Second Sight

John Vattic wakes strapped to a gurney in a research facility with no memory and a headful of abilities he did not have before. That much is standard amnesiac-thriller stock. What Free Radical Design did with it is not: the game cuts between the escape and a military operation in Siberia months earlier, and the past chapters are not decoration. Choices there reach forward. A character you keep alive in a flashback turns up breathing in the present. The structure is the argument, and in 2004 almost nobody was making it on a console.

The powers are the other half. Telekinesis for hurling crates and people, a psi-blast, healing, charm to walk a guard past you, and projection, which sends a ghostly version of Vattic ahead to scout and flip switches while his body sits helpless. They draw from one meter, so the game keeps asking whether you want to spend the bar on solving a room quietly or blowing it open. Guns exist and they are deliberately unsatisfying. Free Radical had just come off TimeSplitters 2, so the flat, weightless shooting reads less as incompetence than as a nudge toward the interesting toolset.

Stealth is where it creaks. Guard awareness is coarse, the camera in tight spaces fights you, and several sequences punish experimentation hard enough that you end up reloading rather than improvising. The cel-shaded art has held up better than the systems around it, giving the labs and snowfields a clean comic-panel flatness that dodges the muddy brown of its contemporaries. Vattic himself, glasses and cardigan and mounting dread, is one of the least action-hero action heroes of the generation.

It arrived within weeks of Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, which had louder physics and a cruder story, and both were largely ignored. Second Sight is the stranger and more considered of the pair. It is also the shorter, which works in its favour: the plot tightens instead of unravelling, and the final reveal actually justifies the back-and-forth structure rather than apologising for it.

Play it now and you will fight the controls before you fight the guards. Stay with it anyway. Very few games of this size trust the player to hold two timelines in their head and then pay that trust off.