As yet unseen

I love indie games enough to help run a site dedicated to covering them, but let’s not pretend they’re perfect. Many are flawed experiments, tributes to preexisting media, attempts to build something new out of the old. These rough edges can be off-putting or intriguing in equal measure depending on how they affect the gameplay. Horror games are particularly susceptible to this as they need to delicately balance aesthetics, tone, and mechanics and any amount of wonkiness can make it feel off-kilter. Crucially though, that off-kilter-ness can often be a unique identifier that makes games more memorable than they otherwise would be. My most recently played example is Cover Your Eyes, a game with some rough edges but enough heart that it warrants attention despite, or in some ways because of, its flaws.

The pitch for the game is a simple but effective one. You play as Chloe, a loving mother of two children with a lousy office job, a lousier husband, and the lousiest collection of unresolved traumas one would never ask for. After having a particularly bad day by anyone’s standards and just trying to get some sleep, only to be interrupted by the neighbors having an incident (which I will not spoil), Chloe is left with a single goal: get her family out of this town by any means necessary before its descent into Hell takes its toll.

CYE is an RPG Maker horror game but not how you’d think. You won’t find any turn based combat here, nor an inventory to filter through, nor party members in the traditional sense. Instead it’s structured very similarly to traditional survival horror games like Silent Hill or Resident Evil – mostly linear navigation, constant foraging for items, real time stop-‘n’-shoot combat, and a significant quantity of creatures that’ll force you to either run or fight. I found myself impressed with what was achieved given the engine, never feeling like it was ill-fit despite the genre switch.

Visually the game is a mixed bag. Areas are bespoke and look nice if a bit standard in the first half. A hospital very much looks like a hospital with some creepy stuff on the walls to remind you that the town has gone to hell, if you catch my drift. Most sprites look expressive but the style is quite inconsistent, with wacky smiling spinning head enemies shoulder to shoulder with straight up demons. This works to the game’s benefit in an odd way, keeping you on your toes with enemy types you’ve yet to see or didn’t expect, but you will not be able to take many of them seriously despite their respectable damage numbers.

Of particular note is soundtrack, which is composed by Austin Jorgensen and you can absolutely tell. You won’t hear quite the spread of comedic samples or airhorns as you’d expect from LISA; instead you get oppressive, pounding pieces that do a lot of the atmospheric heavy lifting. There are tracks in this that will burn their way into your eardrums, filling them with the finest kind of dread. My only complaint is that there’s not quite enough of it, with many sequences being completely silent as if they were making room for voiced dialogue that doesn’t exist. And speaking of the writing…

Look I won’t mince words, the writing in this game isn’t great. The dialogue in particular suffers from unnatural phrasing, tonal inconsistencies, and typos up to and including misspelling character names. I initially thought this was going for an oddball Twin Peaks-ish dreamlike dialogue or an intentional attempt at PS1 survival-horror cheese, but it never quite achieves either. Many of the more normal characters we stick with throughout the game that you’d expect to ground the setting are borderline robotic, and this contrast is laid bare by the far more expressive villains and speech-capable monsters who we spend far less time with being so articulate. It’s jarring, but in a way that distracts from the intended tone rather than aids it.

There is a distinction to be made here though. While the dialogue writing itself is weak, the plot of this game is absolutely bonkers. I do not intend to spoil the story of CYE, don’t worry. What I will say is this: you won’t predict where it goes. I don’t mean you’ll struggle, or that you’ll get it mostly right but not quite, I mean you will not succeed. What begins as a relatively standard premise for survival horror eventually transforms into something entirely different and distinct. That isn’t to say it’s necessarily coherent – many character decisions and events feel like they exist purely to move to the next setpiece – but I guarantee it will surprise you with something you have not seen before. The game doesn’t just go to dark places, it goes everywhere in rapid succession, particularly in its back half. Don’t dwell too much on the details, just hop on the train and be braced for it to derail.

In many ways CYE feels like the flip side of a coin that has Decarnation on its reverse. Decarnation is a visually stunning game with a style as striking as its story is brutal, but is held back significantly by being mechanically miserable. Put simply: actually playing Decarnation just sucks, full stop, and that’s a sadness. By contrast CYE is mechanically sound at every moment, with constant resource management and responsive combat. Its enemies are often goofy and its writing is all over the place to the point of affecting my immersion, but its tension is delivered via its mechanisms, in the silence punctuated by gunshots, in the aftermath when you count your remaining bullets, and in the “wait, what the fuck?” moments that become increasingly frequent over your 5-ish hour playthrough. I liked it more, is what I’m saying.

When StarSkipp sent this code over to us I told him I didn’t have an ETA on completion of the game or the review, which he very kindly accepted. A day or so later I booted it up just to take a look at what I’d be in for. Despite any gripes I had it gripped me something fierce and I ended up playing through it over the course of two consecutive days. I had to know where this would go, how it would end, and I’m glad I did. Cover Your Eyes is undeniably rough in several places and very much feels like a debut game, but its unpredictability and memorability makes it a worthy cult title that deserves a look from old school survival horror fans. It’s exactly the kind of thing I love to see, warts and all.

7/10

Review code provided by publisher.