The Eyes of Ara

The Eyes of Ara is a first-person point-and-click adventure that tries to harken back to the genre’s golden era, evoking games like Myst with its puzzle design and mysterious, eerie atmosphere. The game, however, is ultimately dragged down by its shallow story, uneven puzzles, and cumbersome control scheme on the Nintendo Switch.

The game opens with the protagonist – who is neither named nor shown – arriving at a medieval castle by boat. A letter explains their mission: a strange signal is emanating from the castle and disrupting communications in the region, so they are to find its source and shut it down.

When we manage to enter the castle – even its entrance is locked behind a puzzle, of course – we find that it’s a very curious place with various rooms full of strange memorabilia. The castle feels like a classic game environment, being completely designed around its puzzles: it’s the kind of place where even clocks don’t tell the time but if we place their hands in the right position, they open up and reveal a secret lever hidden inside where their pendulums should be. We constantly find notes scattered around the place about a family that lived there in the past, but the castle never feels like somewhere people lived: it’s just a giant intricate puzzle we must solve.

Sadly, the game’s story is not its strongest point. As we explore the castle, we meet some small, shy drones that emanate a bright blue light. As soon as we enter a room and find one floating around, it immediately flies away, as if it were not meant to be discovered there. The game’s main mystery surrounds their identity and purpose. Are these drones harmless or dangerous? Are they human-made or alien artifacts? One of the castle’s past inhabitants believed their blue light represents the soul of the dead. Some feared the drones, while others were just intrigued by their presence. A note we find in the castle says:

“The townsfolk love to tell stories, haunting children into obedience. But those stories never frightened me. Warnings that a terrible fate ‘befalls all those who dwell here’ are just waves crashing on rocks. I can feel the spirits around me, speaking to me, directing my brush as it glides across the canvas. I am not fazed.”

Whether they’re ghosts or aliens, the drones mean no harm. At least, they appear to be just casual observers: if, initially, they fly away from us, as we keep advancing deeper inside the castle they start to get used to our presence and even follow us around. The problem with The Eyes of Ara’s narrative, however, is that the mystery surrounding these “eyes” is not complex enough to sustain the whole game. There’s nothing in the story besides that, which makes the notes we find and the things we discover get repetitive quite quickly. Their true nature is not hard to figure out due to the abundance of puzzles surrounding a specific theme but the main problem is that the revelation doesn’t mean much to the main character and to the setting: it seems inconsequential. The ending, therefore, is anticlimactic, with most of the things we did in the castle never amounting to much.

The logic behind the game’s puzzles stays the same for most of the game, too. We find clues around the rooms in the form of books, posters, and random notes, which usually have the exact numbers or words we need to unlock something. Sometimes, we have to pay attention to symbols and decode their meaning with the help of another note or book, but these instances are rare.

This puzzle design leads to some problems. First, it means that the player is “paying attention” instead of “thinking”: they are not deducing something but just looking out for the clues they need, frantically scouting every room for books and posters. Without the corresponding clue, it’s impossible to solve the puzzle without resorting to trial and error, which means that every time we find a puzzle, our first action will be to check if one of the clues we already have contains the answer. Sometimes, these clues contain several possible answers, so it’s just a matter of testing them all out until we get the right one. This puts the focus on “pixel hunting,” as the player will be much more worried about finding the books and notes in the rooms than about anything else – and the game even hides some important objects behind others so to make this task harder.

Other puzzles are just obtuse. There’s one right at the end, for example, that requires the player to recognize and use base-4 math. Instead of the game’s final puzzles being a culmination of everything that came before, representing an escalation in the difficulty of the previous puzzles, they just throw some random math problem at our lap without preparing us beforehand to solve it.

Another problem with the game’s overall design is that to reach the ending, we must have been collecting one of the many collectibles in the castle… which are not needed to progress until the final act. So, if we are not thorough, we will end up having to do a lot of backtracking. Signaling that these collectibles would serve as the key to the ending right from the start – or tie them with progression in any other way – would have been ideal to remedy this issue and avoid unnecessary frustration.

Finally, the Switch version also suffers from two problematic control schemes. If we’re playing on the TV, we have to use the Joy-Con as a pointer, like a Wii Remote. However, unlike the Wii Remote, the Joy-Con doesn’t have a sensor bar to make it precise and stable: we will have to recalibrate the thing all the time. Turning objects around is especially irksome because, instead of twisting the controller to turn them, we must rotate it, which rarely works. Playing in handheld, in turn, we must use the touchscreen for everything, which may be much more precise, but also robs us from the on-screen pointer that glows when passing through interactable objects. Without it, we’ll have to blindly touch everything on the screen in the hopes that it will be the right object, which aggravates the pixel-hunting part of the game.

The Eyes of Ara tries to emulate past games of its genre but ends up falling into the same pitfalls many did back then, resorting to pixel hunting and obtuse puzzle design to create difficulty. Without a good story to compensate for these shortcomings, the game ultimately fails to leave a good impression.

January 23, 2025.