New multiplayer shooter Blindfire has a unique dark mechanic and it’s out now

There’s a trend among certain restaurants where diners sit in the dark, trusting the waiting staff and their remaining senses to enjoy the food placed in front of them. It’s a way of heightening taste and removing sight from the equation, and that’s exactly what new multiplayer FPS Blindfire is doing with its penumbral setting. What’s more, it’s already out for you to play in early access.

Revealed during the October Xbox Partner Preview, Blindfire is an FPS game that really does look like it’s trying something different. If you couldn’t tell by the preamble, the main twist is that its 8v8 combat will happen entirely in a dark set of arenas, with little light to guide your way. Every shot taken will illuminate whoever’s firing, so you’ll have to be extremely careful and sure when you decide to let rip with your weapons.

If that wasn’t enough, deadly traps have been placed throughout each arena, placed by the ultra-wealthy elite who fund these deathmatches. So you’ll not only have other players to avoid, but the levels themselves are your enemy too. When you die – and you will die – you’ll hop into a spectator mode where you can see using night vision, suddenly able to spot that the arena is decorated with lashings of blacklight paint. Deceased players will be able to control those aforementioned traps, making them far less passive then you might first presume.

Whether or not any of this will work is still to be seen and with a peak concurrency of only 21 players on Steam since its launch, matches may be thin on the ground right now – at least on that particular platform. That said, this is very early days for a title that no doubt has a long series of updates ahead of it, and we’re always a fan of an underdog story coming up from behind to take the big dogs down.

Blindfire is out now in early access. If you’d like to check it out for yourself, head over to Steam to see if you want a bit of its pitch black action.

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