XBLA Indie Review: BlindGiRl

“High Quality Blind Platforming”

An XboxHornet Review By WDesm.

BlindGiRl is a top-down adventure game where, no surprise, the gimmick is that you are blind.  Fortunately, your character makes up for this with a mastery of colour-coordinated echolocation, which means that you can carefully plot your path throughout levels, if you know what you are doing.  The game boasts a physics engine capable of handling fluid dynamics (namely, sound-in-air), and even features sound waves bouncing off waves, slowing down as they enter thicker mediums, and even different types of sounds waves.  This impressive engine is held together with a few puzzles in each level, and a fragmented storyline that needs your help to unravel.  Not bad for 80MSPoints.

Blind GiRl starts you off looking at an uncoloured music score, which acts as the level select screen of the game.  Your confusion in-game is matched by confusing snippets of poetry, as the blind girl tries to understand the whos, whats, wheres, whys, and whens of her life.  Standing on a note starts that level, which usually involves you being in the middle of a pitch-black screen.  As you move, red sound-waves travel outwards, bouncing and reflecting, which acts as your echolocation.  Each step gives more clarity to the level design, and the faster you walk (thankfully, the analog stick is touch-sensitive on this game), the louder the noises you make.

In total, there are three colours of sound-waves you can make – red, for walking; green, for singing (and your song gets sequentially longer and more complex as you collect more music notes); and blue, for screaming – even though it will serve little purpose for most levels in puzzle-solving, should you get irrevocably stuck, BlindGiRl will scream loudly, echoing terror through the screen.

The physics are well-done, each level’s puzzles are difficult yet not fiendish, and the fragmented story is enough to keep you interested in the details.  The game is not necessarily long, and there isn’t likely to be a lot of replayability in this title, but for the rock-bottom price, I legitimately enjoyed BlindGiRl; there is a certain charm to a game that has creativity and artistic merit without being pretentious or overt about either of those qualities.  Give this one a try, and just “see” what you’re missing out on!

Game Score 8/10

Download a demo of the game here.

Watch a clip of the gameplay, and the multiple different colour-blind modes available in the game here.