Unsighted [PS4/NSW/PC]

[fuse]

Top-down indie action-RPG. For fans of: Hyper Light Drifter, Cross Code.

Loads to like here: decent, challenging combat, good bosses, some nice (though quite specifically stylised) animation, good ability/equipment based traversal, tonnes of systems to interact and engage with. It's got borrowed ideas from all over the shop - a full night/day cycle, pets, parries, active reloads, crafting, fishing, sliding block pu... ok maybe not all of them are likeable. But there's a lot going on!

One whopper of a thing to take issue with: the timer. At its recommended difficulty, nothing's taken me more than a few attempts to clear, but I've still managed to die plenty of times, and not always at big staged battles as you'd expect. The bigger challenge by far though is that all of the automatons in the game - NPCs, your fairy-bot companion, and even yourself - have a limited amount of time before you turn 'unsighted', and essentially, die. Meteor dust can extend this life span, but is hugely limited, only grants an extra 24 hours, and is also the only way to produce additional healing syringes to let you heal mid-fight.

Folks with FOMO issues will be driven absolutely bonkers by it - it has all of the usual trappings of diverging paths, secrets to explore, puzzles to solve - and yet a lot of them essentially boil down to wasted time. I've only done 3 of the 5 main dungeons and I have already got NPCs and vendors dropping dead, with my own timer getting perilously short on top. If you have any kind of completionist streak, or are more inclined to take your time with things, I would absolutely recommend setting the difficulty appropriately from the start. It might be unjustified, but right now I feel like I'm in real danger of ending up in a position where I literally can't finish it, which is a thing that feels totally alien in this era!

[fuse]

Turns out the time pressure isn't quite as intense as it lets you believe at first, with a few ways to give yourself a bit more breathing room later on - but that's also not to say that keeping all of the plates spinning is an easy task. I just finished it last night, and it ended up being a bit of a crawl over the line with quite a few characters not there to see it. One that I did let die totally locked me out of one avenue of upgrades, which I wasn't expecting and caused some worry!

General feelings on this are positive though; it's a good game and from a teeny tiny studio is a very impressive achievement. With this in mind the visuals are decent and functional, whereas I did feel that the music very rarely added anything to any of the environments - this is perhaps the area where the Hyper Light Drifter comparison works least in Unsighted's favour. While it's got a lot going on mechanically, I also feel like it could've done with a few less borrowed ideas - I'm not sure dropping half your bolts on death and having to go back to collect them was necessary, not once did I ever pay any mind to the combo meter, and so on. Comparatively, a quick-switch weapon system would've made a world of difference to fluidity!

Still: good game, well done team.