Beyond Eyes, an indie art game about a girl and a cat. She's also blind.
This game was released in 2015 by Tiger & Squid, and for me, it finally came up during quarantine for a certain global pandemic. The indie game backlog is as endless as any, so I picked a game that has really been installed on my hard drive for three years. What I found was a fun adventure that slowed me down for a few hours and even moved me a little, though I am pretty willing to let these small scale games move me emotionally.
So is it a walking simulator? Sort of. The key difference is that the average walking sim involves puzzles and beautiful landscapes to gawk at while a story happens around you. In Beyond Eyes, Rae is blind, so as you control her, she has to physically get close to things for them to appear. Without her power to find things without sight, the screen would remain blank, endlessly white, unlike the average two-legs-simulator. I found the washed-out watercolor art pretty for the duration of the journey. It was like paint on a canvas. Birds would fly in and then out her "vision" range and the art style really lent itself to objects appearing or disappearing in the frame.
Rae also has a cat that visits her. One day, Rae takes it upon herself to go find that cat when it stops showing up. A blind girl versus all the dangers of a world that she can't see, a world that may often deceive her. As you make your way through suburban acres and town centers, you'll come up against paths that scare her, people that won't help her, and you'll have to figure out how to navigate a world that may sound like one thing in the distance, but turn out to be something beyond the conventional expectations of a ten-year-old, or even something dangerous. But Rae wouldn't stop until she found her cat Nani, so if you've got a day to take a break from the big-budget stuff (in my case a break from Seige and Halo) why not help out Rae and see the way she does.
- Ben R.
Player of Games
P.S.
I'm a sucker for games that engage me in an unusual way. So, quarantine fueled indie binge coming up. Here are some extra pictures.
This game was released in 2015 by Tiger & Squid, and for me, it finally came up during quarantine for a certain global pandemic. The indie game backlog is as endless as any, so I picked a game that has really been installed on my hard drive for three years. What I found was a fun adventure that slowed me down for a few hours and even moved me a little, though I am pretty willing to let these small scale games move me emotionally.
So is it a walking simulator? Sort of. The key difference is that the average walking sim involves puzzles and beautiful landscapes to gawk at while a story happens around you. In Beyond Eyes, Rae is blind, so as you control her, she has to physically get close to things for them to appear. Without her power to find things without sight, the screen would remain blank, endlessly white, unlike the average two-legs-simulator. I found the washed-out watercolor art pretty for the duration of the journey. It was like paint on a canvas. Birds would fly in and then out her "vision" range and the art style really lent itself to objects appearing or disappearing in the frame.
Rae also has a cat that visits her. One day, Rae takes it upon herself to go find that cat when it stops showing up. A blind girl versus all the dangers of a world that she can't see, a world that may often deceive her. As you make your way through suburban acres and town centers, you'll come up against paths that scare her, people that won't help her, and you'll have to figure out how to navigate a world that may sound like one thing in the distance, but turn out to be something beyond the conventional expectations of a ten-year-old, or even something dangerous. But Rae wouldn't stop until she found her cat Nani, so if you've got a day to take a break from the big-budget stuff (in my case a break from Seige and Halo) why not help out Rae and see the way she does.
- Ben R.
Player of Games
P.S.
I'm a sucker for games that engage me in an unusual way. So, quarantine fueled indie binge coming up. Here are some extra pictures.
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