The idea of virtual reality gaming is to offer gamers an immersive experience, putting them in positions and giving them perspectives that weren’t available previously, like with the recent Angry Birds virtual reality demo. However these perspectives and immersiveness does not mean that they have to be limited to just visual aspects of the game, which is what Blind Swordsman is trying to do.

The idea behind the game is for players to put on a virtual reality headset, a pair of headphones, and start playing. Sounds simple, right? However like the title suggests, you will be playing completely blind (and as a swordsman) and will have to rely on text instructions on the screen as well as sound to identify where your enemies are coming from.

The description of the game reads, “You play a blind swordsman. You can’t move. You are in a dojo, swordsmen come in and move slowly towards you to attack you. If you hit an enemy with your sword they die. If you get hit you die. The world is black and you have to rely on your hearing to determine where the swordsmen are.”

Players will not be able to move in the game, but are only allowed to turn their bodies to get a better audible cue as to where their enemies might be, and have to strike when they get close enough lest they get struck first. According to the game’s creator Scott Leaman, “I wanted to create an experience without graphics to see if it was possible to create a virtual world with only positional audio. This is to show the impact of audio in immersion and world building, as well as act as a showcase for the Oculus Audio SDK.”

It sounds like a pretty awesome and unique idea and like we’ve said before, virtual reality will help unlock new ways of playing games and this is a perfect example of that. If you have a virtual reality headset and would like to take this for a spin, head on over its page for the download link.

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