So I played Close Your Eyes for my IndieCade game. It’s a horror-y puzzle platformer whose main mechanic is the ability to close your eyes to change the way you can interact with the world. By closing your eyes, you can walk past enemies unharmed, walk through some walls and platforms, and make hidden walls and platforms appear. Later in the game, closing your eyes can be dangerous for you, as there are some enemies that get closer to you and can eat you only while your eyes are closed. This creates some interesting, though rather easy, puzzles that require proper timing to solve. Overall I felt the game was well executed and definitely creepy, though not quite scary enough to be called horror.
My first big complaint is that it’s really short and it doesn’t have any particularly challenging puzzles, though this can probably be forgiven by the fact that it’s a free game and was made by students. My second complaint is that it seemed to be attempting to portray a really abstract story about the playable character’s history with abuse or domestic violence. It tells this story through what are essentially flashbacks; levels that don’t have any puzzles but do have sound and images of other people in them. The end is really sudden and honestly easy to miss though (I’d explain why, but spoilers), and I think that if they had made the game longer they could have really flushed the story out a lot more, and made it more meaningful. I believe they were trying to emulate Yume Nikki with the ending, but it didn’t really work because of the way they had introduced other story elements earlier in the game.
You can watch me play it here.