There is a very small subset of games designed to help sighted gamers understand what the world can be like for blind or low-sighted people. I find these games fascinating because in my day job as a product owner, I crave empathy lab testing and speaking with users around their pain points so I can design solutions to ease their burden. Blind Touch is a first-person adventure game that puts you in the place of someone who has lost almost all their vision and their memory after an accident. As you get used to new and familiar surroundings, you’ll need to use your walking cane to sonically map out your environment to complete your everyday tasks.
Each level in Blind Touch has a goal to reach, like leaving your flat, walking down the street, or boarding the subway. The game starts out with almost pitch-black screens, but once you get access to your cane, you’ll be able to use the trigger and bumper buttons to tap directly in front and at 30-degree pivots from directly in front of you. Each tap sends out a sonic pulse that highlights the outline of different objects. It could be the patterned floor, designed to signal whether you can walk straight ahead or take a turn. It might be that you’ve tapped a bin, a plant, or the cat. If the echo consumes them, they have been “sensed” and become coloured in. This means you can spot them in future when playing on normal difficulty. On harder difficulties, this mechanic is far less powerful, as is the cooldown-based echo that sends a signal out to give you distances and locations of objects for you to sense, and your goal destination for a few seconds. Blind Touch plays more like a blind man’s sonar radar.
When you complete a level, you get ranked based on how many items you sensed, and these translate into a dream world where your bedroom is being rebuilt from an empty room. The premise is that the more you sense, the more your memories will return to you. If you find yourself floundering, and I certainly did, you can also enable a memory mode that gives you the option to remember a level layout and explore it with a blue-tinted visual filter to get your bearings before attempting it blind. This was helpful on several occasions, but it didn’t help me with my main gripe.
Blind Touch’s gameplay relies on the cane working correctly, and across my 2-hour completion time, it glitched out constantly. The cane gets stuck in walls and objects, and when tapping slightly to the side, sometimes it gets jammed and doesn’t return to centre. More frustratingly, the sonic ripple each tap does has a mind of its own as to whether it will sense an object or not. I tapped objects directly, had objects fully coloured in within the sonic ripple, tapped objects on the cane point and tapped them on the red part of the cane… did it work? Did it hell. I feel like either the fundamental game mechanic is broken, or I have fundamentally misunderstood the main action of the game. Either way, it’s inconsistent and deeply frustrating. After wrestling and failing to get objects sensed, I became frustrated and started to speedrun the last bits of the game because the inconsistency was winding me up. It also put me off even attempting the harder difficulties because of how poor my original experience was.
Not everything is bad, though. I recommend playing Blind Touch with headphones because the spatial sound design is great. Humans talk gibberish, but you can hear them and move towards them. The vacuum cleaner motor moves around your ears in your flat. Trains whoosh past in a sensory manner. It works very well. The menus are also written in Braille, only displaying text when you hover over the options. These are great additions that will help the game shine if the cane and ripple mechanics are patched to be consistent and less glitchy.
I’ve seen in the press releases that Blind Touch is also coming to VR, and if that’s true, I wonder if that is part of the problem. This game feels designed with VR in mind, but the depth perception for the cane and ripples hasn’t quite been optimised for non-VR gamers. Again, I could be wrong with that assumption, but all the current issues with the cane getting stuck in objects and walls evoke VR jank when a player reaches slightly out of the optimised zone of movement. I still think that Blind Touch is a unique and interesting game. At launch, it feels like its ambition is a few steps ahead of its implementation. I hope the implementation catches up, as this is an empathetic and potentially clever way to help others experience what low visibility feels like in a day-to-day setting.
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