Games worth discovering

Play a creepy retro take on Resident Evil on your phone with I See You - Pocket Playfest

3K View2023-06-07

With the success of games like 1-bit Survivor, there’s been a recent trend of low-res Resident Evil-style survival horror games, and for good reason! I See You is the latest game following this path, and it placed me in the unique perspective of a blind man searching for his girlfriend while being stalked by an evil entity. The successful incorporation of puzzles, item collection, narrative, and even music blended together perfectly to create something that really kept me on the edge of my seat.

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Welcome to TapTap’s Pocket Playfest - An Indie Celebration! Beginning on June 16 and running through June 28, we will be showcasing demos for ten brand-new, unpublished mobile games. These ten games are all from indie developers and represent some of the most exciting upcoming mobile games on the horizon. You’ll only be able to download those demos for Android right here on TapTap, so stay tuned!

In addition to checking out some exciting new games, you’ll also be able to vote for your favorites. The developers whose games get the most votes will get a big cash prize from TapTap, and that’s not all: You can win too! Just by playing these games and voting for your favorites, you’ll earn points and get entered into a giveaway! You could win a Steam Deck, an Xbox Elite controller, or even a $1000 gift card.

I See You is one of the ten games TapTap will be featuring as part of our Pocket Playfest. Enjoy the rest of our thoughts, and be sure to come back on June 16 so you can download it and try it for yourself. Play and vote for your chance to win!

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I See You started with an unsettling setting. Playing from the perspective of a blind protagonist, the world surrounding me was completely dark save for the items, walls, and doors directly next to me. Relying on sound is a critical element of gameplay. I had to use it to direct myself into rooms throughout the house to accomplish my next objective. These objectives ranged from finding keys to answering the phone.

Things took a turn for the sinister after I received a warning to leave the house and found a Browning single-action handgun. Fans of the Resident Evil series will immediately recognize this as the initial gun Claire received in Resident Evil 2; I See You is full of small elements like this that pay homage to horror classics.

Some might say finding projectile weapons doesn’t really make sense in a game where you’re playing from the perspective of a blind man, and that’s fair enough. However, it was easy to suspend my disbelief once an invisible entity started chasing me throughout the house while I gathered clues and evidence. The combination of the music and the blood-soaked footprints that followed me really put me on edge during those sequences. I didn’t have time to wonder, “Why do I have a gun readily available to shoot this thing?” I just shot the damn gun!

I wish I could say that I See You was the perfect lo-fi survival horror, but the demo had some issues that must be worked out before the full release. The least of these is the localization of a few words still in Chinese that need to be converted to English (or the language of your selection).

The issue that really affected my gameplay, though, was item glitches. Whenever I collected certain items like ammo, I See You crashed, causing me to restart the game from my last save point. I tried playing without getting any ammo, but that only helped for so long. There came a moment when I needed an essential item to progress in the story, but I couldn’t collect it without the game crashing. I tried to complete this section three times with the same result, which is a shame, because the demo showed some real potential up to that point.

Glitches aside, I See You was a fun experience that brought me through a roller coaster of emotions within the first twenty minutes of unique gameplay. The character perspective, intriguing narrative, and demonic entity kept things tense, and though there’s some definite work that needs to be done on the technical side, I See You is one of those hidden gems I’m looking forward to seeing in full once it’s launched.