A missing cat gives rise to a game about seeing sound
Sherida Halatoe’s Beyond Eyes aims to help sighted people understand what it’s like to be blind – but in a more innocent sense, it’s about celebrating the marvel of perception. Each of the game’s environments is void to begin with – a gleaming pearly expanse, empty save for your character Rae, who stands in a small circle of visible terrain.
As you guide her forward, everything she hears or touches takes shape as a flourish of watercolour, gradually populating the whitebox with trees, walls and brooks. Though vulnerable and slightly comic in her white dress and wellies, Rae is a god creating the world in the act of sensing it. “I thought watercolour was the perfect medium for that,” explains Halatoe. “Because when you drop it onto paper it kind of flows out in all directions, and I liked that as a metaphor for her mind-mapping the world around her.”
Rae lost her sight to an accident with fireworks when she was a toddler. As with a sadly large number of people with vision impairments, she has grown to be something of a recluse, friendless save for a chubby ginger cat named Nani. Now Nani has gone missing, and Rae must set out across a world of hidden obstacles and hazards in order to find him.
In the process, she’ll discover just how much of a gap there can be between her sheltered expectations and the town that (seemingly) surrounds her. Objects persistently refuse to be what they sound like from a distance. As you approach a clothesline, hung with checkered aprons, for instance, the rasp of a jackdaw reveals it to be a scarecrow. Later on, the tapping of a woodpecker transforms into the clicking of a stoplight. At times the spectre of the cat is visible, squeezing through a stile or trotting down a path like some sort of mischievous spirit.
Rae doesn’t behave like an automaton – she’ll react visibly to reversals and surprises, hunching over in fear when she’s confronted by something that she doesn’t fully understand. She may even resist direction, though Halatoe won’t be drawn on how. Lead her away from the source of confusion, and she’ll manage to recover, lifting her chin and reaching out to touch surfaces as she passes them.
Halatoe hopes that Beyond Eyes will stand apart from games in which the protagonist is just a tool – thrown into danger without concern. “Instead of an empty vessel that you can do whatever you want with, I wanted to have players care for a character and feel responsible for her,” she explains. “It’s all about empathy. I think one of the reasons I like making games above other media is, you can tell people about what something is like, but with a game you can put someone in somebody else’s shoes.” Edwin Evans-Thirlwell