"Visage"

After ending the call with the Infinite Network Entertainment person in charge, Meng Shu dozed off in his chair.

When he got up in the afternoon, he reconnected with the system and checked his Fear Points.

At that moment, the familiar panel appeared once more.

And compared to the previous data, there was a slight increase.

Design: 60+3 (Average)

Code: 60+8 (Average)

Art: 60+2 (Average)

Music: 60 (Average)

"Dark Forest": 2.1 million people scared

"21 Points": 4.1 million people scared

Total Fear Points: 7,558,000

Seeing this panel, Meng Shu understood.

Did Design go up by 3 points because he had modified the game's text and story?

After all, he felt that without Resident Evil 7 as the core framework, the original "21 Points" would make it hard for people in this world to understand the character settings and development.

So he had pulled it out, revised it, expanded it, and turned it into a brand-new game.

If that was the case, then to raise the Design stat further, he would need to keep modifying games in the future.

And he noticed that the stat increase had filled his mind with a flood of new ideas and insights.

At this rate, even without buying games from his past life, he could develop new ones with his own real skills!

The Code stat had also gone from 3 points to 8, and Art had increased by 2.

Code went without saying—he handled it all himself.

Did Art go up because he had revised the art assets submitted by his employees?

Meng Shu raised an eyebrow at this.

In truth, the models for "21 Points" hadn't been particularly realistic at the start. They were decent, passable, and even high-quality by competent standards.

But they were nowhere near the level of blurring the line between real and fake.

It was only after he used the engine's features to meticulously polish those art assets that he achieved the final result.

Still, the Art boost had given him a certain understanding of aesthetics.

For instance, he now had a basic grasp of theories like perspective, light and shadow relationships, and environmental composition.

In practice, he could also manage entry-level skills like sketching, object modeling, poster design, and UI layout.

All of this came from the panel's improvements!

Now he was really looking forward to the Music boost.

Even though the base of 60 was solid, it wasn't enough to make him a king of singers or a musician—it just meant he had strong, high talent.

The real gains came from the additional stat points.

Even a single point of improvement brought significant returns.

After reviewing the panel, he turned to the Fear Points.

"Dark Forest" had gone viral domestically, and with international buyers seeking it out, over 2 million people scared made sense.

After all, it hadn't even been a month since the official version launched, so it would keep generating sales in the future.

As for "21 Points," being VR and free made it far more appealing than "Dark Forest." Combined with Infinite Network Entertainment's promotion and the experiences of various streamers, over 4 million people scared was also reasonable.

Together, these two games had brought him around 7.55 million Fear Points.

A decent little sum of capital.

But honestly, this amount of Fear Points was still too little.

After all, a single Resident Evil 7 cost as much as 100 million points.

If he wanted to buy high-quality horror games, he'd need to stack up and accumulate Fear Points.

Fortunately, the price for Visage wasn't that outrageous—6.9 million Fear Points would do it.

So he immediately selected that game and bought it.

Clink, clink—

A sound of coins jingling.

His Fear Points became 658,000.

At the same time, the system's mechanical voice rang out.

[You have obtained the step-by-step development tutorial for the horror game "Visage"]

[You have obtained the concept design for the horror game "Visage"]

[You have obtained the VR production method for the horror game "Visage"]

Instantly, a flood of knowledge surged into his mind.

It forced him to close his eyes and carefully absorb it.

A few seconds later, he reopened them—he had already mastered the production method for "Visage."

At the same time, the concept design booklet appeared on the computer desktop in the form of a PPT.

Now, with everything in place, he could start planning.

Then, he clicked open the PPT and began browsing.

"Visage" is a first-person psychological horror game.

In this game, ghosts are real and paranormal phenomena occur frequently.

Moreover, unlike other gory monster-fighting games, players here cannot attack or defend.

Once they encounter a ghost, they can only turn and flee until it's safe to return to the original location and continue playing.

The game tells the story of a series of strange deaths in a small town called Riversdale, with a population of fewer than 400 people in some country.

Before their deaths, these victims all exhibited varying degrees of mental instability, or outright mental issues, with severe paranoia and delusions of persecution.

The protagonist, Dwayne, and his family of four move into a historic house in the town.

But soon, he begins to experience anxiety, insomnia, and mounting stress, which also causes his mental state to deteriorate steadily, gradually wearing him down.

Under these circumstances, he turns to heavy drinking and consuming large quantities of various anti-stress pills, but to no avail.

Eventually, unable to bear the burden, he completely breaks down.

In the basement, he murders his wife and children, then commits suicide before their corpses.

Adding another death to the town's tally.

This scene unfolds at the very beginning of the game.

And when the game officially starts, players discover that before the protagonist's family moved in, this historic house had housed other families.

They are:

The Lucy family, a little girl's household from 1961.

The elderly couple Dolores from 1962.

The solitary man Luis from 1965.

The retired football player Lacan from 1970.

And the protagonist Dwayne's family from 1985.

Except for Luis, all of these people, like the protagonist, died in this house.

What players must do is use the protagonist Dwayne's perspective to revisit the events that once occurred in this house.

To understand what these families experienced and how they ultimately died.

Then, within this, find key clues, piece them together, and uncover the protagonist's identity, what happened to him, and why he had mental stress issues that led him to kill his entire family and commit suicide at the game's start.

The game has four chapters and two endings, one good and one bad.

The first three chapters can be played in any order, with no sequence required.

They are the Lucy chapter, the Dolores chapter, and the Lacan chapter.

After completing them, players can enter the protagonist's own chapter to learn the truth of the story.

The game has a sanity system, also known as Sanity Points.

During the experience, when the protagonist encounters paranormal events or is in dark environments, his Sanity Points decrease.

Once Sanity Points drop to a certain level, a Vengeful Spirit will appear.

If the player is in the Lucy chapter, a little girl ghost with a missing lower jaw will chase them.

In the Dolores chapter, an old lady ghost will pursue them, and in her chapter, players often encounter corner scares.

For example, you enter a room, turn around, and find her crouching outside the door, silently staring at you—then, in the blink of an eye, she vanishes.

This kind of silent, unavoidable approach truly makes the gameplay terrifying.

The Lacan chapter and the protagonist's chapter feature the eyeless man and shadow ghosts.

If players want to deal with the Sanity Points issue, they need to constantly find stress-relief medication throughout the process to restore their sanity to normal.

At the same time, they must find lighters to maintain a light source, because the lighters in the game aren't nuclear-powered and consume fuel quickly, requiring frequent replacements.

"Visage" is a high-quality game with a long playtime, a very oppressive atmosphere, and an obscure storyline, along with frequent paranormal phenomena and vengeful spirits seeking lives.

It makes players feel utterly insecure during the experience, with adrenaline spiking.

Due to its exceptional quality, it has been unanimously rated as an extremely terrifying game.

Players from the original world all exclaimed they couldn't handle it.

When Meng Shu was a producer in his past life, he had also played this game.

All he remembered was being so scared during gameplay that he'd screamed out loud.

Couldn't be helped—the game didn't just rely on psychological horror and environmental dread, but also included the most universally hated tactic: the Jump Scare.

That is, the method of scaring people through sudden appearances plus deafening sound effects.

To put it plainly, Visage was one of the few horror games that had ever genuinely frightened Meng Shu.

Even in his original world, where scare tactics were diverse and abundant, this game managed to carve out its own style among a sea of horror titles—which alone speaks to its exceptional quality.

Now, in this world where the horror genre lagged far behind, Visage's terror level would probably need an "18 and under prohibited" label slapped on it.

After all, back in his original world, where horror films flourished in a fiercely competitive era, people had actually been scared to death by movies like The Conjuring 2.

So unleashing such a heavyweight game in this barren horror landscape would absolutely require a proper warning notice and disclaimer.

Otherwise, if a player got scared to death, that would be a real problem.

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