Unsighted

A solid action-adventure with an innovative core mechanic that is unfortunately at odds with how I would like to engage with the game. Unsighted starts with you waking up in the ruins of a battlefield with no memory of how you got there and a timer telling you when you will lose sentience turn into a mindless automaton. You have a sword, a little floating companion, and no time to spare. Pretty strong hook. Every NPC has a timer as well, and scattered across the world are pickups that extend someone’s life by 24 hours (which is about 30 minutes in-game). There aren’t too many though, so you must decide who gets their life extended and who does not. Every decision is a risk of losing time: should you explore that corridor, try to solve the optional puzzle, seek out more resources with the chance that you die and lose progress? It can be a bit stressful, which is of course exactly what the devs were going for, and they nailed that feeling. The one major downside to this is that I would have liked to more deeply explore the world they created, which is very difficult when you gotta go fast. The devs do provide you with the option to turn off the timer if you want to play at your own pace, which is a great accessibility option, but taking away the driving force would just make this a Hyper Light Drifter derivative. It’s pretty short, and I suppose I could just run it back, but there are simply too many other games in my library calling my name. As you make your way from room to room and biome to biome, you’ll clear rooms of enemies, complete platforming challenges and solve some light puzzles. It reminded me a lot of CrossCode in its construction, and of course any top-down Zelda game. There are a few other side quests with their own mechanics: a fishing game, a treasure map, and probably some other things too. For a short game, it does its best to keep you doing something new all the time. Combat is all about parrying your enemy to create an opening. Once you get the hang of that, well, that’s kind of it. Just parry and whack it. Combat feels good and fluid, but it did feel like the difficulty curve completely flattened out once I got the timing down for parrying, which is basically the same for each enemy. Some enemies require multiple parries to stagger them, but that doesn’t change very much. However, one thing I really liked is how you can change your loadout on the fly. This was useful for world traversal (when you need multiple items or abilities to complete a task) as well as enemy encounters. The platforming and puzzling varies by location, and I thought they did a good job of making each area feel unique. Each one has its own gimmick, but something that stood out to me is that every area links together via unlockable passageways, so I would bet this game has some cool speedrunning optimizations. Also, judging from the achievement names, you can sequence break the game a bit as long as you have the right equipment. They really designed all this with the player in mind. I might have been compelled to complete another run for more achievements if the story and writing were stronger, but I think this is one of the weaker areas of the game. It’s not bad, and I love to see queer POC women representation in video games, but Alma and Raquel’s story didn’t instill any strong feelings in me. There’s a pretty good section where you are chasing down memos left by the missing love interest, but beyond that I thought a lot of the writing was stilted. I did feel driven to try to save everyone, though, and I came pretty close — RIP Teresa. Also, I found the fifth dungeon … very difficult. Like, way more so than any other area. Maybe it’s just a type of puzzle solving that I’m not particularly good at, but it took me like three times longer to complete that one than any other dungeon. Is that just me? Curious to know if anyone else had a similar experience. I think the devs did a lot to consider how the player would want to engage with their game and made it all work very well. So even though I treated this as a one-and-done, my ranking for this goes up a bit since I can recognize how multiple playthroughs would bring out so much more in this game, and I think anyone who chose to run this several times for different achievements would have a lot of fun with it.

This is the best Zelda-like you've never played. Good dungeons, fun combat. Lemsbians.

Not gonna even hold you- Unsighted is peak af. Alma, as a character, is already very interesting from the start. Gameplay seems simple enough. However, it evolves over time, blowing your mind to discover abilities that are merely mechanically unlocked when the player knows what movement animations trigger them. This means certain moves are not really locked at all. You just have to know how to do them. Certain vital tools used to progress to hidden/linking map areas take a similar approach via crafting. This is something I've never seen in games. The counter and dodging system never stops being fun. Gameplay variety also hits perfectly as the game progresses. It's all very impressive for a 16 bit looking game. It is surely something that a corresponding hardware would have never been able to accomplish until now. Highly recommended.