Periphery Synthetic is playable by sound alone – is it the next step in accessibility for the blind and visually impaired?

Close your eyes. It’s an exercise we’ve all tried: navigating through touch, memory, and educated guesses. Invariably, we panic and open them immediately or run into something we were sure wasn’t there. You can do the same in a video game and have a similar experience of playing chicken with obstacles, both real and imagined, in your path. Though that is the closest many sighted players will come to the realities of blind and visually impaired gamers.

Periphery SyntheticDeveloper: shiftBacktickPublisher: shiftBacktickPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam, Itch)

A clutch of games exist, however, in which this is not the case. It’s not a crowded field, but it received a new entry last month in Periphery Synthetic. A nonviolent, undemanding space exploration designed as, according to its developer shiftBacktick, “primarily an auditory experience to be playable without seeing the screen.”

It’s a meditative experience that sees the player roaming over vast plains in search of materials to visit other planets. All of which is represented visually by a succession of squares and audibly through the combination of two chords and their harmonics and inversions, to create a soundscape of over 100 simultaneous and unique sounds that make the game playable by sound alone.

Indeed, in my own explorations of Periphery Synthetic, even as a sighted player, I found myself switching off the graphics (one of a suite of accessibility options) and navigating by sound alone. Much as we all had, I found myself navigating as if I’d closed my eyes, and yet in the place of unseen obstacles I found a navigable, relaxing, and compelling loop in which I could become lost in the noisome vacuum of Periphery Synthetic’s equitable gameplay.

Despite a long history of audio games, the idea of playing without seeing what is often regarded as a visual medium still takes some by surprise – especially online. There are trolls, naturally; but also a sincere misunderstanding, according to psychology PhD researcher, Chris Leech, the scope of sight loss included within the syntactical definition of “blind and visually impaired.”