Review: Blind Fate: Edo No Yami.
Why does it always rain in the neon light? Blind fate, after a short introduction starts against the backdrop of an empty city full of neo...
Why does it always rain in the neon light? Blind fate, after a short introduction starts against the backdrop of an empty city full of neon and rain. It always rains in the future. In this case the rain does not move, however. Because as it turns out, this future is actually the past for the main character and the image we are seeing is but a projection of what was into the man's brain. This is because as the title suggests, the main protagonist is blind. And soon you will find the neon lights have long since dimmed and the rain dried up.
Blind Fate: Edo No Yami transports the player to a far will take you to a dystopian future long beyond the time where the apocalypse happend. You take the tole of Yami a member of the Shogunate, fierce warrior and survivor of the destruction of humanity. left for dead on the battlefield a snarky AI spirit, named Tengu finds you and restores your lost limbs and eyes with cyber prosthetics replacing your human sense with top-of-the-line sensors that will prove to be your main tool in combat and survival during the game.
After a quite lengthy and somewhat confusing introduction you are thrusted in the game with a bunch of abilities and powerful moves. However as traditionally happens in games you will soon lose all those and will have to work your way through the game to earn them back. I understand why games are designed this way, but if I am to play a powerful cyber samurai, I want to feel like that from the start and use my abilities to overcome obstacles, taking those away feels cheap and is a big tease that is almost insulting. It also takes quite a while before you unlock some good abilities and overall, there are not that many. Add to that the overall length of the game and you end up struggling most of the game without the cool stuff.
Blind fate is a side scrolling adventure running a 2D design on a 3D engine. The controls are basic with your sword attack buttons, a ranged gun (with limited ammo) a dodge, jump and block/parry button. Additionally, you get to use the left trigger to select your sensors, a main part of the game mechanics in this game. As I mentioned your character is blind and uses these sensors to get information from the world around him. This causes the enemies and objects to essentially be invisible to you and you have to use these sensors to "see" them. There is hearing, smell and heat vision. These are used to detect enemies, find tracks and clues as well as objects such as ammo and health packs. Each sensor puts a dark filter over the game's surroundings and highlights the clues it finds. Though this effect can be pretty cool initially, it actually covers the beautifully designed surroundings making the world feel like an empty simulation. I would have preferred to have seen the highlights marked on the actually screen rather than on a black background.
All these parts should combine as an interesting mechanic for the game but end up quickly feeling repetitive and soulless. It is as if the developers were afraid to really lean into the combat mechanics and build interesting encounters around them. As it stands it is run into room > defeat enemy > repeat > defeat boss. The bosses are also not that inspiring, they just have way more hit points and hit harder making them feel cheap instead of cool set pieces.
The story of Blind fate:Edo No Yami is compelling even if the plot twist come at you from a mile away and the presentation of said story is nicely presented as well. The design of the protagonist and the idea of cyber samurai is really cool the game comes packaged with great sound design as well. it has three difficulty settings but regardless of those the game stay very difficult. There is not frill or repeatable content and the game runs short at 6-8 hours making a tight concise story that takes place in an otherwise interesting setting. For such a short experience it is not all bad, but the game does fall short of its potential as the combat could be so much more. (See SIFU as an example)
In the end Blind Fate: Edo No Yami fails to deliver gameplay that matches its presentation and story with odd and uninspired design choices in the combat matchups resulting in repetitive and unsatisfying moments that should have been epic defining memories of gameplay. It certainly is not a terrible game; it is just there, and I left me wishing for more. If you are interested in playing a cyber samurai badass you can check out the game on various platforms, right now.
