Every so often there comes a game that attaches to your soul and makes you feel things that you either didn’t want or didn’t know you could. Beyond Eyes is one of those games for me and a truly unique title in terms of the overall concept.
Like Among The Sleep, it has a story to tell and it gets right down to it while you play. In Beyond Eyes you play a young girl whose story unfolds in a storybook-like fashion. While watching fireworks, an incendiary suddenly veers off course and blows up in her face.
The result is that the girl is left blind, coping with her loss in a garden. This is where you the player come in, guiding her around and chasing after her newly befriended cat.
However, you are blind, which is a problem. The game offers you a white screen. As you explore the world, it fills in with what she hears and feels. Now as one would expect, this creates a genuine number of issues because you keep stammering into walls, buildings, and various plants and animals as well.
As you play through the game you move at an incredibly slow pace which again, is understandable because: You are blind. You do however get to meet an interesting group of people as you play and can interact with a fair amount of things as you progress, like stopping to feed a cow or swing on a swing set.
I will, however, note that the controls for the game work well, and the music is pretty nice to listen to. I really enjoyed the “visuals” of the game…a kind of watercolor atmosphere. The fact that they went out of their way to tell it as a storybook is not something you see very often in games, and I think it’s quite charming because of it.
The overall design of Beyond Eyes is flawless in my opinion, and it grasps a unique concept that very few have ever tried to achieve; I absolutely love it. It’s a game that takes a stance on things most people would never dare confront (as they are either afraid it wouldn’t sell well, or that the message wouldn’t be well received).
In conclusion, though, I highly recommend this game to anyone and everyone. It would be great to see people playing it as a way to help understand what it’s like to be blind.
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!