How did The Gang come up with Out of Sight's second-person perspective?

In a couple of weeks, developer The Gang will be looking to launch its unusual atmospheric horror game Out of Sight, with this being a particularly interesting idea as it takes place not only in a first-person perspective but also a second-person perspective too. Since only a handful of games explore the second-person perspective, we asked creative director Per Hallros and executive producer Patrick Berglind about how they came up with the gameplay mechanic and what it was inspired by.

To begin with, Hallros told us in the interview that you can see below with localised subtitles: "It really started from coming up with like, what is second-person perspective? And then we did some research like how that could behave in a game. And we came up with this solution where you have a detached... where your eyes are in a different character. And then it became a very strong connection between these characters. Where... oh, but I want to bring the camera with me for my eyes, right? So how that kind of became like a natural transition to have the first-person part where you carry it in your arms. And then put it down to becoming the second-person perspective. You are watching yourself through someone else's eyes."

Berglind then continued: "Also, I think, I mean, the concept of 2D games, the concept of, in this case, 3D games. And instead of going way ahead of the curve and doing something radical in terms of mechanics that's super way ahead, right? Taking aspects and just tweaking those and perfecting those are a bit more interesting, at least to us, than being like, let's do a 4D game with smelling controls or something. That's a bit far out, maybe. But I think that aspect of like, I mean, second-person, I can put down my camera. That's quite easy, if that makes sense, concept-wise. But then perfecting that into gameplay has been a big challenge. I think we succeeded."

Hallros then added a little later on with the following: "I can just add, like, a lot of the stuff that we found when researching is kind of like the old Resident Evil games, where you have static cameras, almost like CCTV cameras, watching a character and then moving statically. But then we were really intrigued by the thought of, okay, but what if that camera is a whole other character? And that's when you get the collaboration or the transition between first and second-person perspectives."

Out of Sight will be launching on PC and consoles on May 22, and you can watch the full interview above for more on the kind of horror it will present, how your senses will betray you in-game, and also how Little Nightmares and Driver: San Francisco helped refine the game's vision...