Sensory Overload: ‘Blind’ Now Available on Rift
In early September, Tiny Bull Studios and Fellow Traveller Games announced a release date for Blind—the highly stylized, narrative-driven puzzler we originally showcased during Oculus Game Days at PAX East. Today, we’re excited to share that you can finally step inside this black-and-white psychological thriller and uncover the mysteries of its twisted mansion using echolocation and your wits on Rift!
What began as a joke during the 2014 Global Game Jam’s brainstorming phase quickly turned into a full-fledged prototype with cunning mechanics reminiscent of Perception and Stifled. Although it started out with a decidedly survival-horror bent, it has since evolved into a slow burning story built on more than jump scares. As Tiny Bull Studios CEO and Lead Game Designer Matteo Lana and CTO and Lead Programmer Rocco Luigi Tartaglia explain, “When we started to imagine the possibilities of VR, we realized we could tell an interesting story and let the player savor the feeling of being immersed in total darkness, rather than being scared of it.”
Average playthroughs clock in at five or six hours, though completionists can likely get a full eight hours of enjoyment out of it as they fully explore the environment, nab every collectible, and unlock every achievement.
Drawing from Tiny Bull’s Italian roots, film buffs may notice narrative and atmospheric influences from the giallo genre of the 1960s and ’70s, including the works of creative auteurs Dario Argento and Mario Bava, with a bit of Greek tragedy and German Expressionism thrown in for good measure.
While VR is often understood as a predominately visual medium, the team behind Blind subverted the expectations of visual spectacle in favor of a more muted experience with an emphasis on the sense of presence generated by spatialized audio. “Partially removing the ‘video’ from video game was our way of telling a story that doesn’t focus on what we want the player to see, but what we hope they will feel,” note Lana and Tartaglia. “Blind doesn’t openly explain everything the player sees, as we wanted to leave some room for interpretation. Our hope is that, after completing the game, players will take a little time to think about what they’ve experienced and come up with their own interpretation of the story.”
We weren’t able to get any specific details on Tiny Bull’s future plans, but we did learn that the team consumed in excess of 5,000 pizzas during the course of development. That’s a whole lotta pie.
Step inside the darkness of Blind and see if you can escape the sadistic Warden today!
— The Oculus Team
