The Xbox Indie Games Marketplace is, at best, a mixed bag, as the vast majority of community-led games portals tend to be. There are some extreme examples of awfulness in there—the most notable that I’ve tried recently being Dossun Island, an 8-bit style platformer with dreadful animation that was clearly designed by someone who has no concept of how parallax scrolling is supposed to work. But then there’s some excellent stuff in there too—stuff which would be worthwhile on Xbox LIVE Arcade. Anyone who’s played games such as Beat Hazard will be aware that there are some genuine gems amongst the millions of massage apps and video-based crap.
And then there’s the “creative” games. For some time now, the term “indie game” has been associated with creativity, artistic experimentation and, of course, that overused word “pretentiousness”. Ever since Braid came along and either charmed or irritated everyone, the term “indie game” has been synonymous with doing things that little bit differently.
One such example of this creativity that I had the good fortune to stumble across tonight was an 80-point game called Blind Girl. In it, you play the titular blind girl and, via some very interesting game mechanics, have to collect musical notes.
Blind Girl, being blind, can’t see anything. So when you enter a level with her all you can see is her face, sitting there in inky blackness with her eyes closed. Moving around causes her face to change into some bare footprints, and the sound of her footsteps causes red “sound waves” to emanate from wherever she is. These sound waves bounce off walls, so by her making noise, the player is able to “see” the layout of the level.
As the game progresses, Blind Girl starts learning a tune. By tapping A, she can sing the part of the tune she has learned so far. This sends out green sound waves which, as the tune grows in length, travel a much greater distance and reveal much more than her footsteps alone.
As a simple maze game, it would be interesting enough. But it’s the twists and puzzles created with these simple mechanics that make Blind Girl such an intriguing game to play. “Enemies”, in the form of sinister floating eyes, are introduced a few levels in. There are red and green variants of these eyes. The red ones will chase Blind Girl if they hear her footsteps, but she can sneak past noiselessly by the player using the analog stick more lightly. The green ones will chase Blind Girl if they hear her singing. However, you can also only see where these eyes are if you hit them with the respectively-coloured sound wave, or if you’re right up close to them you can see “Z”s floating, indicating that they are asleep. Many of the puzzles revolve around manipulating the behaviour of these eyes to clear a path to the musical note, and there’s quite a few examples of creative solutions required.
Following the tradition of Braid, between levels there is some text that makes some attempt to tell a story about our titular heroine. The writers made the strange decision to do this all in rhyme, too, and the “titles” to each level are also in verse. Some of them are a bit clumsy, and it comes across as a very self-conscious attempt to be “arty”. It doesn’t detract from the game at all, though. Just be aware that if Braid‘s books irritated you, Blind Girl‘s poetry might rub you up the wrong way too.
Blind Girl is a pleasure to play. It’s pretty short, so it can easily be played through in one sitting. But the simple game mechanics, which are introduced gradually and paced well without the need for a fourth-wall breaking tutorial, work so well that it’s well worth doing that playthrough. There are times when it’s challenging, but it’s never so difficult that you want to throw the controller down and never play it again (something I experienced with Braid, and something many people have experienced more recently with Limbo). It’s a simple, polished, creative game that is a fine example of someone creating a game which doesn’t easily fit into the traditional “niches” and genres. I guess it’s a puzzle game at heart. But like many other indie games, it’s treated more as a free-flowing, interactive piece of art rather than a “game”.
Check it out. The trial allows you to play about a third of the way through the game, but the full thing is only 80 points. If you’re the slightest bit interested in creative game design, you could do far worse than check it out.