Playing With Perception In Beyond Eyes

When I first saw Beyond Eyes at last year’s EGX it was the game’s distinctive visual style that drew me in; its vivid, watercolour-like presentation immediately standing out from the crowd. It’s simply impossible to mistake it for anything else in an increasingly crowded marketplace, an asset that will surely serve it well in the long run.

Although it was the art that leapt out at me once more when I saw the game at Rezzed, that’s pretty much the only element that hasn’t seen a major change since last year. This newest demo build feels much closer to a full game, with a significantly richer world that does a much better job of encouraging you to explore it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rpTjozuZLo

While you could certainly explore what was on show at EGX, there didn’t seem to be all that much to find or even push you forward. That’s completely changed now, with small audio cues scattered throughout the world always drawing you onwards. If you aren’t familiar with Beyond Eyes you may be asking why the game is using audio rather than visual hints, but that all comes down to the game’s core premise of finding your way in the world as Rae, a young, blind girl. Rae wasn’t born blind, so she has some idea of how the world looks, but only a very narrow one.

This limited experience with the world leads her to make some incorrect assumptions about the sounds of the world around her. What sounds like a fountain might actually be a storm drain, while the gentle noise of laundry trying in the wind might actually turn out to be a particularly unnerving scarecrow.

Playing with perception like this seems to be one of the core elements of Beyond Eyes, and the game executes it wonderfully, particularly in reference to Rae’s cat Nani. The search for Nani is what has lead her away from her previously sheltered experience, and it seems to be the driving element of the game’s narrative.

However, Nani isn’t some abstract narrative element designed to give you something to chase after, but rather another part of the game’s desire to play with your perceptions. At various points you’ll hear sounds that Rae assumes is Nani, and Nani will even appear to be running through bushes or scratching away at the ground.

What’s not made clear is whether any of these moments are actually Nani, or just another case of Rae layering her own preconceptions onto the world around her. Nani is always presented in an almost ghost like manner, and her transient appearances leave a real sense of ambiguity about her presence that I can see becoming a real tease as the game progresses.

While the way the game plays with perception is clearly intended to tell us something about the troubles that visually impaired people can have at times, it makes a much broader point about how your senses aren’t necessarily to be trusted. To some extent we all believe what our senses tell us about the world is how reality really is, but Beyond Eyes really conveys just how often our brain fills in the gaps with past experiences for us, reinforcing our own preconceptions of the world.

Perhaps the biggest change to the game since last year is a behind the scenes shift. While the game was previously under the sole stewardship of its creator Sherida Halatoe, there’s been a big shift since then. Team 17, who are handling the publishing side of things, have given her space in their Wakefield studio, as well as a twelve person team to work with. This expansion not only helps to improve the core game, but also makes the game’s transition from PC to consoles (Xbox One, initially) a lot smoother.

Despite the expansion of the game’s development team, there’s no feeling that the game has lost any of its charm or driving force. It still seems very tightly focussed around its core ideas and mechanics, and the way that the audio cues help to guide you while also playing with perception feels incredibly natural.

I really want to see what the larger world of Beyond Eyes has to offer, and to see where Rae’s search for her cat will take her. There’s a lot of scope to get very creative with the world given the mechanics that are at play here, and that has me very excited for the game’s release later this year.