Unsighted Review: a stylish and queer hack and slasher
Unsighted is Hyper Light Drifter if Hyper Light Drifter was very queer. It’s a stylish pixel art isometric hack and slasher in the vein of Metroid or Castlevania with a melancholy tone, killer soundtrack, and a doomed protagonist. Except the doomed protagonist wants to reach her girlfriend. Who is also doomed.
Unsighted comes from Brazilian developers, Studio Pixel Punk and it wears its heart on its sleeve. Thanks to some novel twists and a fun cast of characters, it is a jam-packed take on the formula. Sometimes, it just tries to do a little more than it can handle.
In a post-apocalyptic world where androids are fuelled by “anima”, a special resource mined from a meteor, humans have seemingly cut them off from the meteor and the life-giving fuel. Without it, the androids eventually decay and become “unsighted”, transforming into mindless killing machines. In the role of Alma, a badass android with a classic case of the video game protagonist amnesia, you’re racing against time to not just keep yourself going, but to save other NPCs. Everyone’s anima, yours included, ticks down in real-time. Take too long to reach a certain area, and you might find a once-friendly NPC has become a foe.
I love this kind of thing, especially since it reminded me of a personal favourite of mine, Final Fantasy 13: Lightning Returns. As in that game, your quest isn’t just about tackling bosses and reaching the end, it’s all about who you help along the way. Even the simplest side quest takes on a new dimension when it puts your entire mission in danger. Waste too many hours chasing down a favour for a friend and who knows what unforeseen consequences await down the line.
The game’s story is a little heavy-handed, delivered in by some clunky exposition, but it still manages to be sparse enough to let those moments carry emotional weight. Mainly it gets by on having a diverse and charming array of android characters, all with wonderful designs. Their circumstances, marginalised and cut off from vital care, won’t be outlandish for many queer players. Wherever the delivery might falter, the substance of its themes shines through. Unsighted really has a lot of fun with its androids too, designing them in all shapes and sizes. A little old lady in a giant mech was a personal favourite.
As a whole, the game is quite the looker, dense with detail and complimented by a lush day and night cycle with rain coming in occasionally, making it feel more alive than I’ve come to expect from the genre. Even the menus are cool to flick through, giving you an up-close look at your character and their various weapons.
Oh and what weapons. Unsighted, like any good metroidvania, doesn’t bury you in weapons but slowly feeds you a varied arsenal where each addition feels more like a tool for a certain problem, than simply a bunch of upgrades. The early unlock, the shuriken, a throwing blade that can be steered in flight (flashbacks to 2008’s Dark Sector, anyone?) is an early showcase for its weaponry, all opening up the world. Though in truth the world can be tackled in a variety of ways. There’s an early intended path, but the further in you get, the more it branches and you can tackle things in different orders. The invention in its weapons applies to the world too, with areas hosting novel little mechanics and puzzles that really got me to engage the old grey matter. Navigating mine carts through an old mine by finding ways to switch tracks is an early highlight. Unsighted is always mixing up what’s expected of you.
There is perhaps, a little too much. Its core action RPG elements are dense enough with crafting and multiple kinds of upgrades to juggle but then there’s fishing, digging for treasure, and even managing pets, who require feeding and petting. The game has Gears of War’s active reloading for heaven’s sake! It feels like they crammed in every idea they could think of and while it’s admirable and definitely absorbing, I found myself losing track of various things. Perhaps that’s the point though. There simply isn’t time for everything.
It’s not just all the game’s systems competing for your attention. While it’s pretty fetching, that busy pixel art makes for a noisy image in the midst of combat. With dozens of enemies and projectiles flying around the screen, it really matters that your character is small enough to be easily lost in the crowd. Worse, the UI is awkwardly split with stamina measured in a bar over your character’s sprite while health is kept up in the corner. Keeping stamina over the character feels like a clear answer to helping you stay focused in busy scenes…so why then is health relegated elsewhere?
Not to mention, the game is bloody hard. It doesn’t take a whole lot to kill Alma and since it’s not always clear where to go, there’s not always a distinction between enemies that are tough and enemies you definitely aren’t expected to fight yet. Maybe I’m simply too old now for games like this but countering dozens of attacks in quick succession is more a test of my RSI than my mettle. Welcomely though, you can customise the difficulty, in a few ways. There’s an option to turn off the character timers if losing NPCs is too much to bear and you can switch the combat’s difficulty down to forgiving. Plus, there’s co-op, so you can always enlist a friend to aid you.
One bad concession the game makes to difficulty is the inclusion of a sidekick character, a fairy robot, who follows you around to give advice. This is mildly annoying most of the time but becomes outright infuriating when they keep insisting, in unskippable and repeated exchanges following a death, about ways to make the game easier. “Try equipping some cogs to make combat easier!” they’ll cheerfully chirp, forcing you to rattle through some text boxes before getting to take control again. It’s teeth-grindingly patronising to say the least.
Despite this hand-holding, so much of the game’s combat goes unexplained. There are charge attacks, jumping attacks, faster combos if you change direction after a swing…and that’s just for starters. Then there’s the inconsistency of the game pointing out what you should do next and leaving you to your own devices. Because it would yank the camera and have this sidekick tell me where to go, I often assumed that when it wouldn’t do that I was going the wrong way yet all too often that wasn’t the case. I didn’t really want more or less hand-holding and signposting, I just wanted the game to pick one style. Either show me around the world or let me get lost but this half-hearted guidance wasn’t appreciated.
Charging around the map, racing to find the right way forward, the key thing from Lightning Returns I maybe wish Unsighted made room for was downtime. In Lightning Returns there will be quests gated behind set times, meaning you had a justifiable reason to bin off whatever was important to do side stuff, all of which mattered thanks to the nature of the story. Unsighted’s side content feels even more vital to the outcome of the game but the lack of any downtime meant I often dared not engage with it for fear of messing up the main storyline. Unsighted’s store page boasts of the value for subsequent playthroughs but it’s tough to make time to play a game of this scale once, never mind twice. Fearing terrible endings for its core characters and stories should I stray too far from the path, my curiosity was stifled. This isn’t bad per se, the game clearly wants to overwhelm you with the magnitude of your mission. No matter how hard you try, you won’t save everyone. That’s powerful, if overbearing.
What keeps Unsighted all held together in spite of any flaws is the characters and their story. Despite some clunky exposition, it all nonetheless reaches a tremendous payoff. There’s no conclusion that isn’t hard-won in this game and there’s tremendous catharsis in its closing hours. Through all the trials and all the setbacks, helping those you care about makes it worth it. I cherish those I managed to save.
Unsighted understands what really matters and while it may have one too many systems bolted onto its cybernetic body, its core is bright and powerful like few games out there.
