Vision By Proxy

Vision by Proxy

Vision By Proxy is a short game by a team of students at studying Computational Media and Digital Media at Georgia Tech.  The game opens with a cartoony animation of a bug-eyed alien falling from his flying saucer to earth.

You control your little alien with arrows, like a standard platformer, but your quickly realize that the world is quite small, and there must be more to this game than running and jumping.

As soon as your alien gets close to a person, there’s a flash of flight, and he steals one of their eyes. (When I played this game, I was actually taking a little break over at IndieCade, recharging from all the demos of hyper-realistic blood splatters and targetting. I was not expecting supercute blue alien to be an organ thief!) Once equipped with a new eye, the alien sees the world as the eye’s previous owner does.

When he looks through the eye of a gardener, small sprouts look like fully grown vines, and the alien is able to climb them. When he looks through the eye of an architect, he sees the world as a blueprint, with a bridge appearing over

The story is quite linear, there’s only one way to solve each puzzle and the small playing world means all players will solving each problem in the same way and in the same order. That’s not necessarily bad, since Vision By Proxy seems to be more of an interactive movie short than a game you can “beat”

The theme seems to be that different people see the world differently, which makes a small playing area seem much bigger… but the sad faces of eye-patched people after coming into contact with the alien belie that uplifting conclusion.