This was an interesting one. Unsighted is a top-down metroidvania, which is mildly unusual on its own, but it's unique selling point - and most divisive feature - is the timer: almost all characters in the game, yourself included, have a literal countdown ticking away until they die (or become Unsighted technically, but it's functionally the same)

So obviously this is a pretty hard sell, and they're aware of it, warning you very clearly near the beginning of the game, and even offering the choice to disable it entirely right then. As someone who takes really long to do anything in life (not just games), this feature was definitely a concern. After checking there wasn't anything critical locked behind keeping everyone alive, i decided to keep the timer on, at the very least just as an experiment, to see how it influenced my play

Basically, it did and it didn't. The beginning was just getting used to the game, so as expected, but as everyone's hours started dropping, i found myself sprinting everywhere, rushing past enemies and sloppily fighting bosses; anxiously debating whether it's worth spending the time to explore, because i could find some of the rare item that extends timers a bit, or maybe a shortcut for speedier navigation, but i could just as well waste a bunch of time.

The first few characters deaths sucked, but kind of expected. A few guys start with remaining time so low that i'd be surprised they didn't die on anyone's first play-through, so i made my peace easily. The next few were a bit harder because they were either useful or charming. One character teaches you to fish, and you find them around the map along your travels, so i was pretty sad to find one of their spots empty all of a sudden. It hit the hardest when the floating fairy-guide character that had been with me the entire game eventually disappeared, but it was also a turning point; death was now normal, characters were expendable, and i had to keep myself alive most of all

Mechanically, Unsighted is impressively well-designed, and seems to be built for sequence breaking. At the start, you're given five bosses to kill, and a recommended order, but the map is technically open already, if you know how. Moments i found particularly surprising were when new traversal mechanics were revealed, but with items you already had for a while - making you realise how many spots you thought weren't accessible, actually were. Clearly the game wants you to use this knowledge to absolutely unravel it on a new play-through

Unfortunately, the narrative is where things slump a bit, which is an extra shame because it makes it hard to feel much when the characters disappear, as they don't leave much of an impression anyway. The overarching plot is a pretty basic defeat-the-evil-and-save-this-world type deal, except you're all robots, and the humans are bad - i don't know, it didn't matter to me. Nailing good story and characters is obviously easier said than done, but getting that right would've put this game into near perfect status, in my opinion, so it's a real shame

Real good game though, and interesting "experiment" that they tried out here