Developer: Tiger & Squid | Released: 2015 | Genre: Adventure, Facile
Regarding brightness, this game was the polar opposite of Among the Sleep. Here white was consistently dominating the screen. It was short – about two hours, including one level restart because of a bug.
Rae, a little girl blind after an accident, had to go look for her friend, Nani – which was an orange cat. The game was quite unique in the way it used her blindness as a gimmick. I was walking her around removing white “fog of war” that was drawn depending on being in close vicinity. Sometimes, a noise in the distance could temporarily show a hotspot, like a woodpecker working a tree or a church bell. There were also permanent hotspots created by constant sounds such as a streaming river or a waterfall.
Most of the game was about finding my way through fields and a village, uncovering white fog. Sometimes she was smelling the cat thus showing where to go next, and there were very light tasks such as throwing bread for seagulls to get out of the way, or fetching a ball for another girl.
I had mixed feelings about this game, but for the most part it was cute and short enough to warrant the installation. I actually quite liked “painting” the surroundings as it reminded me of a game mechanic that I used to find enjoyable. On the other hand, the girl was walking very slowly. Since she was blind it was quite understandable, but it was still too much. I often yearned for a run button.
It was also sometimes too easy to get into a loop of constantly bumping into house walls and bushes, having to find my way around. I then tried sticking solely to the paths and roads, but the game sometimes abandoned those just to spice things up. There were also things to back out of or walk around.
Especially barking dogs.
One really sweet idea that was used from time to time was to reveal something in the distance as what she guessed it was, then as she got close it transformed into what it actually was. For example, a fountain in the distance turned out to be a sewer pipe instead.
- I had to go quite a long way around a fence to get a ball for Lily, a girl she met by a fence.
- When it started the rain, the drops were few and slow. Not the most realistic rain I’ve ever seen.
- Later it rained a lot more, and the noise from it prevented the stickiness of the fog.
- After a level in a harbour, I found a series of walls that she later deducted was a cemetary instead.
- There were lots of houses with doors, none of which she could ever enter.
- I opened the gate to a chicken yard that I couldn’t close. The chickens didn’t care either way.
- A busy road was illustrated as a long and dark cloud of smoke. Luckily there was a crossing.
- If a man popped up to move or change something, he was often whistling. Loudly.
- The cat turned out to be dead (she only found its collar) but the girl with the ball visited her.
In the second level of the game I hit a bug as I discovered a barking dog. Somehow I managed to sidestep the path just enough to get into a repeating cutscene loop that I couldn’t break out of. I had to quit the game and then resume it, and that’s where I discovered that I was set back quite a bit.