MindShot

Good game the landman crawling practice makes me wanna throw my phone out the window

In case you hadn't been disappointed enough by the quality of games for blind gamers in the past—most of which are relegated to accessible recreations of card games that weren't even fun when we first learned to play them with real cards—here comes a new game that promises to be a serious, actual, skills-based video game for the blind, and manages to disappoint us in exciting new ways. For context, despite my blindness I am a professional gamer, playing fighting games against sighted folks and winning, as well as enjoying PC audio games like "City of Division," which illustrate how to actually do a shooter game right. What we have here is a big puddle of shovelware, shilled to us for money, with clunky movement, glitchy controls, and more bugs than an abandoned food truck. Picture this: you get through the first few levels, though with no audio indication of doors, the hardest part was finding a basic path to the gun range, then enjoy some clunky awkward shooting, including a segment that requires you to use your phone's gyroscope to aim even though the settings let you turn off the gyroscope. Note to devs: don't let players turn off a feature that is required to progress. Then you get to the rope climbing section. After crawling under barbed wire, trying your best to avoid some pretty weakly telegraphed binaural audio landmines, which are doing their best to merc you—presumably to save you from having to play this dumpster fire any more. Then you try and stand up, but the controls make you reload your gun instead of stand up, soÿo you repeat the gesture 20-30 times, exactly as directed by the game, and after enough tries, the game realizes that two fingers are different than one and finally stands you up. Then you get to find the ropes, which again have no sound to guide you until you bump into them. Two of them. You need to climb three. So you climb Rope 1, awkwardly handle the controls to climb back down, try to move to Rope 2 or 3 (depending on which you bump into, if any), and repeat the process. But can you find the third rope? If so, not easily. I restarted this level about 36 times, trying each time to mentally map the movements I was making to get a feel for where the ropes were positioned. By doing so, I managed to find Rope 1 and 3, or 2 and 3, but never 1 2 and 3, and if you walk past any of them, they all either despawn altogether or just become innavicable. And that's the game. That's what you spend money on. Oh and the enemies mostly have 1 sound byte a piece, so get ready to hear more repetitive sounds than a 90s arcade game, and not in a cute nostalgic game. This game is what happens when devs care more about hyping and marketing their game to line their pockets than actually making a product blind people can enjoy. If any blind person was involved in the making of this train wreck, then they should feel deeply ashamed of visiting the same quality of nonsense we have been getting spoon-fed for years now Save the money and get the Mind Shot experience by waiting for your next migraine, then listening to some badly mixed ambient noises, and you'll have gotten all this game can offer for free by virtue of the pain and boredom. Some people were not meant to make video games. Far be it from me to be a dream crusher, but if this was their dream, it needs crushing. When even a Prudence Interactive cash shop-front end dressed up as a game feels better than this stuff, you know it's a bad time.