Beyond Eyes (Xbox One) - Review
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 05 August 2015 / 6,389 Views
I’ve had my own eyes on Beyond Eyes for a while now; it really blew me away with its presentation back at EGX Rezzed in London earlier this year. Here was an indie game, which came seemingly out of nowhere, that sported a visual design that could easily fool someone into thinking it was an experimental AAA game.
Now, I must profess, niche 'walking experiences' like Dear Esther and Gone Home are my forte; I enjoy experiencing elaborate worlds that are made for gamers to explore, so I was always going to jump onto Beyond Eyes like a flea to a dog, but the end result caught me by surprise.
Beyond Eyes' opening moments do a good job of easing you into the trials and tribulations that await. You play as Rae, a blind girl who has lost her cat and sets off to find it. You explore your garden, bumping into bushes and other objects you didn’t realise existed until the last second, and “see” things in the distance that Rae can hear or smell.
Again, Rae is blind, so the world always starts off completely white. Exploration is the name of the game, as wandering about and encountering various objects and features will reveal more and more of the world, filling in all of the blank white space. The notion of trying to show what it must feel like to be blind is actually what gravitated me towards Beyond Eyes, but after two and a half hours of exploring white environments it all became too much. Perhaps that's the point, but I doubt it.
The Unfinished Swan utilised a similar mechanic. In that game you had to paint the world in order to properly visualise it, but The Unfinished Swan soon mixed things up, adopting a unique gameplay mechanic after just the first stage. It’s only really now, thanks to Beyond Eyes, that I can appreciate why the developers did that - using the same mechanic for almost three hours would've been both repetitive and, dare I say it, boring.
What I find most appealing about exploratory games is that you typically get to learn more about the world you inhabit, or the people within it, at your own pace. Gone Home was brilliant at creating characters that had fleshed out back stories, for example, all without ever actually seeing them in the game. It was through exploration that you learnt more about the characters and world in Gone Home.
Beyond Eyes, by contrast, lacks this feeling. Other than the short term goal of seeing more of the level there's very little incentive to explore. Seeing more of a town doesn’t by itself flesh out the game world, nor does it help to build up Rae's character. It’s simply there; an obstacle to be overcome and quickly forgotten. And this really is a shame, as Beyond Eyes looks absolutely lovely and its heart is clearly in the right place.
There are a few pseudo-puzzles that need to be overcome in order to progress through the game. These primarily revolve around avoiding noises that scare Rae (dogs, cars, etc.) and finding alternative routes or overcoming the obstacle. They're not remotely challenging, however, and your actions rarely have consequences on the world around you.
My biggest problem with Beyond Eyes isn’t its length (which is a typical 2-3 hours long, like most similar indie games), it’s the lack of content or incentive in the world to maintain the player's interest. Chapters are short, the levels themselves are small in scope, and it’s really only thanks to Rae’s artificially slow speed and a handful of technical issues - I would often get stuck on geometry that I clearly wasn’t touching - that the game manages to squeeze past the two hour mark.
I don't want to sound excessively harsh on this title; it looks gorgeous and provides a fantastic insight into what it's like to be blind, especially at such a young age. I’m glad Beyond Eyes exists. I’m also thankful to Sherida Halatoe who worked with clear passion on Beyond Eyes, but its central premise of experiencing the world from a blind person's perspective runs thin within the first half hour, and past that not much more happens. Beyond Eyes is a great learning tool, but don’t expect to be entertained.
This review is based on a retail copy of Beyond Eyes for the XOne
