Beyond that feature, Blind Fate also offers a host of enemies modeled after creatures from Japanese folklore, carefully recreated by the Barcelona-based Troglobytes. Game Rant sat down with studio lead Saverio Caporusso to talk about how Blind Fate’s mechanics and game world come together to create an innovative new experience for players.
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In Blind Fate, Information is King
Obviously, a blind player character poses a lot of gameplay challenges. The primary one, Caporusso said, is traversing the environment.
For example, the player might approach a chasm that, according to the most recent environmental data collected, has a bridge spanning the gap. However, the bridge may have collapsed, and without updated data, the player would be in for a nasty surprise. To address that, the player collects environmental data from Blind Fate’s robotic enemies. “Enemies have updated information about the environment, so by defeating enemies you collect data that will help you progress,” Caporusso said.
“The main character is a cyber samurai, so his brain can receive all sorts of environmental data. You may be able to see a static image of the game environment around you, but that image is not updated.”
Of course, fighting the game’s enemies is another challenge for a protagonist that can’t actually see them. The player can keep track of foes using a suite of high-tech sensors that pick up different kinds of stimuli, Caporusso said. A hearing module detects enemies with loud footsteps or whirring machinery, enemies that give off a unique odor are picked up by a smell sensor, and a thermal sensor can display heat cores from certain enemies. Players have to learn to pair sensors with different enemy types to deploy them effectively.
When the devs started working on Blind Fate, the player character was initially supposed to rely mainly on sound as a means of detecting enemies, Caporusso said. “Of course, you would be able to hear enemies coming towards you, so a sound sensor of some kind was an easy choice.” The decision to diversify and add more types of sensors was made to improve the overall player experience, he said.
Blind Fate’s Enemy Types are Inspired by Japanese Folktales
In addition to its unique mechanics, Blind Fate sets itself apart from other titles in the genre with its enemy design, Caporusso said. In keeping with the game’s futuristic Japanese aesthetic, the hordes of robots thrown at the player are modeled after creatures from ancient Japanese folklore. To develop each character, Troglobytes hired a writer specifically tasked with researching Japanese folktales — specifically about ghosts and demons, or yokai and kami. The writer also had to find a function for those enemies and how they would fit into the actual gameplay, Caporusso said.
For example, Blind Fate features an enemy known in Japanese folklore as the ‘wa nyudo,’ or priest wheel. In the traditional Japanese canon, this was a yokai that appeared as a priest’s head inside a flaming oxcart wheel, said to hunt criminals. For Blind Fate, the wa nyudo was augmented to look like a futuristic police android, Caporusso said, with a policeman’s head inside a wheel of flashing lights.
Even central game features get this folklore treatment. Blind Fate’s skill tree is a cybernetic version of an entity known as a jubokko - a tree that in Japanese folktales grew on battlefields and fed on the blood of fallen soldiers. As Caporusso said, “Our skill tree is an actual tree."
Despite their unique looks, enemies designed in-game adhere to traditional classes familiar to players, such as rangers and tanks, Caporusso said. “We wanted the enemy types to be recognizable to players because it is risky for an indie studio to change them.”
Blind Fate: Edo no Yami is coming soon for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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