I'd say The Childs Sight had a very intriguing idea behind it but the execution was bizarre. For anyone looking for a night of horror gaming I would recommend The Childs Sight purely because it's quite cheap to pick up across the board and will provide a few hours of tense horror gaming, especially if you're looking for something out of the ordinary but prepare to feel weak, useless and very confused along the way.
Lj's Rating: 2.5 creepy babies out of 5.
For more information on The Childs Sight please use the following links...
HannMade Studios - Developer | Twitter
Forever Entertainment - Publisher | Facebook | Twitter | Website
Many thanks to Forever Entertainment for the Review Key.
The Childs Sight | Steam Store | PlayStation Store | XBox Live
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