Review: Another Sight

Another Sight is a game I played during Rezzed 2018 where you control Catherine, a young woman falling to the London underground, losing her sight in the process but also awakening a form of synaesthesia, allowing her to see colours and details in the environment based on sound. Trapped in this new environment, she crosses paths with a mysterious feline who becomes her new companion on the journey back to the surface and her family, becoming accidentally embroiled in a secret war in the underground.

The Good

• Surreal Normal: The best thing Another Sight does is create the feeling of exploring a surreal landscape of strange kaleidoscope colours when in reality you’re just in the London underground and travelling through sluice-gates and operating simple machinery. Every burst of sound, including every cry of your feline companion, adds colours to the environment and turns the darkened hallways outside Catherine’s sensory range into an explosion of bright and warm tones.
• Alternate History: The London Underground isn’t just home to rats and mould, but also of a strange yet wonderful commune of scientists and artists, all working under the light and protection of a glowing pylon, which is at the core of the plot. But that’s not all, there are those historic personages who oppose them and will stop at nothing to take the pylon for themselves. And now Catherine, aka Kit, is trapped in the middle. It was a shock to see Monet there but there’s also Edison, Tesla and many more, giving this simple underground a wonderful bit of alternate history weirdness.

The Bad

• Bog-standard Puzzles: The greatest sin Another Sight commits is ruin its wonderful premise and style with thoroughly uninteresting puzzles and challenges. For the most part, the only thing you do in Another Sight is walk to a switch, find out it’s disabled, move to the switch powering it, and then return, pull the 1^st switch and move on to the next set of switches. There’s very little variety to this boring pattern and it ends up bringing the experience down.

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