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Discover This Game World as a Blind Girl Searching for Her Cat

'Beyond Eyes' represents visually how the blind mind-map their surroundings through other senses.
​Image: Beyond Eyes

For a person with impaired vision, leaving the house can be as daunting a prospect as travelling to another country. According to the Royal National Institut​e of Blind People, almost half of blind or partially sighted UK residents feel "moderately" or "completely" cut off from the world around them, and only a third of those of working age are in employment.

Sherida Halatoe's video game Beyond Eyes aims to help the fully sighted understand such challenges, while also teaching its players to think more positively about those affected. Its world consists not of stifling darkness but of light, a serene expanse of unseen objects that inspires curiosity rather than claustrophobia.

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"It's open, it's the unknown," explained Halatoe during an interview at the Rezzed gaming expo in London. "For a lot of players it's still quite intimidating to have white space there, but the blind people I talk to describe it not as living in the dark. There's just nothing there."

Image: Beyond Eyes

"We associate darkness with fear, but it's not scary, it's just nothing," she went on. "And that's one of the reasons I went with the white backdrop, because that to me communicates more of the nothingness than a black screen—and without the negative associations."

Beyond Eyes isn't the first game to portray blindness—only last month, Motherboard spoke to the creators of T​hree Monkeys, a fantasy simulation in which you navigate a 3D world by sound alone. The Beyond Eyes approach is quite novel, however. Originally a graduation project and now due to be published by Team 17 this year, the game represents visually how the blind mind-map their surroundings by way of other senses.

The protagonist, a girl who was blinded in an accident some years before, has ventured outside her home in search of the cat that is her only friend. As she wanders through the void, everything she touches or hears is manifest to the player's eye as a s​plash of watercolour.

A drystone wall coalesces into being as she trots along it, one arm held out; a church bell pulses in the distance, then fades from view. As ambitious as it is, the game's appeal is quite simple: It rests on the satisfaction of filling in the picture, as you join up threads of scenery into a surreal, free-floating archipelago.

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It's a welcome change from other games, which treat their characters as unfeeling tools

"There was a lot of trial and error, to be honest," said Halatoe of the aesthetic. "Originally I was thinking about portraying blindness through the other senses, about how you would visualise how something feels or sounds. But it was a lot more abstract than it is now, almost horror-esque. The presentation was very different—screeching noises with very harsh, jaggedy lines."

Image: Beyond Eyes

If Beyond Eyes avoids falling into the company of horror games, it is still imbued with threat. Not everything is what it sounds like: At one point, the flap of fabric gives rise to the image of a clothesline, but as the girl approaches, a burst of cawing reveals the object to be a scarecrow. Later, a woodpecker taps away at the air beside an anomalous, writhing tunnel of blackness; on closer inspection, the bird turns out to be a clicking stoplight near a busy road.

These transformations tell us much about how sheltered the girl is, about how she has come to live in a world of picturesque fantasy. This is also palpable from her body language: upright and receptive when sure of her ground, stooped and resistant when the landscape defies her expectations. It's a welcome change from other games, which treat their characters as unfeeling tools in the service of player objectives.

Naturally, Halatoe has struggled to obtain feedback from those who have experience of a vision impairment, but the responses she has received have been positive.

"There was a girl who came up to me after a talk that I gave. She had been blind for most of her life, but only recently regained a lot of her eyesight. And the game really represented for her how she used to feel, crossing roads—this huge mush of sound. That was a really nice thing to hear, because coming from a fully visual person it's all guesswork, right?"