Beyond Eyes Xbox One

I’ve read numerous reviews of Beyond Eyes before I ever played. I saw scores as high as a nine, and scores as low as a five. Generally, that tells me this is a love it or hate it game. Knowing I could get a review code for our website, I decided to look into it.

Initial thoughts were, well, mixed. The game looks pretty, but there is legitimately only three usable buttons. Left stick to move around, right stick to look around, and A to interact. Sadly, I would have overlooked this title had I not reached out to Microsoft for review codes for titles we may have missed over the past few months. Beyond Eyes was one of the codes we got. Despite its short length, and minimal button options, I couldn’t have enjoyed myself more.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. This game is slow. You walk slow, interact slow, do everything….really, really slowly. But, to be fair, that is expected. You play as a young, blind girl who, through a textual story presented like a children’s book, loses her cat and sets off to find it. Understandably, then, is the slow pace. You are blind, and must feel and react like a blind person might.

Bringing the plight of the blind to life is a touch task, especially in a video game context. Making the game move at a slow pace, therefore, is intentionally. To present the rest of her blindness, the developers created a white world that fills with colour and detail as you move through it. If an animal moves in the distance, that distant area will briefly light up, indicating her sense of hearing has alerted her to something. Rain is also used to great affect. The constant sound of rain falling can disorient a blind person rather quickly, because of an inability to focus on specific sounds. When it rains, the colour and detail that you may have uncovered, is quickly washed away, making certain areas and puzzles more difficult.

The game scores so high with me because of how they represent the idea of blindness in this medium. Is it the best game, or the most entertaining game? Absolutely not, but I feel like everyone needs to to play it once. It will be three great hours of your life, three hours that I will score 8.5/10!