Random Game Review: Beyond Eyes · 11:13am Jun 24th, 2017

Welp. Looks like I once again dove into my Steam library looking for small cute things to play, and I found Beyond Eyes! I honestly don't remember how I got this game. Either it was part of some Humble Bundle, or I just stumbled on it in the Steam store and thought it looked interesting.

Beyond Eyes is a very short and pretty unashamedly artsy game that puts you in the boots of a blind girl looking for a cat. I put about two and a half hours into it, and I took my time, so it's probably something that can be finished in two hours. Still, it's a cute little game, and I believe it's on 75% sale right now, so for less than three and a half euros it might be a nice way to fill a few hours. It's purely story-based, though, and as far as I could see it doesn't contain any special secrets to uncover, so it doesn't really have much in terms of replayability.

The story: Rae is a girl who lost her sight in a fireworks accident, and her blindness seems to have made her very insecure about leaving her house. The only social contact she's had during the year after her accident was a neighborhood cat which came to her garden. But after the winter, the cat stopped showing up. So she finally decides to leave the security of the garden, and venture out into the great scary unknown to find her feline friend. This first takes her through the fields around her house, later through a village, and finally through the forest beyond the village, encountering scary and interesting things along the way.

The gameplay: this is the game's obvious strong point. The gameplay is really interesting. You know those classic real-time strategy games, where the whole environment is shrouded in black and gets unveiled as you explore it? This game does that too (though, in white), but with some interesting twists. Directly unveiling terrain around you is your sense of touch; everything in a radius of about half a meter around you gets revealed as she feels her way around her, and confirms with her own hands what is there.

To go back to the RTS mechanics, though, there is another thing that unveils terrain in RTS games, and that's when stuff shoots at other stuff inside the shrouded area. This mechanic exists here too; after her sense of touch, there are also her other senses; hearing and smell. She can accurately estimate the distance of things like rushing water, tweeting birds and cloth flapping in the wind, and can smell fish or bread near her, and those things will get revealed as if they were already explored by touch.

However, there is a twist to these senses: Hearing can be fooled, and even things confirmed by touch can change around you later. This means that very often, when you actually reach something that you either confirmed before, or that the girl has a certain image of because of what she thinks she heard, it can turn out to be something quite different. A scary-sounding growl can end up being a lawnmower engine, a truck can suddenly be parked in a place you've already been before, and rain messes up your senses in general, suddenly making everything around you confusing and uncertain.

My experience, the pros and the cons:

The game is not without its flaws. Even in forests or open fields, you are very obviously being railroaded along one track, typically by bushes placed along the path. The girl can't push her way through a bush, duck under a low tree branch or climb a wooden fence. Story-wise this seems to be because of her timidness, but gosh darnit, girl, you got a cat to find! Some bushes shouldn't stop you!

I understand entirely why they did this, though, since there's a story to tell, and getting lost in the wide plains or an expansive village with a blind girl who shuffles along everywhere she goes so she doesn't bump into things would be extremely tedious. And, in all fairness, what you can explore still feels pretty vast because she moves so slowly.

However, she does often get stuck on objects she bumps into, and that's really annoying, especially since said objects only appear about a hand-length before you bump into them. And occasionally I encountered invisible walls, or gaps that felt like they should've been wide enough to get through but weren't, and these things kind of broke my immersion as well.

The exploration mechanics are also a small point of annoyance to me. I dislike leaving small patches unexplored, and her exploration radius is so small that even to just completely unveil a bridge I crossed, I found myself going back and forth to unveil the other side of it. And very often I was playing 'snowplough' and removing all the small bits of white left over on larger open areas, like squares or wide roads. Another thing that somewhat bothered me was that coming close to a house often unveiled a balcony one floor up. Um. How would she even be aware of that?

That said, I still enjoyed the game, and especially after my 'snowploughing' to unveil every inch I passed, the rain mechanic took me completely off-guard. There was the area I'd completely unveiled before, melting away as the rain touched it and confused the girl's senses. I especially liked how it faded away the tops of benches and walls, so I'd have to explore them again and confirm their now-wet state.

I won't spoil more there, because that part was really well done, but I'll tell you this: to me, the most memorable moments in the game were the genuinely scary ones. When I walked out on the seemingly endless beach, in the middle of a rainstorm... the game actually made me experience agoraphobia. A complete lack of identifiable points around you in a very scary thing.

So, um, yea. Don't go out on the beach during a rain storm if you can't see. There's no cats stupid enough to hang around there, anyway.

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