The Eyes of Ara

The Eyes of Ara is a first-person point-and-click adventure that tries to harken back to the genre’s golden era, evoking games like Myst with its puzzle design and mysterious, eerie atmosphere. The game, however, falters with its shallow story, uneven puzzles, and cumbersome control scheme on the Nintendo Switch.

The game opens with the protagonist – who is never named nor shown – arriving at a medieval castle by boat. A letter explains their mission: a strange signal is emanating from the castle and disrupting communications in the region, so they are to find its source and shut it down.

When you manage to enter the castle – even its entrance is locked behind a puzzle, of course – you find that it’s a very curious place with various rooms full of strange memorabilia. The castle feels like a classic game environment, being completely designed around its puzzles: it’s the kind of place where even clocks don’t tell the time, but if you place their hands in the right place, open up and reveal a secret lever hidden inside where their pendulums should be. You constantly find notes scattered around the place about a family that lived there in the past, but the castle doesn’t feel like a place people could live in, but a giant intricate puzzle they must solve.

Sadly, the game’s story is not its strong point. As you explore the castle you meet some small, shy drones that emanate a bright blue light. As soon as you enter a room and find one floating around it immediately flies away, as if it was not meant to be discovered there. The game’s main mystery surrounds their identity and purpose. Are they harmless or dangerous? Are they human-made or alien artifacts? One of the castle’s past inhabitants believed their blue light is the soul of the dead. Some feared them, while others were just intrigued by their presence. A note you find in the castle says:

“The townsfolk love to tell stories, haunting children into obedience. But those stories never frightened me. Warnings that a terrible fate ‘befalls all those who dwell here’ are just waves crashing on rocks. I can feel the spirits around me, speaking to me, directing my brush as it glides across the canvas. I am not fazed.”

Whether they’re ghosts or aliens, it doesn’t matter much since you soon find out that they mean no harm. At least, they appear to be just casual observers: if, initially, they fly away from you, as you keep advancing deeper inside the castle they start to get used to your presence and even follow you around. The problem of The Eyes of Ara’s narrative, however, is that the mystery surrounding these “eyes” is not complex enough to sustain the whole game. There’s nothing in the story besides that, which makes the notes you find and the things you discover get repetitive quickly. Their true nature is not hard to figure out due to the abundance of puzzles surrounding a specific theme, but the problem is that the revelation doesn’t mean much besides the simple idea that “there’s something more out there”.  The ending, therefore, is anticlimactic, and most of the things you do in the castle doesn’t seem to matter much.

The logic behind the game’s puzzles stays the same for most of the game. You find clues around the rooms in the form of books, posters, and random notes, which usually have the exact numbers or words you need to unlock something. Sometimes you have to pay attention to symbols and decode their meaning with the help of another note or book, but these are rare.

This puzzle design leads to some problems. First, it means that the player is “paying attention” instead of “thinking”: they are not deducing something, but just looking out for the clues they need, frantically scouting every room for books and posters. Without the corresponding clue, it’s impossible to solve the puzzle without resorting to trial and error, which means that every time the player finds a puzzle their first action will be to check if one of the clues they already have contains the answer. Sometimes, these clues contain several possible answers, so it’s just a matter of testing them all out until you get the right one. This puts the focus on “pixel hunting” as the player will be much more worried about finding the books and notes in the rooms than about anything else – and the game even hides some important objects behind others so to make this task harder.

Other puzzles are just obtuse. There’s one right at the end, for example, that requires the player to recognize and use base-4 math. Instead of the game’s final puzzles be a culmination of everything that came before, representing an escalation in the difficulty of the previous puzzles, they just throw they player some random math without preparing them beforehand.

Another problem in the design is that to reach the ending the player must have been collecting one of the many collectibles in the castle, which were not needed to advance until then. So, if they are no thorough, they will end up having to do a lot of backtracking. Signaling that these collectibles would serve as the key to the ending right from the start – or tie them with progression in any other way – would have been ideal to remedy this issue.

Finally, the Switch version also suffers from two problematic control schemes. If the player is playing on the TV, they have to use the Joy-Con as a pointer, like a Wii Remote. However, unlike the Wii Remote, the Joy-Con doesn’t have a sensor bar to make it precise and stable: the player will have to recalibrate the thing all the time. Turning objects around are especially irksome because, instead of twisting the controller to turn them, you have to rotate it, which rarely works. Playing in handheld, in turn, the player must use the touchscreen for everything, which may be much more precise, but also robs the player form the on-screen pointer that glows when passing through interactable objects. Without it, the player will have to blindly touch everything on the screen in the hopes that it will be the right object, which aggravates the pixel hunting part of the game.

The Eyes of Ara tries to emulate past games of its genre but ends up falling in the same pitfalls many did back then, resorting to pixel hunting and obtuse puzzle to create difficulty. Without a good story to compensate for these shortcomings, the game ultimately fails to leave a good impression.

July 19, 2020.