Not Alone In The Dark: Blindside

Something that most games tend to have in common is images. I'm the best at being egalitarian. There have been a few exceptions of course, and Blindside, due out January next year, is the latest. Created by indie devs Michael T. Astolfi and Aaron Rasmussen, the plan is to make an survival horror with no graphics at all. Take a look listen of the trailer below.

Rasmussen experienced blindness for a short time when at high school, which seems to be the inspiration behind the experience of what is, despite there being no graphics, a fully 3D adventure. It's a horror, in which you use audio to navigate, trying to solve the mystery of why you can no longer see.

The video below is from the game's Kickstarter project, so I want to add our usual caveat that we've not played the game, so cannot tell you whether we think it's good or not, and as such, we aren't suggesting that you donate to the project. You can do what you like, clearly, but understand at this point this is not an endorsement - rather it's our being intrigued by an intriguing-sounding game. To see the "in-game" clip, skip to 1:50.

(It's not, of course, the first game that visually impaired gamers can play. Not even close. It's a rather odd claim for them to make, really. Beyond the very obvious, like Interactive Fiction and text adventures, there are a great many audio games out there. Audoigames.net, for instance, have a list of over 100 of them.)

But if what they're doing works, this could be very interesting. I love the idea of scraping hands along surfaces to identify where you are. That and orientating via environmental noises seems a good use of 5.1 sound. I also like the amount of work that's going into this - it looks like they plan to take this very seriously. We've nagged them for a playable version, so we can experience it for ourselves, and they promise us we'll be the first to know.