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.
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.