I am intrigued by Farsight, a nervy (if trendily) liminal space explorer announced at Not E3’s Horror Game Awards Showcase. It tugs on a fear I’ve never had, but will probably start thinking about at every future Specsavers visit: being dragged into that distant red-roofed house shown in optometry exams, and hunted by the spooks within.
However, I’ve also recently been made aware of another first-person, eye-related psychological indie thriller, Time to Wake Up. And, well, this one has a Steam demo, so…
Time to Wake Up’s ocular fixation has less to do with its setting and more with how you traverse it. Stuck in a semi-lucid dream shaped by – what else? – past traumas, you can blink at any time to shift between two variants of the same space. That may conjure up eyelash-flapping memories of Before Your Eyes, another game that married reality-jumping to blinkING (tracked, real-life blinking, in that case), but the fact that you’re instantly flicking between the same point in two similar-yet-distinct domains has it feeling more like Dishonored 2’s A Crack in the Slab mission. Or Titanfall 2’s Effect and Cause. Except for the purposes of exploration and light puzzle-solving, instead of temporally ambushing henchmen.
I’d say this is a relatively peaceful application of the reality-jumping concept, the demo often asking you to go searching for key artifacts in one plane before carrying it over to the other, or having you climb a stack of fantastically oversized books to blindly dive into the opposite realm like a teleporting otter. Only, Time to Wake Up is no cosy puzzler, and will happily appropriate its own jump cuts to unsettle you with sudden flashes of squalor and decay. It doesn’t stray into outright horror within the 45 minutes or so of demo time, but there’s a definite sense of it heading towards more perturbing places.
In any case, it’s promising stuff, already showing that developers Eye Blink Twice are thinking up ways of playing with the central mechanic that range outside of Arkane and Respawn’s original efforts. I’m hoping the voice-in-your-head narration is still subject to change – it varies a little too starkly between convincingly emotive and wisecracking smugness, and does a lot of telling while the environments are already showing – but a spot of ambiguously internal monologing is worth this slice of clever dreamwalking. Full game’s out sometime this year.
