Playing Beyond Eyes is kind of like seeing for the first time. Where sighted people imagine the concept of blindness by thinking of the world with our eyes shut, we easily downplay the roles of our other senses. Although playing video games involves touching controls and listening to sounds, inarguably the most important component has always been visual. It’s here that developer Tiger & Squid finds an intuitive balance between a video game and a world we cannot see.

Though inspired by The Unfinished Swan (2012) and the animated short Out of Sight (2010), Beyond Eyes lovingly perfects a sightless experience in a video game and challenges our senses and expectations. Guided only by what the player character feels and hears, players essentially create their own worlds as they go. Young Rae is perhaps the perfect protagonist for this adventure, imagining the world around her in beautiful watercolors and mistaking sounds for both dreams and nightmares as she searches for her one and only friend, the cat Nani.

Moving in the game reveals details of the world around you. Sometimes a fence or a wall won’t appear until you walk right into it. Sounds tend to reveal their sources naturally as Rae approximates the positions of things like birds and brooks. Scent is emulated through gentle yellow ribbons, drawing the player to their source. As Rae progresses through the story, she imagines Nani nearby and calls after it with a progressive sorrow, representative not only of her own story of frustration but that of the game’s development and fundraising failures.

When creator Sherida Halatoe and friend Rian Franssen began discussing the project that would become Beyond Eyes in 2011, it pre-dated both the first major crowdfunded game (Broken Age) and Steam’s now-shuttering service, Steam Greenlight. By 2014, after an early split with Franssen who pursued her own graduate project, Halatoe started an Indiegogo campaign to fund the completion of her game. Despite a small amount of press and acclaim, the campaign was unsuccessful, raising less than half of the modest €10,000 goal. Undeterred, Halatoe announced a partnership with Team17 a year later, who helped her to both finish and release the final game as Tiger & Squid.

The game itself starts out casually enough (after the cutscene where a little girl loses her vision), but quickly inspires anxiety when perceived threats are introduced. Barking dogs and loud noises and busy streets are encircled with angry black wisps or hidden behind a menacing fog. Obstacles like these help inspire empathy in the player, who is given near constant feedback with Rae’s body language and sound. As sound is such an important part of gameplay, Rae’s sometimes incessant whimpering can be problematic to players trying to ‘unblur’ the gorgeous environment, but it does help us to empathize with the character.

One of the most stunning occurrences in Beyond Eyes is finding large structures in the middle of areas that appear empty. As I suspect most would play, I typically navigate by following a wall or path, and am genuinely surprised when I walk into a wall or find my way blocked by a fountain in the middle of a paved area. The player is literally stopped in their tracks to feel what it is like to not see what is directly in front of them, which is a huge step toward better understanding the character’s disability. It wasn’t uncommon for me to feel slightly frustrated by Rae’s pace or the time it took me to navigate safely around an obstacle, but all of it made sense to me and never felt like a shortcoming of the game. The rainy sequences were in the same vein, where already cleared areas would slowly be erased by the rain; frustrating but necessary.

The biggest fault of the game is in a peripheral area: its achievements. Where there are auxiliary objects to find and interact with in the game world, the actions needed to trigger the achievements using them are rarely straightforward and often require player action beyond what might be reasonably expected. One requires the player to pick up a flower from one area, for example, throw it off a bridge in another, and then find the same flower elsewhere downstream. While difficult or convoluted achievements are not necessarily anathema, a game with as deliberately slow a pace as Beyond Eyes will surely turn achievement hunters to guides well before the finish. Doing so will split the player’s focus and break immersion, while possibly spoiling the game’s conclusion. I do understand why these achievements exist, but frankly no matter how much work was put into those extra animations it isn’t worth the loss of immersion.

As mentioned, controls can feel a little wonky at times and movement is definitely slowly paced, but how carefully would you move around if you were a blind child alone in a strange area? A “false positive” from my PC’s antivirus also shows perhaps an issue with Team17’s QA, but those things aside Beyond Eyes is a beautiful game to buy at full price and take your time with.

7/10.