Another Sight (Switch)
Synesthesia refers to a form of sensory overlap where an individual will experience one form of sensory input by way of another sense such as tasting colors or seeing sound. The condition comes in many forms, but experiencing noise as colors in our own world is one of the more common versions of this rare phenomenon, and that specific form is the focus of the puzzle platformer Another Sight.
After having her regular vision damaged during a fall into a strange underground area beneath London, the heroine Kit ends up relying on the sounds in her environment to navigate, but she thankfully isn’t just wandering around hoping for a noisy world to guide her. A cat named Hodge appears to guide her, the player alternating control of these two leads to solve puzzles and create a path through the darkness by triggering sounds and their associated colors for Kit. One problem with this concept becomes immediately apparent as you are asked to tinker with your brightness settings. Too low and the world outside of Kit’s synesthetic view is oppressively dark, with even illuminated areas sometimes hard to make out as well. Objects of importance are often highlighted in a bright purple, but it can blend in with some of the level coloration and even worse, there’s a moment near the end of the game where you need to make out purple symbols that are far too small to be easily matched to the right switches even on a large screen. When playing as Hodge you see the world as it really is but without the highlights, meaning a thin lever might still blend in with the background no matter which character you have in charge. Set your brightness settings too high, and the angle of viewing the world only through the colors that sounds reveal is weakened, everything clear enough that you can better find and interact with the game world, thus making the core gimmick now exclusively a hindrance rather than a vital way of exploring the game’s environments.
Exploring underneath London is a slow-going affair almost exclusively because Kit will only walk at a decent speed if she’s sure the area ahead is safe. What this usually takes the form of is switching to Hodge, running a small bit ahead so Kit can hear your footsteps, switching back to cover that ground, and repeating this dull process again and again to achieve any speed. It’s exhausting and pointlessly tedious, it often better to just bite the bullet and let Kit amble slowly ahead rather than going through the needless complications of character switching only to cover a small bit of ground slightly faster. If Kit needs to jump, the destination needs to be illuminated properly, and what the game deems proper is sometimes difficult to figure out. You may think having Hodge meow at the spot or activate some nearby mechanism may be enough, but then you run to the edge and Kit refuses to make the leap, instead falling down off the side and dying. The checkpoint system often throws you back to the beginning of the game’s often slow puzzle solving segments, so missing a jump because the color in the spot wasn’t perfect is frequently aggravating. Adding to this, sometimes you can jump to a spot and then just get stuck as your landing doesn’t gel with the physics, at least two moments requiring a pause and Restart from Checkpoint in my playthrough of the game for this reason.
Kit’s conditional jumps at least could be said to have a reason to fail, the colors she uses to see apparently failing you even if it doesn’t help the game that they fade so quickly or are so finicky. However, there’s hardly any excuse for Hodge’s awful jumps. The cat has two types of jump: an awkward enormous vertical leap and a quick horizontal one. To get up to higher surfaces requires doing the vertical leap, but then manipulating the jump ever so slightly to catch onto the sides of things like pipes and platforms. Adding even a little direction before the rather rigid vertical jump turns it into the low horizontal pounce that is only good for clearing small gaps, and even then the game loves to put jumps that aren’t quite the right fit for either jumping style. Very close horizontal platforms where overshooting your destination equals death ask you to try and get the fiddly pounce just right, and vertical leaps can sometimes require multiple attempts as you bonk against the edges of the area you’re trying to reach.
The control issues and bothersome limitations ruin the ability to appreciate the game’s art direction. Kit’s view of the world can be genuinely beautiful and a few areas are built just to capitalize on it. The associations between color and sound craft wonderfully surreal twists on areas like a massive garden or an underwater area full of life, although switching to Hodge to get a look at their real appearance reveals a rather bland take on these environments perhaps as a form of juxtaposition. This Alice in Wonderland-like journey into a strange underground world where people compete for a strange power source called The Node has a few moments that are outright fantastical like moving around suspended clock parts and hovering trains, but perhaps the oddest thing you encounter on your travels are famous real people from the time period. Set in 1899, The Node’s plot significance doesn’t make the presence of electricians and inventors strange, Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla smart picks for historical references, but then impressionist painter Claude Monet, novelist Jules Verne, and pianist Claude Debussy seem present almost solely so one brief and meaningless diversion can be tossed in before you get back to the main narrative. They technically have their purposes since they become the ones to dump exposition on Kit and question her morality, but they feel like cheap celebrity cameos, especially when the character profiles on them have odd disparities like Claude Monet being called an idealist in the same sentence where it proves he has little faith in humanity and wants strict rules in place to keep them under control. It is fun to see what will be trotted out next for people with an interest in history, but it feels shallow once you realize they’re just hollow versions of famous figures.
Puzzle-solving is a big feature in Another Sight, and sadly it carries on much of the issues with imagination and execution featured elsewhere. Many puzzles are horrendously plain, the player scouting out something with Hodge and then flipping the right lever or pressing a button to let Kit cross. Boxes are pushed at ridiculously slow speeds to their destinations, a magnet in an otherwise interesting set of puzzles about building bridges and carrying characters is hampered by its slowness and trying to time how long a button is pressed in controls befitting a crane game, and the stealth segments mostly just involve the straightforward distraction tactic of meowing with Hodge so they chase him instead of Kit. There are very few interesting ideas at play, triggering sounds often done with a flip of a switch instead of clever thinking, and including needless precise jumping or climbing segments in these bland puzzles puts you at risk of being killed by controls. Many ideas could be tolerable in a less clunky title, but nothing really stokes the imagination, and when it does try to get more involved with a puzzle, you get things like the symbol-matching mentioned earlier or a piano puzzle where you figure out which keys line up with switches by trial and error and have to reactivate the puzzle after every attempt that didn’t hit the right note. Multiple unsatisfying endings for the generic plot certainly don’t add any meaningful longevity to the game, but at least a few rare moments where you need to figure out how to get Hodge or Kit to the profile collectibles ask for some thought rather than the usual mindless execution.
THE VERDICT: Another Sight has some wondrous environments to view through Kit’s synesthetic connection between sound and color, and even a few places experienced through Hodge’s perspective have a surreal atmosphere. Sadly, a few good sights are not enough reward for the grueling slowness caused by the poorly executed sight-by-sound mechanic, and even when it is integrated into some form of puzzle, it’s done with barely any imagination. Mostly made up of slow navigation, puzzles that often amount to moving a character to a switch or lever by way of clunky platforming, and mostly pointless historical figure cameos, Another Sight is a directionless game that was perhaps wrapped up too much in delivering on visual splendor instead of building anything close to a mildly interesting narrative or set of puzzles.
And so, I give Another Sight for Switch…
A TERRIBLE rating. When you step into the garden area and see the vivid colors or traverse an ethereal world with floating mechanisms, its easy to be pulled into Another Sight’s world, but only for a moment. Movement begins and you remember how needlessly slow you are, jumping crops up and you struggle with its clunkiness, and if a puzzle is involved, the best you can hope for is a poorly executed attempt at something with a bit of thought put into it or a negligible bit of bog standard platforming. Surface level commentary in the plot and the needless involvement of historical figures don’t really do anything for a game that seems to impede you at every turn, and those cameos are hardly the place the game would really want to devote time to improving. While the odd story is a poor motivator for action, cleaning up the game speed, bad jumping, unambitious puzzle design, and so much more are definitely the more important areas of focus, because even if the plot was better told, you’d still be spending a lot of time with tedious trials that don’t encourage you to keep playing.
While synesthesia can have a negative impact on some people’s lives, Another Sight makes it an annoying and tedious affliction instead of a unique way to perceive the world. Ridding Kit of her regular vision turns the need to see through sound and the many failed attempts to build off of it into constant frustration, and it feels like the pointless obstructions that emerge from it are meant to stand in for thought-provoking puzzles. Another Sight is a mess in most every way but the visual representation of synesthesia, this attempt to explore a unique form of sensory perception ending up in a game you won’t want to look into.