INDEPENDENT SHELF

We’ve got our eye on the stereoscopically sensational The Dead Eye

We’ve got our stereoscopic shades on for The Dead Eye

The Dead Eye is one of those games with such a strong hook that it has me nodding along before I’ve even opened the box. This is a solitaire game where you slip into the role of a brazen thermo bandit navigating treacherous terrain on a hostile planet. You do this while wearing stereoscopic-3D glasses.

This is the newest title from Simon McGregor and South African publisher Pleasant Company Games. They’re best known for 2014’s Ancient Terrible Things, a slick small box pulp-horror design. The Dead Eye is a similarly modest-sized product with just a few stacks of cards and a small board to help you organize your journey through the desolate rock. But the gameplay and atmosphere stretch beyond the physical boundaries and provide a very solid and thoughtful mental journey.

It’s best described as a puzzle of sorts. You hold a deck in your hand, revealing a new card in order to progress across the rugged surface of the planet. These are effectively obstacles, such as wild canyon jumps or rampaging murder bots. These cards are multi-use, of course. You then must flip another off the top and reference it for the symbol printed on top. This refers to either juice (thumbs up) or heat (not swell).

You repeat this process until you hit a threshold for success or failure on the obstacle. Early on in the thermo run it can feel oddly random. You don’t begin with many tools and there are few decisions presented. Those come later.

Most everything here is subtle. After a few encounters you realize the significance of the option to avoid the current challenge. Instead of flipping more cards you can place it in the juice or heat pile which carries forward to the next obstacle. While difficult to grapple with from a thematic perspective, the system works to form a more meaningful decision space of manipulating the current environment.

You also will start to rack up parts, little mechanical abilities, pretty quickly. By succeeding in certain encounters you can then take the card and place it beneath the board. Later you can exhaust the part for a special effect such as tossing heat out of the current stack or peeking at cards atop the deck. These get periodically refreshed so there’s a skill element in how you time their use. There are some little combos you can build as well which effectively elevates the value of individual pieces.

Other cards will reward you with distance. This is the primary goal

in the game, push farther through the detritus of a wasteland and get to your destination. Eventually you hit a rest point, typically by the skin of your teeth, and the game completely resets. It provides a mechanism for saving the game when this occurs but the total length of play – successfully achieving three runs – is roughly 40 minutes if you push to the finale. This certainly undercuts the usefulness of saving the game state but some may appreciate the option.

Overall the design feels similar to other puzzle adjacent solitaire titles like the wonderful Friday or peculiar Mr. Cabbagehead’s Garden. Both of those games operate in a similar space of manipulating cards or resources in unique ways to overcome opaque challenges.

This is a solid game whose only fault is that it can become somewhat repetitive if overplayed in the short term. It functions extraordinarily well as a little quirky title to pull off the shelf and slam through a few runs when you have a moment. The atmosphere, while thin mechanically, does present a compelling overall texture to the game thanks to the 3D glasses and an included mini-comic to set the tone. As an entire package, this is a novel game that’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.