We like to joke around here with our silly made-up names for genres, like Zeldersatzes and explormers, but it's really hard to narrow down which of those two perfectly cromulent words best encapsulates what Studio Pixel Punk has made here with Unsighted. Waking up in an underground laboratory, you play as Alma, a dexterous combat automaton built to resist the human incursion on your city. A meteor crashed here long ago, spreading around an enigmatic substance called Anima which granted sapience to all artificial lifeforms, and they've been fighting to hold onto that self-awareness from their organic former masters ever since. Since Alma's an amnesiac, the game takes a little while to get going but soon enough you've got your requisite multiple targets to chase after each at the very end of a long and challenging dungeon full of traps and puzzles. So far, so Zelda, but the game's also big on traversal upgrades and backtracking to a degree most Zeldas balk at.

The game's also taken a page from Hyper Light Drifter's speedy playbook by presenting a combat system that is very much centered around evasion and tactical strikes over brute strength. Swinging away at enemies will likely tire you out fast and leave you exposed to heavy retribution, and Alma can't absorb too much harm in the first place. There's healing items you can use to stay in the fight, some of which eventually regenerate after defeating enough enemies, but it's not nearly enough to let you tank your way through the game. Instead, combat requires a keen sense of timing if you're going to survive; parries out the wazoo, in so many words. The parry guard is very generous when it comes to deflecting damage, lasting around a second and change, but a perfectly timed one will stun your opponent and leave them temporarily vulnerable to some massive critical hits. A common encounter might see you facing down multiple opponents at once, judiciously blocking their fast attacks until you nail a perfect riposte and eliminate that foe from the force attacking you, depleting their numbers one by one. Each enemy has a telltale red glow before they attack, giving you all the visual information you need to put up a defensive stance in time. It's a system that is very punishing when faced with a crowd but one that proves both satisfying and fast-moving when you're practiced enough to pull off those perfect parries on a regular basis. Fortunately, the window isn't quite as narrow as you'd think.

This overbearing sense of brutal survival pervades much of the game's sensibilities outside of combat as well, for better but mostly for worse. One of the game's most immediately disheartening features is a countdown timer on every single NPC you meet, as well as yourself: this is because all automatons are powered by Anima, which is slowly running out now that the meteor has been locked away by an invading force of humans and protected by shadowy creatures that quickly prove to be an almost insurmountable threat. Time passes normally while you're out exploring, as evinced by a slow day/night cycle, and accelerates whenever you die or perform certain activities: this subsequently gives you a ticking clock to not only finish the game but do so with the minimum amount of casualties by playing it safe and moving quickly from objective to objective. These casualties might include side-story-related NPCs, vendors with unique items or services to sell, cute little guys who are just chillin', and major story characters: really no-one is immune, and while I've yet to confirm it I imagine your own timer running out would be very not great to your chances of completing the game. Naturally, this all bodes poorly for any player who isn't able to keep up with the game's high combat challenge nor any who would prefer to procrastinate by looking for treasures off the beaten path or popping back to earlier areas with their shiny new abilities to see what they can now reach.

In fact, it's one of the most counterintuitive game design decisions I've ever seen for the type of gameplay Unsighted offers, with its large world map to explore and many secrets to find and side-quests to follow. I can only surmise it was insisted upon last second by the studio owner's nepobaby hire so it would look like he was doing something; even if you want to make the argument that everyone's finite longevity adds weight to the hero's journey and especially to their failures, an expansive open-world action-RPG that takes over a dozen hours to complete is typically not the type of game in which you'd introduce such a feature. (Nor, if I'm being honest, the achievement set which would require completing the game something like five times in five very different ways. Who even has that kind of time? Well, if the game has one harsh lesson for us all, it's that no-one has as much time as they'd hope.) Happily, if you can deal with the shame of switching to Unsighted's Easy Mode in all but name, you can turn these timers off and enjoy the game at your leisure without necessarily sacrificing the medium difficulty's more enjoyably challenging combat. I can appreciate a modular difficulty system, at least.

The timers definitely put a huge dampener on my excitement to play the game, even when turned off as now I'm no longer playing it "the developer intended way" which has created this awkward rift between me, the player, and the game designers. I'll get over it though, since the gameplay is excellent and the pixel graphics can be occasionally striking when they're not making things a little visually untidy. I appreciate the considerable amount of content that has been put into the game: there's five dungeons, which can be tackled in any order, but also a robust crafting system and a few other side-quests and bonus objectives I've been picking up since awakening in the NPC hub. That there's so many things to spend money on right now, from upgrades to crafting blueprints and ingredients to new gear, gives the game a long tail I'm free to enjoy now that the deadlines are out the window. Combat's tough and you really get punished for mistakes: many enemies take two or three HP chunks off you per hit and you only start with seven, though to mitigate that there's a chip upgrade system that lets you add to HP as well as providing other passive benefits (my favorite so far is one that prevents money loss upon death; no more corpse runs for me). I'm sure I've deprived myself of some quality dramatic stakes by making sure all my vendor friends don't disappear forever or, worse, end up going rogue due to a lack of Mystery Meteor Juice but I find it hard to be too torn up about that. It's an indescribably odd feeling to like a game so much in the abstract and yet find oneself so at odds with what the designers believe is fun; games do have an aspect of that "death of the author" conceit by how often players will cheat or mod around certain obstacles to suit their own preferences (if I can remove item encumbrance or degradation, I'll do so) but I usually err towards incorporating the designers' wishes and intent when playing games. Here, I'm doing all I can to ameliorate their attempts to sabotage a really neat game they made, and boy does that feel like a strange position to take.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: I'll still maintain that in pure gameplay terms this is one of the best Indie Zeldersatzes that money can buy. The upgrades really lend a lot to the traversal even if they're just taken from Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword and placed in a 2D context (specifically referring to the spinning top you ride around and the double-hookshots respectively). Turns out only certain NPCs really matter all that much but it's still heartbreaking to die on a boss or be pushing blocks across the ice for one of those obnoxious puzzles and be informed that your dilly-dallying for collectibles or lack of finesse has killed yet another adorable town resident. So glad I turned that feature off, even if it felt like it made the game easier in so many ways. I dunno, the 4 out of 5 still stands because I can't really figure out half the decisions that went into the design, but the stuff that hits really does hit.