2.5/5 ★ – clunkymechanics's review of Beyond Eyes.

Completed: February 07 2021 Time to beat: 2 Hours Platform: PlayStation 4 Beyond Eyes is a really unique little walking simulator in which you play as Rae, a young girl who has recently been blinded in an accident. You control Rae as she navigates her environment using touch, sound, and smell to journey forward to find a lost friend. This is the debut game by Dutch studio Tiger & Squid. Although it is clumsily named (although this may be a translation error, Beyond Sight?) the art style in this game is absolutely amazing, in recent years there has been a huge insurgance of watercolour-esque game art and I am here for it. Personally, Beyond Eyes ranks highly in terms of art style with other similarly styled iconic games like Gris, Gorogoa, and Child of Light. The attention to detail and the way the environment renders around you as you progress thorough levels is magical, there wasn't a moment where I felt the art became dull. The music and sound design were also excellently implemented, playing this game on PlayStation 4 was particularly intersting becasue certain sounds (birds chirping, trees rusteling) played through the dual shock 4 controller making for a more immersive experience. Unfortunately Beyond Eyes didn't have much to offer me outside of the art style. I consider myself a bit of a walking simulator connoisseur ( I am kidding but not really) and felt that this game did a lot of things I hate to see in walking simulators. The main character walks extremely slowly through the environemnt, there is some charm to this when exploring new areas as each step into the unknown could mean danger, but there were plenty of times I was lost in a level and had to spend an unreasonable amount of time inching around the environment just trying to find the correct path. The visual queues were not obvious enough for me to dictate what needed to be done next, resulting in a lot of frusterating backtracking that ruined the gameplay for me. I really hope Tiger & Squid learn from the less than optimal reception from this game because I think there is something really unique in this game that deserves to be praised.