A Blind Legend (PC)

The idea behind A Blind Legend is certainly a novel one. You play as a character who is blind, and as an extension of that fact, the player themselves sees nothing that can assist in how they play. The screen is almost wholly subsumed by a black and grey smoke that gives you no clue on where you are in game or what you are up to. The tutorials are all done by a disembodied voice, although the choice to have it delivered as an artificial sounding feminine voice-to-speech program breaks from the fantasy setting of the adventure. Besides notifications that you should be using headphones and the game’s title, the only time there is on-screen text is during the credits that are also read aloud to you. A visually impaired player can truly rely on their sight during this adventure while other players are urged to truly immerse themselves into this image free experience, but it definitely feels like most of this game is an ambitious idea by a team who had no creative ideas for how to follow through on it.

The adventure takes place in a fantasy kingdom, one that is mostly grounded in the medieval era but features the likes of witches, zombies, and perhaps other beasts, although that creature by the water could have been either a crocodile or some form of mythological serpent since you only ever hear the foes you encounter. In fact, if the credits hadn’t outright labelled some of the foes you encounter as zombies, I would have been perfectly willing to assume that the seemingly supernatural elements were just a trick of not being able to see the truth of the situation. However, the reason for this adventure that has you face such unusual foes and takes you across the land despite your lack of sight is the unfortunate fate of Sir Edward Blake. The king himself has a vendetta against this blinded knight, and to assert his power, he snatches up Blake’s wife and ferries her off to the castle with the intent of marrying her. Blake is driven by his anger to pursue, but he needs the assistance of his young daughter Louise to navigate not only the harsh climes and dangerous environments ahead, but to be able to navigate through the world at all.

Considering how important the audio is to this experience that essentially robs you of every other sense, you would have expected them to have better voice actors on board. This wasn’t originally made in English so perhaps its native French fares better, but Blake’s voice actor struggles to sell his often intense emotions, and the voices of people like bandits and soldiers who attack you are sometimes unintentionally goofy. A bit more surprising than their performances though is the language featured in the game, A Blind Legend not shying away from being explicit both in general language and some rather dark implications of the fates in store for Blake and Louise should he fail certain fights. While children might not have patience for this title’s concept, leaning into a fully mature story was not something I expected, and its made even worse because the plot is so thin. Most of the game is just traveling from one place to another, running into enemies sometimes or having to get around a dangerous location. Most of the midsection could be trimmed out because of the repeated concepts that do little to enhance the adventure, and while we do get bits that illustrate how Blake cares for his daughter and show how lost he’d be without her during them, we also get him hitting her for running after a horse that he then happily rides.

The plot is unfortunately best pushed aside so you can instead engage with this game’s central gimmick, the idea that you are truly left to depend on your hearing alone… save for a few parts that slightly break away from it. When you are involved in a fight, if you manage to score a hit on your opponent, the screen will flash white to indicate a successful hit. What’s more, if you yourself take damage, there will be a flash of red, and while both hitting the enemy and being injured both have sound cues, it is actually more reliable to just go off these screen flashes instead to determine your successes and failures. It feels a bit too harsh to criticize this one break away from the concept, technically Blake has his sense of smell and touch to guide him as well but we as the player do not, so maybe a few color flashes isn’t a huge departure from the core concept. The fact it seemingly makes up for the slight ambiguity in fight sound is a bit of an issue though, and it’s a shame too, because much of the game does use the sound design to great effect. Walking towards and into a waterfall is very evocative, your footsteps change to match the different places you walk through, and the game uses the direction a noise is coming from to guide you pretty well. It is a bit hard to differentiate if something is immediately in front of or behind you at times, but the sound design is definitely top notch when it comes to communicating your position in the world and what you’re interacting with at the time.

However, interaction is where A Blind Legend utterly fails. There are two things you’ll be doing in A Blind Legend: following your daughter’s shouts, and fighting incredibly similar enemies. Most levels involve the former, the player able to call on Louise any time they desire to get information on how they should be moving. Louise guides the player through many different locations, some like the steaming geysers and the narrow cave path posing actual dangers if you deviate from her instructions… but there’s nothing preventing you from calling for directions over and over again. When failing to do so can lead to death and getting set back to continue the tedious walking process again, you’ll keep asking Louise to notify you where she is so you can walk to her or suffer for being too proud to do so. Sprinting can speed up these sections, and sometimes you need to sprint in sections where you’re outrunning someone, but these boil down to charging a direction, coming to a quick stop and checking with Louise if you need to adjust, and then doing another small burst before repeating the process. Riding a horse and similar involved chases at least have her call out actions you then easily perform, but so much of the game, even just navigating a town to get to the next story beat, is the long, boring, arduous process of stepping forward and seeing where your daughter is in reference to you. Her lines don’t change much over the course of the game so you can learn that she actually means to turn twice to the left when she says she is on your left rather than making a single turn, but this just means much of the game is filled with Louise’s repeated calls to get you through rather boring walking challenges. There is a portion where a monk guides you instead that is a bit interesting for breaking you out of your comfort zone, but it too fails to make moving around anything more than something that must be done slowly and with repeated instruction.

The fights aren’t really creative either. Enemies will attack you from one of four sides, and to deal damage to them, you must swing you sword in their direction at the right time based on their grunting. What this boils down to is hunkering down with your shield so you’re invincible to all but one or two enemy types, waiting to hear where they are, and either deflecting so you can land multiple hits or just striking during their attack wind up for one successful hit. Many foes take plenty of hits even if you consistently deflect and hit them as much as you can with your sword, and they often come in groups as well. Listening for arrows and raising your shield while on the move is at least a cute break from combat design that touches on a unique way of reacting during the adventure, but most every fight plays the same save for learning when you should and shouldn’t strike. No fight is very exciting because they are all so formulaic, and while it is possible to slip up if you mistime attacks or deflections, you can also sustain a bit of damage before you’re dead… in most cases. Usually your heartbeat and breathing increase when you’re damaged, but some foes or dangers are instant kills. It feels less like these frustrations stem from the lack of sight and more from design that can’t think of any other way to punish you save forcing a chapter restart, but at least the game doesn’t decide that being blind means the whole experience should be punishingly difficult. You may constantly resort to the same tactics to survive, but Blake is at least a capable warrior in your hands despite how long it takes to get anything done.

THE VERDICT: A Blind Legend delivers on its idea of almost completely stripping away visual information to simulate the blind knight’s situation but it has no clue on how to make playing under these conditions actually engaging. Fights are incredibly similar to each other and involve hunkering down and waiting to learn what direction to swing and navigating even the most dangerous places of the game feels the same as a stroll about town since you’re always going to be constantly asking Louise for directions that she gives too easily. The rare moments it whips out a break from these two styles of play are basic things like blocking arrows or pressing exactly what you’re told while riding on horseback, and with a generic story harmed by poor performances, it’s hard to appreciate some otherwise fantastic sound design and mixing that could have helped A Blind Legend thrive if you were actually doing something interesting.

And so, I give A Blind Legend for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. A Blind Legend manages to avoid being even worse just by way of it being easy enough that you aren’t made to suffer. Being all too helpful with the sound cues do mean the fights are incredibly straightforward, and the movement challenges would be a lot worse if it was easy to get lost and turned around every time one cropped up. Most of A Blind Legend’s successes are just hearing how well the game constructs soundscapes, and it’s actually fairly easy to build not only mental maps of the places you’re traveling, but an entire setting can be easily conjured in the imagination because of the effort put into building a world with sound alone. Sadly, everything you do is either tromping from one spot to another or beating back enemies who barely ever truly pose a threat, but things would be far more frustrating if precision was truly required or the sound design was poor. A Blind Legend’s major flaw is its utter lack of ideas on how to challenge a player who can’t see what’s happening, but without the need for graphical elements, it could have conceived of many unique tasks to spice up the interactivity. Perhaps during the section where Blake is in a dungeon he might have to undo his manacles by ear, maybe in the village by the river he rests in for a while he helps with chores like catching fish or fetching water. They would likely be simplistic in nature, minigames where you just do a few right inputs to succeed, but the entire appeal of this title is that concept of a video game where the video element is practically non-existent. Stripping out the color flashes would show a greater commitment to that idea, but the real flaw is all you really do are the same few basic ideas that never evolve or truly challenge the player once they figure out how they work.

I don’t think anything can better encapsulate the tedium and lack of creativity in A Blind Legend than the fact a certain Steam walkthrough for the title uses the phrase “Just follow the girl” to encapsulate multiple chapters and that simple phrase is more than adequate to describe all you need to do during that portion. It barely even describes the fights since they’re so similar as well. I was really excited to see how this concept was going to be explored, but ultimately, A Blind Legend’s ambitious concept is wasted on repeating the same few boring tasks over and over. This is a game design that should be revisited, but only by a team that is willing to put effort into things like gameplay and story rather than coasting on sound design and novelty.