But in the first-person games that have emerged over the past few years, I am seeing something different. The lessons of the Gone Homes and the Dear Esther_s have been fully absorbed by the general intellect of the video game world. In _Obra Dinn, the perspective is being used to create certain conditions to limit the player, and the game is specifically designed around the fact that you cannot see everything all in one go. You have to navigate your eyes around the world to gather information about it. It’s about learning where to look and what to point the camera at, not about simply following the lines that have been drawn for you by immaculate level design. In Paratopic, the perspective is used to generate the creeping dread of having to go somewhere you might not want to. Of traveling through a hinterland that is beyond your knowledge, and yet you still have to get through it, despite not having a single clue about what your goal might be. And in Horrorshow’s own Ghost Lake from earlier this year, it is a way of forcing players to understand just how damn small they are in the grand scale of terror that they’ve found themselves in.