It’s possible that Unsighted will sneak onto plenty of best-of lists by December. It’s a deep action-adventure that blends a wide range of influences, complete with an affecting post-apocalyptic narrative and a doomsday timer threaded into its mechanics. We had a great time with it in our Unsighted review, and were able to speak to the two-person development team that makes up Studio Pixel Punk to dive deeper into the title.
Unsighted tasks the player with making the best of a damaged world. They play as Alma, a powerful amnesiac robot trying to help a community of her peers on the edge of survival. As she summons the details of her past she roams the blighted landscape, and Unsighted‘s diverse set of explorable biomes are a pleasure to jump, dash, and hookshot over while searching for secrets and upgrades.
And yet, that omnipresent timer is always ticking away. Unsighted takes considerable risks by its very design, a topic which came up several times in conversation with Studio Pixel Punk’s Tiani Pixel and Fernanda Dias. We were able to chat about these choices, as well as Brazil’s formative gaming culture and how many tokusatsu shows ruled the nation’s airwaves in the 70s.
A question that I always can’t help but ask regards influences. Unsighted has a ton of of them – that much is very clear to anybody who plays it. What I want to know is, what were the influences on you as developers growing up, and what were the games you loved, and what games do you feel are strong inspirations for Unsighted, specifically?
Tiani Pixel: Yeah, I think that there are some obvious ones, like Metroid and Zelda, but also there’s one main inspiration for us that very [few] people get: the first Pikmin game, because of the time-based nature of the game. We always felt that that game was special because of that. It’s kind of a controversial game, because a lot of people disliked the time aspect, but there’s a lot of discussion about it, and we feel that it makes that game special, and it’s a worthwhile mechanic to revisit. We were kind of sad that a lot of developers are kind of afraid of touching these kinds of mechanics, but we decided to take this and try to do something interesting with it.
Fernanda Dias: Some other influences we have that are kind of more out there, maybe not too obvious… Like, for example, Zelda, Metroid, a bit of Dark Souls. Gears of War, because of the reload mechanic. We have Hades, in communicating the relationship system. We have, uh… there’s a bunch.
Tiani Pixel: All of the Supergiant games.
Fernanda Dias: Yeah. And the music, I love, Darren Korb’s music, and it really influences me as a musician in general, not just for Unsighted.
Tiani Pixel: Yeah, but a lot of our inspirations for the game, they are very purposeful so the players will notice that it’s referencing another game. For example, the fairy companion in the game, it’s clearly a reference for Zelda. And it’s funny, because what we wanted to do with the game is kind of break with some conventions of this genre a little bit, especially with the time system, because a lot of these games, there’s like, that funny situation that the world is ending but you can like, keep doing sidequests and fishing and whatever for the rest of days and nothing will happen. So, we decided to make a statement.
It starts off about this mechanic in games, the lack of this urgency in certain games. So that’s why our references are so on-the-nose like this, because, yeah, it’s a commentary about these games as well. Not that we don’t like them, we respect them very much, but we wanted to see what happens if you take these games and add like, real stakes to the story, and putting that in the gameplay as well. We feel like very [few] games put these real stakes on the story in the hands of the player.
Fernanda Dias: We just grew up playing those kinds of games, and we wanted to put our spin on it and remix those ideas and do something a bit different.
Tiani Pixel: Speaking of the fairy companion character that is a very on-the-nose reference to The Legend of Zelda, it also plays on how we try to break a little bit with the conventions of the genre, because a lot of people tell us that they thought, like, the fairy companion was annoying and all that. And, yes, it’s supposed to be annoying, but also, you can ignore her at the beginning of the game. We try to add a lot of moments in the game [where] you have a choice, but it’s not really clear that you have this choice, because most players just assume that you have to follow the intended path, because that’s what you’re doing most games.
For example, in Unsighted, at the beginning of the game, when the fairy is calling out for you, you can just ignore her and play the entire game without her. Or, if you don’t give her the meteor dust, she will just go away. So if you find her annoying, you can do that. You can even use the powers of that character at the top of the cathedral to steal her time and get rid of her. So, it’s like, a play on this trope. A lot of players hate this kind of character, but let’s see if you really want to correct that, you know?
Wow. So, I’m on my second playthrough, and I couldn’t possibly comprehend letting, Iris die. Beyond that because I thought one of the ways that you used her to sort of play with the Navi trope was that you find all this backstory about her. Like, there’s this whole other thing about her, that’s not just like, an annoying companion that is constantly interrupting you with tutorial info. That totally blew me away. And I have to admit, on my first playthrough, I completely screwed that up, and I did not connect with her sister.
Fernanda Dias: Don’t worry! You, can’t get to her alive.
You can’t? Oh my God. I thought that was something I was going to do on this playthrough!
Tiani Pixel: But, again, there’s a lot of things that you can miss her on her sidequest. We’ve had a lot of players that let her go unsighted before they even found that first log about her sister. So, they were like, ‘oh my god, I’m finding stuff out about Iris, but she’s not with me anymore!’
I did play the first Pikmin back in the day, and it was very challenging and frustrating because you felt like you ruined runs because you just were doing things wrong and not accomplishing things right. The one that connected with me that used that mechanic, though – and seemingly everybody hated it – was the original Dead Rising. It was built to constantly replay, because there was no way for you to get it right the first time, you were going to screw something up and some quest was going to be broken, and then you had to restart the whole game.
I remember many reviewers and gamers detested Dead Rising, and I fell in love with it. Because I was like, this is intense. There were some moments in that game you made by a hair’s breadth, and it felt so special. Most games I feel are too afraid to do that. And, to Unsighted’s credit, you do provide certain options and settings that can ease that a bit or make people feel less stressed about it, but I do think it’s integral to, not just the game, but the theme of the story and everything. It would be a far lesser game if it didn’t have that.
Tiania: We haven’t played the first Dead Rising game, but a lot of people tell us that it’s similar. But we know that it isn’t a super-popular thing with certain players. And I think mostly because it’s like, it reminds me of the first roguelike games that started getting popular with indies, like, with Spelunky and [Binding of Isaac]. I remember that there were some people that got annoyed that you lost most of your progress if you died and you had to keep restarting. And I think a lot of people get mad because they don’t understand that, like, this is not a mistake. This is not a game design error. This is intentional. Maybe we need a word for this kind of genre of game. I’m not saying that we’re inventing a genre, because, like we said, it’s been around since the Pikmin games. But I feel like a lot of maybe the press or the gamers still don’t have a word for this kind of game, and they don’t know what to expect. We like pushing those boundaries to do things that maybe other games aren’t doing. And we know that sometimes this can be controversial and it takes some time for maybe the press or the gamers to get used to this.
Fernanda Dias: Yeah. And also like, we feel like the people who like it, like it a lot. They get it. And that’s mostly what we’re aiming for. We want the people who like it, to like it a lot.
That looks to be the response that you guys are getting, on Steam and in general. I feel like people have connected with it. I have seen some people sort of kvetch about it a little bit, but I feel like most haven’t, and that’s critical. I don’t know how old you two are, but like, way back in the day of point-and-click adventure games, this was also a bit of a hot topic when it came to Sierra games, because those were games where you could die. And that is something that’s mostly died out in point-and-click adventures. They don’t have dead ends, they don’t have deaths, they don’t have situations where like, you can’t beat it because you never got an item way back when. And a lot of people hated that, but there were the hardcore who were like, no, this adds an intensity to actually experiencing the story, where you don’t want to miss anything.
Tiani Pixel: Yeah! You mess up, you die! There’s stakes. We haven’t played those older games, but a lot of people compare Unsighted to that, and we’re happy. I’m interested to go back and play these games because I love retro games, but I wasn’t much of a computer user when I was young, so I missed some of them.
Fernanda Dias: One that I played was a text adventure, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s brilliant but it’s so hard, and you die a lot. Everything you do, you die.
Yeah, that was a huge thing with text adventure games. On this topic, I do have a very strong fascination with gaming culture in Brazil, and I also know it’s very different now than it once was. Could you talk about what gaming was like when you were younger, and compare it to what’s happening now? Because I personally feel like Brazil is really coming into the fold as a game development hub, and it’s just getting bigger.
Tiani Pixel: Yeah. One big thing here in Brazil, and it kind of ties in with some of the discussion that has been going around lately, is with piracy. Because, for example, in the city that I lived throughout my childhood, you could never find an original game to buy. Like, it wasn’t even an option. I’ll be honest with you: I never saw an original PS2 game in my life, and it’s common for all Brazilians. Like, I even doubt that those exist, because there was never an original game being sold here in Brazil. However, this came with a lot of positives. English is not our native language, so we received pirated games from all over the world, so there’s a lot of Japanese games that are famous here that a lot of people in the US don’t know, and kind of ended up being inspirations here for game designers in Brazil.
Were they translated to Brazilian Portuguese, or no?
Tiani Pixel: Sometimes, sometimes.
Fernanda Dias: We played them mostly in Japanese!
Tiani Pixel: A lot of times we had to play them in Japanese, because playing them in English or in Japanese is the same for us. As a kid we did not understand either. And a clear example of this, I feel, with a Brazilian game, is the game Horizon Chase. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. It’s a pretty popular game that is based on another game from the Super Nintendo that is called Top Gear. It’s a racing game that was immensely popular here in Brazil due to piracy, but no one knows about it outside of Brazil. It’s fun to see how this kind of thing shaped Brazilian game culture, and we can see it in how the games are developed.
And what is the scene now? Like, am I accurate in saying that Brazilian game development is just exploding?
Fernanda Dias: There’s a lot of development studios that are coming up making wonderful stuff. There’s Pocket Trap from Dodgeball Academia. A few years earlier, there was Dandara from Long Hat House.
Tiani Pixel: There’s another game that is very Brazilian, Chroma Squad. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it.
Oh, that’s Brazilian? The one that’s like, a Power Rangers RPG?
Fernanda Dias: That’s Brazilian!
Tiani Pixel: Yeah, and we feel that is really Brazilian because tokusatsu shows from Japan have been around here in Brazil since the seventies. Because, again, it was just another part of the media that we consumed. And from what we’ve heard, tokusatsus weren’t popular in the United States, except for Power Rangers, but you can see in Chroma Squad how it’s an homage to all tokusatsu. They were very popular here in Brazil. And it’s a very – I know it’s a Japanese thing, but the way it was translated here in Brazil, it kind of incorporated into some shows here and how we viewed the superhero stuff. It’s really nice to see these popular games coming up from Brazil and showing certain facets of our culture.
To me, what opened my eyes to game development happening in Brazil was meeting Ana Ribeiro at PAX east a number of years ago, right before Pixel Ripped 1989 had come out. And just the notion that this person diverted from a medical degree to game development. I was like, well, something’s happening in that country. And I was a huge fan of that game on release as well.
Regarding Unsighted’s core design: I was studying game development years ago, and I remember a rule of thumb for a lot of instructors being about how making an isometric game is easier, because 2D platformers require a greater emphasis on physics and gravity…but that’s not the case with Unsighted. Unsighted is an isometric game that is a fully fledged platformer with gravity. There’s even a lot of granularity to how the physics in the game work. I was able to kind of squeeze my way into spots that I don’t think I was supposed to get to, or place boxes and then jump on the boxes to jump on buildings and get into areas.
Fernanda Dias: I see you’ve discovered the immense power of boxes!
Boxes are huge! So was that mobility part of the early design concept for the game, or is that something you sort of added at some point during development. Was it formative?
Fernanda Dias: For sure.
Tiani Pixel: It was part of a personal challenge for us, because there are some games that are isometric and contain platforming elements in these 3D physics, but it’s very hard to do. That’s why a lot of games don’t do this, but we challenged ourselves to do it. And we feel like it adds a lot of depth to the level design and to the movement of the character. One big inspiration for us in that aspect was Super Mario 64, because you can really express yourself with the platforming, and we tried to do something similar in Unsighted. We are happy that a lot of people are picking up on it, because there are a lot of hidden moves that you can [pull off] if you combine speed, jumping, and then jump-attacking, you can really go to places that feel like you weren’t supposed to get to. But don’t worry, we have your covered! It was all expected. Once you start playing with the boxes you are playing exactly as we intended.
Fernanda Dias: One thing we like very much is when the game feels good to play, feels good to move around in like, just an empty room. Like if it feels good to move around then I think it’s, it’s a good sign for the game, because moving around is mostly what you do.
Tiania: Yeah. And it helped us to create those secret moves that I was talking about, like the wall jump that you can do the from the start of the game, but the game doesn’t teach you that at all. It’s a direct reference to Super Metroid, but since the game has this time limit aspect to it, we tried to really make even the most casual player to think like a speed runner. And like, when they see that they can wall-jump, they may think to themselves that they can try another playthrough knowing that you can wall-jump from the beginning of the game, then do things differently, and maybe faster. And we feel like with this third dimension there are a lot more possibilities for the player to express themselves with the movement, and try to like, break the game with these moves.
Something that was really important to me while playing it, and it’s something I emphasize and mention when I sell the game to friends of mine and people I know is that Unsighted is one of the most remarkably diverse games of the year. It’s there in your featured image on the steam page, that the main characters are women or present as women. This diverse set of characters are also just crucial to the story.
Fernanda Dias: That’s also a thing that we almost can’t help but do, because that’s the thing we miss a lot, especially from those classic games, those other games, it’s a thing that we always wanted. And we’re finally having the opportunity to make a game, and you can bet that we’re going to add some characters that are like us and like people we know, and that we always wanted to see represented in video games. Yeah, that mostly comes from this feeling. Like, we always wanted to see games like this, and there aren’t a lot of mainstream games that have this.
Tiani Pixel: Yeah. And it also ties in with our intention to break the conventions of those classics because, yeah, the game is very similar to a bunch of other classical games, but we tried to make it also glaringly different in another aspects, and this is one of them. And like most of our controversial decisions in the game, I can say this: it hasn’t all been awesome sunshine and rainbows due to having the diverse cast. We received some really toxic messages. And, yeah, we try not to give any voice to these kinds of people, but it’s another aspect of the game that sadly we’re having to sometimes deal with it, and [try not to] let it get into our heads and think that maybe it was a mistake, you know? It’s hard sometimes, but we strongly believe in what we did and we try not to be affected by people that might be offended by it.
Yeah. I mean, that shrinks in comparison to the people who feel themselves seen in your game. And I’ve certainly seen that response to Unsighted in a big way. So that’s wonderful.
Tiani Pixel: Yeah. Another thing that maybe you’ve missed: we tried to give all the characters Latin names. So for example, Iris, you don’t say “Eye-ris,” it’s “Ee-ris.” All the characters have Latin names because it’s also something that we missed in almost all of gaming. All of these names are names that you can find here in Brazil. And we’ve had some people saying it’s the first time that they’re seeing their names in a game, so we’re happy with this response, and we think it makes it worth it.
Absolutely. Also just the fact that, while there are games with diverse characters, most of them are not like, wild action-adventure titles, you know? I feel like that makes Unsighted doubly distinct.
Tiani Pixel: Yeah. Again, another aspect that we tried to break with some conventions, because a lot of people expect like LGBT developers to be working on “wholesome” games, but we tried to do the complete opposite. So, yeah. When you think about it, Unsighted may be a very niche game, but it’s one that we’ve seen a lot of people [enjoying], and like, even people who are not LGBT people from Brazil that like really hard games.
That’s awesome. I would have one last question, which I know might be up in the air: what’s the possibility of DLC down the line?
Tiani Pixel: We’re thinking about it.
Fernanda Dias: Yeah. There is a possibility, but it’s not something we would like to do right now, or the first thing we want to do after the game. Maybe we can revisit Unsighted after we let it breathe for a little bit…let us breathe for a little bit.
Unsighted is out now on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.