Exploration, Assumptions, and Cats: Beyond Eyes from Tiger & Squid

[spindizzy]

Beyond Eyes is about a little girl, Rae, who is blind, as she goes looking for her missing cat. I wasn't sure what to expect from it, as it was something I picked up in the Steam Sale for cheap, but I'm still not sure how to feel about it even after I've finished it.

So, to start with: Rae is blind due to an accident! (This bothers me, a little, because disability (and blindness in particular) as a result of trauma feels a lot more common to me than characters who are born with their disability? But based on the way the game was structured, I can see why they made that choice? ... We will come back to this.) After her accident, she ends up pretty much isolated in her family home, until she ends up adopted by a cat she calls Nani – which is fine until Nani stops coming by her house. After a while of waiting for Nani to come back, Rae decides to leave her home to go looking for her cat.

That is pretty much the entire story! It's very short and simple, there's very little to both the story and the gameplay. There's not really any puzzles or anything – you're just... Exploring the world around you. It's a bit slow, admittedly, but the game does some really interesting things with its mechanics.



For example: Beyond Eyes is really visual; Rae's world starts out almost completely white and featureless (like the first level of The Unfinished Swan if you've ever played that), but as you explore the game paints itself in around you. If Rae can hear something, then the thing she can hear will fill itself in; rivers and animals and anything else that can make noise create islands of things that she can perceive. If she walks past or through or into something, it'll appear. This is, I assume, the reason the creators chose to have Rae blinded rather than born blind; the game relies entirely on her memories to fill in its visuals, and that is where the story-telling aspect of the gameplay comes in.

See, when Rae fills in the world around her, she's going off very limited experiences. A lot of the things she runs into look the same – houses are similar, all dogs are exactly the same, every cat you go near is Nani – and while, the cynical part of me thinks that it's probably to save on work, it makes perfect sense from a story perspective. And some of what she's filling in... Well, she hears running water outside and assumes it's a fountain, she hears fabric flapping and assumes it's a washing line – and then she gets closer, and finds that the one is actually a grate and the other is a creepy scarecrow, because sometimes she's wrong.

(This is used to excellent effect in the last chapter of the game, it's genuinely creepy.)

And what Rae can't perceive is just as important as what she can! What looks like a clear path closes up in seconds as walls and fences bloom in front of her. Animals that aren't making noise are functionally invisible, while bridges are a complete leap of faith until you're half-way across.



(Q: Susan, how much did you panic that you were throwing a small child into a river during this game?
A: A LOT.)

Situations with a lot of noise confuse Rae in different ways – a busy road becomes a nightmare void, and walking around in the rain wipes away the traces of where you've been. Put together, this is really cool to me – it's an uncertain world with an unintentionally unreliable narrator, pretty much entirely constructed through gameplay! That's awesome!

And the way that Rae handles this uncertainty is great – for most of the game, you can't steer her through or near things that scare her, so you have to find alternative routes, and the game colours become a lot darker and colder until she can get away from whatever's frightened her. She can get character development related to this, but it's optional, which seems like a really interesting choice considering that the entire plot of the game is Rae doing something that scares her (facing the outside world!) for the sake of her cat. I have seen optional character development in other games, but rarely in games where that arc is so close to the plot?



Honestly, my main problem with the game is with its ending. I can buy pretty much everything else about this game – a little girl getting away from her family, fine, a little girl getting all across the countryside without anyone noticing she's gone, sure, I know that happens, her asshole best friend being like "Hi, could you go look for my ball in the long grass?" – you know what, I have met kids. SURE. But that ending.

Spoilers follow; anyone who isn't interested can join me in a couple of paragraphs where the big bold text starts.

The problem is fundamentally with my expectations of what the game was about; I looked at the set up and gameplay and went "Okay, this is a game about loneliness and independence! Rae's only companion after her accident is her cat, her world's been cut down to her family's back yard, it makes sense that her going looking for Nani is so important on a personal level!" And apparently the game wanted me to take away a lesson about accepting loss as well!

... I'm having a hard time working out whether I'm grumpy about the cat being dead, or about Rae just accepting that Nani is dead despite the fact that the entire game has been a lesson in realising that her assumptions aren't always correct, and that there is more than one bloody cat in this town? (There is no mention of Nani having a tag, which I would have accepted completely as justifying her acceptance. ... Maybe I am grumpy about the cat being dead.) Her finding a collar and going "Yes, this definitely means that my cat is dead¹ and I am going to accept that now," just felt abrupt and tacked on? And the epilogue scene didn't feel like a "Yay, Rae is reconciled with her friends!" and more "I know your cat is gone, but you've got a human friend now instead!" *grimaces* I dunno, the way it was done was affecting, but the effect was annoyance rather than sadness for me personally.

¹: I will also allow "missing and officially unfindable," but I'm not sure that's much better?

ANYWAY, spoilers aside. So, this is why I have mixed feelings about it! I really adore that the game uses its mechanics and gameplay to try to represent Rae's experience? And I think it does a pretty good job of building a story about bravery and discovering the world is different to your expectations! I'm not sure that I'd want to replay it for anything more than achievement hunting, but I enjoyed Beyond Eyes, and it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Beyond Eyes is available on Steam, Xbox One, and PS4. This review was based on the Steam version.