So all of the little bits of lore scattered around are designed to add to the overall story and history, but also give varying accounts of it. “One of the main themes of The Eyes of Ara,” says Droste, “is the untrustworthiness of incomplete information and the importance of seeking out the truth. Are they those mysterious blue lights floating around the place, seemingly sentient in the way they subtly point you to the next clue or mysterious device? The ambiguity of the clues and the gaps in what you uncover will only serve to add to your curiosity, and this was a clear design tool used throughout development. Like easing into a hot tub, once the game gets going you’ll be perfectly ready, loose, and limber to take on each new mystery.Īstronomy and astrological bodies are a running theme.The complexity ramps up considerably at this point with numerous puzzles to solve, environmental clues to find, and narrative bits and pieces to collect and read that will slowly form a picture of what exactly the mysterious castle was used for… and perhaps lead you on a path to figuring out what The Eyes of Ara actually are. It’s here you’ll realise that you were playing a tutorial, one that introduced the number of ways in which you can interact with the environment, via a number of fairly isolated puzzles. That feeling will quickly go away once the first of a handful of larger areas to explore opens up. And if you fall into that category The Eyes of Ara may even seem disappointing in the early stages. Mind you, referring to these opening moments as surprisingly simple only applies to those of us who recall staring at a CRT monitor for hours on end while a newfangled CD-ROM drive did its magic to bring us a vivid and confusing multimedia world to explore. And for those of us who generally aren’t very good at solving complex and multi-layered puzzles, it’s the sort of design that’ll make you feel clever. You might be stuck in a room, for instance, and need to poke and prod and logically experiment until you work out what you need to do to proceed. Wilfully obtuse puzzles are a relic of adventure games past.Instead of large areas to wander around in, then, the opening sections of The Eyes of Ara are made up of the sort of stuff you’d find in a classic Zelda game.

“Games have come a long way since then and I wanted to incorporate modern design techniques and theory that has been painstakingly developed over the last few decades.” “The obtuse design of those old games was something I specifically wanted to avoid,” Droste explains.

This style of game is known for dropping the player into a confusing world in which simply finding your feet can take a while. The initial puzzles, for instance, come as a refreshing surprise for anyone familiar with the genre in its heyday, in that they’re fairly straightforward and intuitive to solve.

Play It’s only informed by games like Myst, however, and this is clear from the opening moments.

The eyes of ara blue light