It's been a few days since I've finished my playthrough of Beyond Eyes, and I still don't exactly know how to put it into words. In a way, this is a good thing: an old tutor of mine once defined art as "something that you cannot properly describe with words," and I'd say this game absolutely fits the bill. Recontextualizing this in the scope of a lot of the games I've played and reviewed recently, here's my interpretation of that definition: a compelling artistic video game tells a story or evokes emotions that cannot be as effectively accomplished in any other medium, and once again, I'm forced to conclude that Beyond Eyes also matches up to scale here. Yet at the same time, I'm not sure if I found this game particularly fun or gripping to the point where I would recommend this without reservations to others, and it's this inner struggle that I've been dealing with that I will attempt to reconcile as I go along.
The story unfolds as one day, a girl named Rae is blinded from a fireworks accident and must now adapt to a much different way of life. Some time after this accident, she befriends a cat that she names Nani, and a winter later, Nani is nowhere to be found. Thus, she must now venture into the unknown (in many respects) to figure out what happened to her newest friend, focusing on not what she has lost, but what she can still gain.
Beyond Eyes could be described as an attempt to translate her experiences into a playable form, turning her necessity of relying upon her other senses (mainly through hearing, touching, and smelling) into what is essentially a walking simulator with some sparse interactions. As you slowly make your way through this blank canvas of a world, more and more details are "painted in" through the interactions of Rae's other senses, with obstacles often appearing quite suddenly as you walk around due to not having the ability of sight to spot the landscape from afar. By no means is this a 1 to 1 reproduction; you obviously can't reproduce smells and touching surfaces on a video game console or a PC, though it's nevertheless been transcribed in the form of colored lines (ex: a flowing yellow line for smell) for the player to imagine. At times, you'll need to use those context clues provided by those colored lines to interact with objects in the environment in a very careful and gentle way, such as when Rae must feel around to climb over shorter sections of a wooden fence or carefully dips her toe forward to avoid falling into a river when crossing on a series of stones.
I'm most likely not doing the gameplay description justice, because ultimately, I think this is a case where words fail to accurately describe the experience. Is it actually fun to plod around slowly while walls appear out of nowhere as if the game's got a draw distance of a foot? Perhaps not. Yet, it's the attention to detail that keeps me captivated here and from totally dismissing this as yet another unrealized art project. The creator of the game, Sharida Halatoe, once stated that the game's distinct watercolor-like artstyle is due to the visuals serving as a projection of Rae's imagination; she "sees" the world in this way because of what she's seen prior to blindness, like that of what she remembers from picture books. Because she doesn't have that ability anymore, her reliance upon sound means that she can perceive noisier objects, such as a bird chirping or a river flowing, from farther away until she can rely on smell or touch to pick out closer objects. It's why she "sees" the river from across the landscape, but the bridge isn't spawned until she's physically walking across it. This idea of challenging her perception is prevalent throughout the game's runtime as well, as the vision of what she hears and initially perceives some objects as are overwritten when she approaches closely enough; one instance of this occurs when Rae approaches what she thinks is a clothesline fluttering in the wind, but when she gets close enough, she realizes that it is in fact a scarecrow without a head with a crow perched on top. Certain elements of the unknown such as these also create fear in Rae's mind and takes a "true identity" of its own through thick inky lines and eerie, discordant tones, draining the coloring book of its vibrancy; it'd be easy to write this off as adding elements of atmospheric tension to the gameplay, but I see it as another illustration of how the blind perceive the world around them. There's a lot of attention to detail in attempting to communicate this different way of life, and I would be a fool to disregard that.
Perhaps the game's artistic merit is best highlighted in Chapter 5, where Rae must make her way through an intensifying storm across a pier towards cat noises that she heard at the very start. It's easily the most challenging part of the game, as you must slowly navigate across a gradually spawning wooden platform across the perceived ocean with few landmarks recognized, with even these few landmarks and previous ground covered "erased" by the sound of the pouring rain washing away any scents beside the sea. Again, is it particularly fun getting lost in a seemingly endless white room with only your immediate surroundings and memory to go off of? No... and in fact, it's quite frustrating and often scary. And perhaps this is the exact point of the whole exercise: trying to translate the experiences of a blind individual through an interactive medium that couldn't otherwise be expressed as strongly as a simple observer. I think it would be a fool's errand to try and judge this by the same standards that we use to consider mechanically and technically whether or not we find something "fun," for these kinds of experiences turn the whole idea of what we consider an effective video game on its head, and instead beg us to consider looking through the lens of a different individual and walking a mile in their shoes as a way to invite us into another world while savoring that of our own world.
Now, I did say that this write-up would also entail some degree of reconciliation, because I do have a few laments where I think the game could be improved. I was originally playing this on my Steam Deck, as a more intimate way to interact with the objects on screen, but later switched to playing this on desktop with a connected controller in hopes that there would be rumble interactions on a controller. Unfortunately, I don't believe that any rumble interactions were built in to the game, and I feel that this is a genuine missed opportunity; I understand budget constraints and that the sense of touch cannot be replicated perfectly even in an interaction medium such as video games, but I think adding vibrations where Rae would have felt vibrations under her feet (such as the ground quaking from a jackhammer, or a dog shivering from her touch) would have elevated the sensory experience even further. There are a few optional interactions with the environment that aren't very obvious, and I unfortunately can't recall any green ribbons serving as indicators for those cases; again, I understand that this might go against artistic vision in that it shouldn't be realistically obvious to interact with those elements from the perspective of a blind individual, but I do think it's a shame that I never got to see those interactions unfold and I'm not particularly interested in slowly backtracking through levels and using an achievement guide to track down and proc those interactions after finishing. And finally, I do think the relationship between Rae and others around her (mainly the friend she makes, Lily, as well as Nani) could have been further developed, as I found the ending quite abrupt, though the game's short runtime at least justifies this lack of scope towards that narrative development.
Ultimately, I've decided to not mark a score on Beyond Eyes, because this is a very strange case for me; it's one of those games where I don't think I actually enjoyed playing it very much, but at the same time, I can't help but appreciate what's been created here. Recommending it feels strange too, because it's a very niche title that's not easily accessible to others looking for more traditional games with clearly defined objectives and fail-states; this is instead the tale of a blind girl struggling to make sense of what is left, but finding much meaning in what she is able to make sense of. It is unfortunate that the game was met with such a degree of mixed reception and that a dispute between the game's publisher and creator has led to Beyond Eyes being delisted on Steam, though keys of the game are at least still being sold on external key stores even if Halatoe is no longer making any pennies off of it. Having said that, if you're looking for another ambitious "game for change" that may not be particularly enjoyable to actually play but nonetheless pushes the envelope of video game communication and exploration of the medium, perhaps you'll find that experience in Beyond Eyes.
The story unfolds as one day, a girl named Rae is blinded from a fireworks accident and must now adapt to a much different way of life. Some time after this accident, she befriends a cat that she names Nani, and a winter later, Nani is nowhere to be found. Thus, she must now venture into the unknown (in many respects) to figure out what happened to her newest friend, focusing on not what she has lost, but what she can still gain.
Beyond Eyes could be described as an attempt to translate her experiences into a playable form, turning her necessity of relying upon her other senses (mainly through hearing, touching, and smelling) into what is essentially a walking simulator with some sparse interactions. As you slowly make your way through this blank canvas of a world, more and more details are "painted in" through the interactions of Rae's other senses, with obstacles often appearing quite suddenly as you walk around due to not having the ability of sight to spot the landscape from afar. By no means is this a 1 to 1 reproduction; you obviously can't reproduce smells and touching surfaces on a video game console or a PC, though it's nevertheless been transcribed in the form of colored lines (ex: a flowing yellow line for smell) for the player to imagine. At times, you'll need to use those context clues provided by those colored lines to interact with objects in the environment in a very careful and gentle way, such as when Rae must feel around to climb over shorter sections of a wooden fence or carefully dips her toe forward to avoid falling into a river when crossing on a series of stones.
I'm most likely not doing the gameplay description justice, because ultimately, I think this is a case where words fail to accurately describe the experience. Is it actually fun to plod around slowly while walls appear out of nowhere as if the game's got a draw distance of a foot? Perhaps not. Yet, it's the attention to detail that keeps me captivated here and from totally dismissing this as yet another unrealized art project. The creator of the game, Sharida Halatoe, once stated that the game's distinct watercolor-like artstyle is due to the visuals serving as a projection of Rae's imagination; she "sees" the world in this way because of what she's seen prior to blindness, like that of what she remembers from picture books. Because she doesn't have that ability anymore, her reliance upon sound means that she can perceive noisier objects, such as a bird chirping or a river flowing, from farther away until she can rely on smell or touch to pick out closer objects. It's why she "sees" the river from across the landscape, but the bridge isn't spawned until she's physically walking across it. This idea of challenging her perception is prevalent throughout the game's runtime as well, as the vision of what she hears and initially perceives some objects as are overwritten when she approaches closely enough; one instance of this occurs when Rae approaches what she thinks is a clothesline fluttering in the wind, but when she gets close enough, she realizes that it is in fact a scarecrow without a head with a crow perched on top. Certain elements of the unknown such as these also create fear in Rae's mind and takes a "true identity" of its own through thick inky lines and eerie, discordant tones, draining the coloring book of its vibrancy; it'd be easy to write this off as adding elements of atmospheric tension to the gameplay, but I see it as another illustration of how the blind perceive the world around them. There's a lot of attention to detail in attempting to communicate this different way of life, and I would be a fool to disregard that.
Perhaps the game's artistic merit is best highlighted in Chapter 5, where Rae must make her way through an intensifying storm across a pier towards cat noises that she heard at the very start. It's easily the most challenging part of the game, as you must slowly navigate across a gradually spawning wooden platform across the perceived ocean with few landmarks recognized, with even these few landmarks and previous ground covered "erased" by the sound of the pouring rain washing away any scents beside the sea. Again, is it particularly fun getting lost in a seemingly endless white room with only your immediate surroundings and memory to go off of? No... and in fact, it's quite frustrating and often scary. And perhaps this is the exact point of the whole exercise: trying to translate the experiences of a blind individual through an interactive medium that couldn't otherwise be expressed as strongly as a simple observer. I think it would be a fool's errand to try and judge this by the same standards that we use to consider mechanically and technically whether or not we find something "fun," for these kinds of experiences turn the whole idea of what we consider an effective video game on its head, and instead beg us to consider looking through the lens of a different individual and walking a mile in their shoes as a way to invite us into another world while savoring that of our own world.
Now, I did say that this write-up would also entail some degree of reconciliation, because I do have a few laments where I think the game could be improved. I was originally playing this on my Steam Deck, as a more intimate way to interact with the objects on screen, but later switched to playing this on desktop with a connected controller in hopes that there would be rumble interactions on a controller. Unfortunately, I don't believe that any rumble interactions were built in to the game, and I feel that this is a genuine missed opportunity; I understand budget constraints and that the sense of touch cannot be replicated perfectly even in an interaction medium such as video games, but I think adding vibrations where Rae would have felt vibrations under her feet (such as the ground quaking from a jackhammer, or a dog shivering from her touch) would have elevated the sensory experience even further. There are a few optional interactions with the environment that aren't very obvious, and I unfortunately can't recall any green ribbons serving as indicators for those cases; again, I understand that this might go against artistic vision in that it shouldn't be realistically obvious to interact with those elements from the perspective of a blind individual, but I do think it's a shame that I never got to see those interactions unfold and I'm not particularly interested in slowly backtracking through levels and using an achievement guide to track down and proc those interactions after finishing. And finally, I do think the relationship between Rae and others around her (mainly the friend she makes, Lily, as well as Nani) could have been further developed, as I found the ending quite abrupt, though the game's short runtime at least justifies this lack of scope towards that narrative development.
Ultimately, I've decided to not mark a score on Beyond Eyes, because this is a very strange case for me; it's one of those games where I don't think I actually enjoyed playing it very much, but at the same time, I can't help but appreciate what's been created here. Recommending it feels strange too, because it's a very niche title that's not easily accessible to others looking for more traditional games with clearly defined objectives and fail-states; this is instead the tale of a blind girl struggling to make sense of what is left, but finding much meaning in what she is able to make sense of. It is unfortunate that the game was met with such a degree of mixed reception and that a dispute between the game's publisher and creator has led to Beyond Eyes being delisted on Steam, though keys of the game are at least still being sold on external key stores even if Halatoe is no longer making any pennies off of it. Having said that, if you're looking for another ambitious "game for change" that may not be particularly enjoyable to actually play but nonetheless pushes the envelope of video game communication and exploration of the medium, perhaps you'll find that experience in Beyond Eyes.
2 Comments
Yeah, absolutely agree. She was apparently planning to release her ideas for her upcoming project Trails of Life in novel form, but she's been silent on Twitter for over a year now, so who knows how it would have all unfolded. Perhaps the world wasn't quite ready for something so off the beaten path from what we typically experience, but hopefully other indies keep carrying that same experimental spirit.
FallenGrace
1 year ago