Blind and Schizophrenic is terrible, interesting, but terrible. And because I am blind enough to see that everyone else has made legitimate reviews and am schizophrenic enough to know that my review will matter here are my thoughts in a more objective manner than other reviews that have been posted so far.
The gameplay is simple, get from point A to point B to get respect and money, then run out of things to do, followed by [spoiler]committing terrorism (yes really). You have some controls to work with that are all very easy to grasp: Move, Smoke Weed (heal), Fire AK (gain respect points over time), Arm Bomb, and Detonate Bomb (end game, gain respect points).[/spoiler] (I am not even sure I am allowed to talk about that in reviews, but the game is allowed on Steam, so it would be a little hypocritical if it was.) Beyond that, the core of the game is not hitting walls by using sound to navigate (Or just using a lower difficulty and actually experiencing what the game has to offer) and trying to minimize the number of times you run into walls so that you don’t trigger your schizophrenia and lose the game. And yes, I only played the game for 22 minutes, but I literally did everything that I could find and figure out so I did in fact complete the game if you are wondering. To wrap up my gameplay analysis, the game is unbelievably terrible.
The sound design is interesting, but really grating and annoying. Though trying to navigate with sound would be interesting, as far as I was able to gather it doesn’t really work at all. If a 3D soundscape was implemented in a better way this could be an interesting sound demo. It is not.
Graphically the game is generally appalling, but oddly enough I find it somewhat charming. Using MS Paint and random images from the internet is not really an art style, but it does remind me of the early internet and flash games in a funny way.
When it comes to what the game actually is though it is either a political/social commentary (and an extremely non-politically correct one at that) or just trolling. If it is political/social commentary, I would guess that it is from an anarchist or other politically extreme point of view, though there really isn’t enough here to say one way or another. Alternatively trolling is trolling, and they could just find creating such an indecipherable and crazy piece of work entertaining or funny. This trolling could also be seen as similar to other controversial games like [spoiler]Super Columbine Massacre RPG![/spoiler], and in that way may be seen in an extremely negative light if not extremely distasteful. It [spoiler]directly relates terrorism to Islam using music and image cues in the shop to receive the bomb,[/spoiler] so you know, maybe this game has some polarizing viewpoints. Let’s be real though, either way, I am reading into it too much the “game” is less than a dollar. Whatever the case may be the developer clearly was not intending this to make waves across the gaming industry.
Overall Blind and Schizophrenic is an interesting experience, but in the end, it was a wasted dollar. This game will offend some people on its political statements, but if it doesn’t do that it definitely will offend you because it sucks. But I would be lying if I didn’t say it gripped me somehow. If you ever watch those videos on strange, controversial, banned, censored, or otherwise jaw-dropping games it may be worth the experience and it kind of was for me. And because it gripped me, I just had to review it. There is nothing quite like it, and probably never will be, so why not analyze it? But yeah this is probably one of the worst games I have reviewed thus far and unless you are curious about this fascinating oddity it should be a hard pass.
