Seeing [With/Like] The Machine: Blink and Hana’s Light
By bodypoetic
When I walk my city, I am guided by my phone. I enter a cafe, find a QR code beneath the grease-flecked sheen of laminated paper, lift my phone’s lens to its surface, wait for the shape to resolve into a menu for my hungry hands. Over and over and over I do this, easy as breathing. Where would I be, without these circuit-eyes? How might I see this world? What could I un-know?
–
Hana’s Light (2025, Indiepocalypse Issue #67) is a short hidden object game by Bluzo and Goblincat, with music and sound effects by Peter Landry and Alexander Morgan1. It’s a subtle, heartfelt, haunting piece that follows its recently-bereaved protagonist, Margot, through processing her grief. Justcamh’s Blink (2022, Indiepocalypse Issue #69), meanwhile, is part of a tradition known variously as information games, knowledge node puzzles, or (controversially) metroidbrainias, where the only limit to your progress is what you know2. In Blink’s case, this means your ability to navigate the Curse: if you close your eyes, you teleport to a random location as soon as you open them again. In ways obvious and not, both games are fundamentally concerned with vision – more specifically, the ways in which we outsource our view of the world to technological devices, and how that shapes our thinking in turn.
Take, for example, the QR codes strewn across Blink’s landscape. When scanned, these glyphs output raw text, giving the player information about the game’s mechanics and world. Sometimes, these messages resemble neutral – if flavourful – tooltips: ‘Stimulation dampens the curse. Standing in water will keep you in place’. Others carry an obvious bias: ‘The venerable king stands leader of all good. He need not strain himself; it is our purpose to strain for him’. It is not clear who left these messages, nor how long they have been there – but a reasonable assumption would be that these were the former inhabitants of these ruins.
While it is possible to read QR codes manually (this tutorial by Piko and blinry springs to mind), it’s a time-consuming process that, realistically, most of the time, you’re not going to bother with3. Especially not in a game where you can’t look at anything for longer than twenty seconds. A smartphone equipped with the right app, though, can parse a QR code near-instantly – so I played with my phone within reach, repeatedly lifting it to my computer screen.
This action is mirrored in Hana’s Light – although here it is fully diegetic. Our call to action comes in the form of a spirit-like presence that manifests through Margot’s Tamagotchi. It claims to be Margot’s lost loved one, Hana, and offers to help4. It asks that Margot go into the forest behind her school and collect a selection of items. The player must use the Tamagotchi as a torch, casting its light into the darkness, searching for the items that give off a characteristic orange glow. This effect – the titular Hana’s light – is used throughout the game to signal what the player needs to click on to progress. In the comic-like cutscenes that open and close the story, the orange glow appears most often on the Tamagotchi and the spirit inhabiting it. That said, we first see it on Hana’s funeral portrait, and then on a grief-stricken Margot. When the player’s mouse hovers over items with the glow effect, its colour grows darker and more vivid – suggesting an increase in emotional intensity. This light, then, is bound up not just with the possessed Tamagotchi but the ourobouros of Hana’s absence, Margot’s grief.
In the forest segments, a simple gameplay loop emerges: the Tamagotchi’s light reveals an item; you collect the item by clicking on it; you open the Tamagotchi’s interface and feed it the item; the spirit comments on the item in question, offering opinions, information, and/or flavour text. This process is essentially the same as the QR codes in Blink: pass an image into your [fictional/real] device, which converts it into data, which you then consume.
Crucially, though, Blink’s player character is reading these codes in a very different way. One room – tucked away, one of the more difficult locations to access – contains a conversation played out across nine QR codes. One reveals that ‘we are communicating in secrets etched in the wall. Etched so that we can both feel it and read it without ever opening our eyes’. In other words: this is a writing system similar to Braille, read through direct contact with the body; felt as well as read. A process closer to the unwieldy process of manually parsing the code’s binary than it is to simply holding up a phone.
Interestingly, there is one QR code that categorically could not be read this way. It flashes briefly on the screen as the player character falls through a succession of chutes – such that you can only read it by taking a screenshot, or if you already have your phone ready. The message reads ‘the biggest fools make kings, whom neglect the hands that serve them. These are the true clients of hell’, and it is the closest thing Blink has to a conclusive moral statement. Perhaps it can only be read through machine vision because it is intended to stand outside the narrative, to address the player directly. In any case – seeing it suddenly appear on my screen, scrambling to grab my phone in time, failing to do so – I acutely felt the fallibility of my body and my eyes.
Similarly, in the third and final forest segment of Hana’s Light, you cast the light across the surface of a lake. There, just for a second, you catch a glimpse of a glitching shadow, reflected in the water’s surface. By this point, the game has taught you to keep the light moving until you see the orange glow – so on a first play-through, you’ve likely moved on before you’ve processed what you’ve seen. Move the light back and it’s gone. Again, I felt the imprecision of my body. Again, I wished for the instantaneous reflexes of machines.
This sense of destabilisation pervades both games; neither gives us a full and accurate impression of our surroundings. Blink’s art style is loose, pixelated, impressionistic. It offers the broad strokes of a place, a suggestion of its structure, and little more. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the game’s mechanics – the kind of loose visual idea you might gain from opening your eyes and immediately closing them again. Furthermore, you must frequently navigate in total blindness, aided only by the sound of your footsteps and your memory of the space. The art of Hana’s Light is comparatively detailed – particularly the forest backgrounds – but the player can only ever focus on one or two details at a time. In the forest, your vision is limited to a small circle of light, and the stylised story illustrations offer nothing but the most essential elements of the scene. You fumble and falter your way through both stories, struggling to access what you need.
Lately, for the first time in years, I’ve been doing some quasi-academic research. It has left me in a similar frame of mind: wading through pages of enshittified search engine results, trying to discern which websites are most likely to be AI-written, rephrasing my searches as many as ten times before they bear fruit. It’s not just me – a 2024 report by Janek Bevendorff et al found Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all frequently succumb to spam campaigns and make disproportionate use of affiliate links5. The most reliable way to find sources has been using my own knowledge to find and follow citation breadcrumbs, but this only gets me so far. When faced with an area of study I don’t already have a basic grounding in, I’m lost. I’m used to treating the Internet as a prosthetic extension of my knowledge – and as it grows less and less reliable, my sense of the world around me grows more and more compromised.
Blink’s lore extends the analogy further. In that set of nine QR codes I mentioned earlier, the speakers (whom it is near-impossible to distinguish) collectively wrestle with the actions of their king and the situation he has left them in. One speaker remains loyal, maintaining ‘it was for the best’. Another maintains that ‘his venture into Hell clearly left [them] ruined’. The conversation’s turning point comes with the admission that ‘his majesty does have an air about him’ (emphasis mine)6. The 2024 US election was met with a wave of headlines concerning the ‘vibe-ification’ of politics, as gut instincts and vague impressions gained greater primacy in the discussion. Writer and philosopher Robin James draws a connection between this cultural turn and a shift in our technologies: ‘in the same way that experienced cooks and bakers can judge an ingredient’s volume by sight or feel without measuring it first, pop cultural “vibe checks” are how people apply the same epistemic practices these algorithmic technologies use without having to do the math’7. We use our devices to categorise, and learn to categorise in turn – immediate, gut-instinct processing, imprecisely parsing the world that passes by.
More recently, we have seen the proliferation of large language-model chatbots, with a marked tendency for confirming our gut-instinct hunches. A recent analysis of ChatGPT transcripts by the Washington Post, for example, found that it agreed with users ten times more often than it disagreed8. In Hana’s Light, we might find an equivalent in the Tamagotchi spirit who, when Margot asks if it is Hana, readily agrees. It transpires that this is a lie: the spirit is actually a capricious catboy trapped within the Tamagotchi, only interested in using Margot to escape9. He transparently does not care about Margot – cheerfully remarking on how miserable she is. A friendly voice behind a screen, pretending to be someone lost, indulging your desire to get them back while devouring your personal data. Sound familiar10?
In both games, the player character’s fumbling progress brings them closer to the truth of the world they live in, and in both cases, that truth comes with the offer of power. Blink’s nameless protagonist (re)forges the Crown of Thorns and takes the throne themself, while the catboy offers Margot a choice between returning home and becoming a catgirl like him. Both triumphs ring somewhat hollow – neither the king nor the catboy ever had your best interests at heart. The cycle repeats, the Curse remains in place, and Margot can never go home again. Still, here you are – sitting atop your mountain of hard-earned knowledge, firmly entrenched in the technologies you used to obtain it. The question that remains: what will you do?
1 Bluzo and others, Hana’s Light (25 June 2025) <https://goblincat.itch.io/hanas-light> [accessed 27 November 2025].
2 Justcamh, Blink (11 October 2025) <https://justcamh.itch.io/blink> [accessed 26 November 2025]; Kate Grey, ‘What The Heck Is A “MetroidBrainia”? Introducing The Newest Genre On The Block’, Nintendo Life, 20 May 2022 <https://www.nintendolife.com/features/what-the-heck-is-a-metroidbrainia-introducing-the-newest-genre-on-the-block> [accessed 27 November 2025]; Grey, ‘What The Heck Is A “MetroidBrainia”?’
3 Piko and blinry, ‘Reading QR Codes without a Computer!’, n.d. <https://qr.blinry.org/> [accessed 26 November 2025].
4 The exact nature of Margot and Hana’s relationship is left ambiguous. This lack of concrete information will become a theme across both games.
5 Janek Bevendorff and others, ‘Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines’, in Advances in Information Retrieval, ed. by Nazli Goharian and others, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2024), , pp. 56–71, doi:10.1007/978-3-031-56063-7_4.
6 Interestingly, which position the speakers have settled on is left ambiguous. One QR code reads ‘he has brought us prosperity, but now that you say it so…’ (emphasis mine), suggesting a turn away from the king. The final QR code, however, gives a positive statement that ‘he has helped expose the traitors’. ‘I’ll take these down’ does little to clarify matters – does ‘these’ refer to the seditious messages or the loyalist ones? Even here, the player is unable to gain a clear view of the situation.
7 Robin James, ‘Good Vibes Only – Latest Introduction’, It’s Her Factory, 16 July 2025 <https://www.its-her-factory.com/2025/07/good-vibes-only-latest-introduction/> [accessed 27 November 2025].
8 Gerrit De Vynck and Jeremy B. Merrill, ‘We Analyzed 47,000 ChatGPT Conversations. Here’s What People Really Use It for.’, The Washington Post, 12 November 2025 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/11/12/how-people-use-chatgpt-data/> [accessed 27 November 2025].
9 According to a comment by itch.io user Mars, catboys were an unofficial theme of the game jam for which Hana’s Light was produced.
10 Jason Fagone, ‘He Couldn’t Get over His Fiancee’s Death. So He Brought Her Back as an A.I. Chatbot’, The San Francisco Chronicle, 23 July 2021 <https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/> [accessed 27 November 2025].