Blind Drive

released on Mar 10, 2021

Blind Drive is an audio-based, black comedy arcade action game. The entire game is experienced through your ears. You’re blindfolded and going against traffic. Cars rushing past, angry drivers yelling at you. Cops on your tail. And you can’t see a thing. Play as Donnie, trying to make a quick buck in a scientific study but quickly finding himself in over his head, cuffed to the wheel and driving blindfolded. Plus he’s late for dinner with Grandma.


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Played on Steam Deck.

Fun game with an enjoyable premise of trying to dodge oncoming traffic using your ears made all the better by a wacky story with some pretty good voice acting.

They introduced several new gimmicks throughout the game that recontextualise the main mechanic and I enjoyed all of them.

Challenging but not unfair (though I hate that GPS >.>) and the devs seem to have done some work so that even if you die you don't necessarily need to re-listen to the exact same lines you've heard before at the start of the level.

For someone whose eyes are often very tired from looking at screens all day it's nice to have a game that fits in the niche of "I want to play something with my eyes closed" which until now always seemed like an impossible dream.

Don't know what I expected, but that wasn't it. Recommend playing with eyes closed in a dark room for full immersion.

Was not expecting this to be the second game I’ve played in two days with a grandma wielding a bazooka (Atomic Heart), but, well, here we are

This is the closest I'll get to starring in a Coen Bros flick and I'm hear for it.

Great little arcade experience. Was rather surprised how many ideas and alterations to the simple formula were supremely solid, and the writing here is the charming snark and bite you'd be familiar with from the aforementioned duo's filmography. I thought about turning on Blindfold Mode for MAXIMUM IMMERSION, but the default look's perfect enough as-is that I didn't mind it too much, doubly so when they start altering the visuals to simulate closed eye hallucinations and objects passing by us piqued by light sources. Have to give props for giving me a good reason to bust out the PC headset for something other than a multiplayer game and/or a Discord call as well!

Could've used some trimming here, however, as this goes on for about an hour or so yet some of these ideas, such as slamming down cop cars, are only fun for one go-around, and the entire submarine section didn't really add much flavor to the intense venture I was going on. The completion range is to be 80-100km (roughly 50-62 miles for us Imperial System users), yet I got my fill of it and the overall humor in about ¾ or ⅘ in. Only so much I can laugh at people cuss and use ice cream-inspired euphemisms for drugs before it dilutes into being a dull affair, ya know?

Games shouldn't get to be both this unique and this fun. It's not fair to everyone else.

The topic of accessibility in games has been divisive, and I'm not just referring to the hand-wringing and moaning coming from Super Hardcore Gamers who think a game with an easy mode toggle marks the death of western civilization. Rather, the issue among people who actually value accessibility tends to be how said accessibility is employed. For everything that's wrong with Naughty Dog's upper management (and there's a lot), they're widely considered to be one of the best studios for allowing the maximum amount of people to play their games. The Last of Us 2 has countless, countless switches and toggles to help players who have difficulty seeing, difficulty hearing, or difficulty controlling their fine motor skills; the game can be run at a slower speed, highlight enemies and objects of interest with extreme color contrast, and even allow you to play with your controller upside down if that's how you'd prefer to control your character.

All of these are incredible options, but they come with a bit of a dangling asterisk hanging above them: these are still just options applied to a pre-existing game. There's nothing wrong with that — it's great, in fact — but the games are designed first, and then accessibility is added in after. They're for people who can't or won't play the game as intended. Games that are built from the ground up purely as accessible experiences are rare, but they do exist; Kenji Eno's pitch for Real Sound: Kaze No Regret stemmed directly from the fact that he got the chance to meet with many fans of his games who were blind, and he wanted to make a game where both sighted and unsighted players would both get to have the same, complete experience without any compromises.

So, Blind Drive isn't the first to do it. But holy shit, is it a fun time.

The game has virtually no graphics (literally none, if you enable Blindfold Mode) and only two buttons, and yet somehow manages to continue iterating and evolving on its own gameplay loop again and again through its 90-minute runtime. It's surprisingly story-heavy, though this isn't unwelcome; you need something to latch onto in a game that's as minimalist as this is, and the plot beats are genuinely entertaining and kind of funny, which is a rare quality in game writing. It helps immensely that this was worked on by some of the Jackbox Games team, and it's good to see that they can pull off longform comedy alongside the more bite-sized jokes in the Jackbox Party Pack titles.

You play as Donnie, a guy handcuffed and blindfolded in the driver's seat of a car, and you're tasked with driving ninety miles an hour the wrong way down the highway. To say any more than that would be spoiling a lot of the more interesting twists in the game, but the story and gameplay unfold in a masterful genre shift from tense horror to action comedy. Getting the hang of the driving controls feels amazing, and weaving in and out of traffic thanks to nothing more than your ears is a truly special experience.

The sound design is impeccable, and it really needed to be. There's a couple of stock sounds that are poorly mastered, but these are brief blips in an otherwise immaculately put-together soundscape. I work professionally in audio design and this is some of the best I've heard in any game, let alone in a budget title. If there's one thing the team really ought to be proud of, it's in how effortless they made making an action-arcade game with no graphics look.

It's a fascinating and incredibly engaging game to play through, and you owe it to yourself to give it a try. You haven't played Kaze no Regret because you don't speak enough Japanese, so play through this instead.