Beyond Eyes (2015)

Beyond Eyes (2015)

Genre: Story / Art Game | Players: 1 | Developer: Tiger & Squid (with Team17)

The young girl pictured is named Rae, and she's unusual in a number of ways. Firstly, she has none of the typical video game protagonist powers (run, punch, jump, etc), but in addition to that her connection to her world is defined primarily by what she hears, not what she sees, because Rae is blind - although, it's possible that she can discern shapes when they're very close, it's never explicitly stated. Either way, it's a fascinating and bold premise for a game, a medium that's inherently visual in nature.

The world in which Rae exists is bursting with colour, but she sees little or none of it. Things beyond the girl's hearing and/or limited range of sight aren't even drawn or rendered; they're blank until you move her near them. But rather than being black like a void or an absence of colour, they're bright white like parchment, ready to be written on. As you approach an area it gets filled in, resembling a watercolour painting in real time; I like to think of it as a story book coming to beautiful life in response to Rae's presence.

It's a situation that forces you to play differently than you normally would, which is welcome in principal, but it also forces you to play much slower. Rae moves at a snail's pace. It makes sense in real world terms, she's in an unfamiliar environment, after all, but it may impact a player's desire to explore. Even a 5-10% increase in her walking speed would've helped, but as it is now exploration is greatly overshadowed by the limitation. I'm the kind of person that likes to linger, to appreciate the effort that devs put into level design, art styles, etc, and as such the thought of backtracking to see if I'd missed anything important crossed my mind many, many times, but more often than not I chose to ignore the impulse, which is the opposite of what I normally do.

-White areas are locations that haven't been explored yet.-

There isn't much to do outside of the core objective, anyhow, which is Rae's selfless search for her friend, a cat named Nami. And, as much as I hate to say it, we never really get a sense of who Rae is beyond what we learn about her at the very beginning. Her responses are very limited, amounting to mostly mumbles, laughs and occasional expressions of unease. There is, however, a strong emphasis on the journey, and ever-present is an important reminder to those of us who can see or perceive beauty in the real world to not take that precious ability for granted.