The following was originally posted on the Extra-Life blog.
At shows like E3, it’s rare to find genuine sincerity amidst the
marketing speak and fluffy handshakes on the show floor. In the noise of the
massive and imposing Microsoft booth, more arena than booth, I was able to snag
a half-hour respite inside a small, air conditioned room to meet with the
creator of Beyond Eyes, a game about a newly-blinded young girl learning to
live without the use of her eyes.
The game’s creator, Sherida Halatoe sits near me on a strangely
comfortable square-shaped sofa in an Xbox green room. Maybe the sofa is
comfortable only because it’s a relief to be sitting down on the third day of
E3, and in the air conditioning nonetheless. Halatoe, a short, quiet woman,
with unkempt hair under a knit beanie, is about as unimposing as the game she’s
about to show us. Her modesty is a nice change of pace from the chest puffing
bravado of so many exhibitors on the show floor. And the game’s focus on novel,
unique, passive experimentation is just as refreshing.
As the demo begins, Halatoe tells us about the origin of the
game. I watch a girl on screen walking around a cloudy white world, painting it
with her own visual approximation of what she hears, feels and smells. Like
Flow and Portal before it, Beyond Eyes began life as a school project for
Halatoe, until a publishing firm asked her if they could shop it around to game
publishers. “They showed it to Microsoft and a few days later, Microsoft said,
‘we like this Beyond Eyes game and we’d like to do something with it for our E3
briefing next year.’” She sheepishly laughs, “I kind of wasn’t ready for that.”
They assigned her a team of programmers, artists and sound
designers and asked her to get the game playable on Xbox One for this summer.
“I never had to make anything with a team like this,” she recalls, “but I kind
of just became the Creative Director.” However unprepared she might’ve felt for
the task, the team has brought the game to Xbox One with beautiful results.
Rae walks through the watercolor world, literally filling the
visuals in with her own image of how the world appears in her mind. When she
encounters something in the world, it’s represented on screen unless something
like wind or rain distorts Rae’s ability to read the world around her. However,
Rae – and by extension, the player – can’t always trust her instincts as things
aren’t always what they appear to be. At the beginning of the demo she
approached something that sounded like running water, she gets close enough to
realize that it’s a water fountain. Later, she hears something similar, but as
it draws nearer, the image changes from a fountain into a rusted sewage pipe.
The game constantly plays with the player’s preconceptions and
prior prejudices. Just as Rae struggles with her perception of reality, Beyond
Eyes tests the player’s perception of the world around them. “I didn’t want to
have traditional puzzles. I was thinking about how to make this world feel
authentic.” Halatoe explains as she guides Rae around a farm, uncovering a
beautiful, grounded world with cows, chickens, and fresh laundry flapping in
the wind. “I was thinking about challenges people face in life and wanted to
make a representation of that.”
Halatoe and the team want Beyond Eyes to create empathy in the
player for anyone dealing with physical disabilities. “Most of these things are
simple things that you and I would do on a daily basis without thinking about
it. Getting milk out of the fridge or just putting clothes on and making sure
they match.” She explains as Rae explores an ever more sinister and unnerving
version of her perceptive reality on screen. “But for Rae, it becomes an
obstacle.”
The challenge of Beyond Eyes seems to be more mental and
emotional than intellectual and that’s definitely by design. In the short demo,
Halatoe hinted strongly at the ebb and flow of the game’s emotional peaks and
valleys. Towards the end of the demo, Rae comes upon what she believes to be a
fresh stream, but as she approaches, it morphs into a busy highway. Halatoe
ends the demo at that moment, leaving me wondering how it will end and sparking
my interest for the game’s release later this year.
Like
her protagonist, Halatoe seems to have been unexpectedly thrust into a new
world of challenges, and now must try to find her way without losing herself.
Her first game looks to be one of the Xbox One's newest indie darlings. After
her first E3 appearance and seeing her school project on the big stage at
Microsoft’s press conference, she seems poised for success in this competitive
industry. As she put it, “I just wanted to make a cool game, which got out of
hand a little bit.”
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