Echolocation Game ‘Pulse’ Scrapes Past its Kickstarter Goal in the Final Hours

The Kickstarter campaign for an interesting game called Pulse has just closed, with the project managing to hit its goal in the final hours. In total, Team Pixel Pi has managed to raise $80,977 for the game, just over the $75,000 goal.

Pulse is a game in which you play a blind character. It sounds crazy, but Team Pixel Pi has come up with an interpretation that makes the game accessible and understandable to those of us who can see but yet stays somewhat true to the actual experience of being blind. As you'd imagine, most of the game world is in darkness a lot of the time. But whenever something in the environment makes a sound, the area around that thing becomes visible to the player. The creators explain this by saying that the character has not been blind since birth and so can remember what things look like. What you are seeing when these areas light up is the character's imagining of what is out there.

As you'd expect, this can lead to some interesting gameplay. As the description points out, “there is often a distinct difference between what you “see” versus what is actually there.” So it's not just a case of throwing the cute little helpful creatures called Mokos around in the hopes that their sounds will reveal the world to you. Your character's emotional state can affect the world too. It does give the player a glimpse of what it might be like to live in darkness, and how your ability to use your other senses to make your way through the world might be affected by things like fear.

Now that its creators have raised enough money, Pulse is due to launch on PC, Mac, and Linux some time next year. Have you played the prototype? What do you think?