Decrepit mansions, creepy residents stalking you, a child at a big disadvantage, and a childhood toy that's the key to getting you out alive: If you're a fan of horror or horror adjacent games, then you've likely seen one or more of these things countless times. Seeing them all combined in Out of Sight feels somewhat ordinary, but the game still tries to do something novel that makes it worthy of attention. We got our hands on the final preview build to see what the game offers to genre fans.

Out of Sight wastes no time with setup. There's a sinister motherly voice trying to tuck in a little girl named Sophie, and the little girl sounds like she doesn't want to be there. All you hear are sounds because you can't initially see anything. Eventually, you gain your vision, and you see that Sophie is blindfolded. You also realize that she can see through the eyes of a toy teddy bear that's nearby. With that sense restored in a roundabout way, you take control of Sophie, who's planning to escape her circumstances. The game gives you no more than that for the narrative setup, so you'll discover your captor's motivations as the game moves along.

From what we've seen so far, the game is an exploratory adventure with light puzzle elements. Most of your time is spent walking around the house trying to duck into narrow passageways and avoiding anything that can make enough noise to attract captors to your location. That means avoiding anything like mouse traps or wind chimes or hanging silverware in hallways. As for the puzzle elements, you'll do a good deal of switch-pulling and box moving, the latter of which you'll do often since Sophie can't jump. Overall, it isn't anything new — at least initially.

What is novel is the fact that the whole game is viewed through the eyes of the teddy bear. For the most part, that idea doesn't seem too different from other games, as Sophie often holds the bear at her chest facing outward, so you're playing the game like any other title using a first-person perspective. That all changes when you find a pink blanket. Sophie can let the bear sit there while she performs most of the puzzle activities, since she has her hands free. This means that the game changes from a first-person perspective to a third-person one, similar to the older Resident Evil games minus the tank-like controls. The camera is only partially static, as you can move the teddy bear's head a bit, but the shift doesn't make things feel cumbersome.

The camera shift is novel, but the early parts of the game don't seem to do much with that mechanic. There is one moment when you're using the third-person perspective to hide from someone. There's another moment when the perspective is used to show someone chasing you, and this is pretty cool due to the intentionally unstable camera to make the chase feel realistic. The game promises that the hook of seeing everything through the bear's eyes will lead to some more interesting scenarios later on, but that remains to be seen.

That's the same feeling you get about the general gameplay. You'll spend a good deal of time in cramped crawl spaces between walls, and most of the rooms you'll enter are normal. The puzzles are simple enough, so the challenge feels lacking. It's good for someone who's more interested in story, but the hope is that the gameplay becomes more interesting in the game's back half.

Now that I've seen a little bit beyond the point where the preview build ends, every element of Out of Sight becomes inspiring in the back half. The preview area simply shows off the mechanics in their most basic form, and the game up to this point is intriguing enough that players will feel compelled to keep playing to see how it ends. We'll have a full review of Out of Sight closer to the launch date, which is in less than a month.