Blackout: reviews, hot takes and discussion
Release date: Oct 2, 2026
A first-person game about being unable to see. One warehouse, one hundred thousand kilometers on a side, with a single live switch somewhere in it. Clap to light the room for a few seconds; find the switch by ear, following a hum and a ticking relay. Nothing is in here with you.
- Price: $3.99 (20% off)
- Platforms: Windows
Developer: Len Syrudas
Features: Single-player, Custom Volume Controls, #category_playable_at_your_own_pace, Playable without Timed Input, #category_playable_without_vision, Save Anytime, Stereo Sound, Family Sharing
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Blackout system requirements (PC)
Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i3-4130 / AMD FX-4300 or equivalent — 4 hardware threads
- Memory: 4 GB GB RAM
- Graphics: Direct3D feature level 11_0 with WebGL 2 support and a current manufacturer driver — Intel HD Graphics 620, NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030, AMD Radeon R7 250 or better. Uses about 150 MB of video memory at 1080p; the game ships no textures.
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- Sound Card: Stereo output required. Headphones required for navigation.
- Additional Notes: BLACKOUT is played in the dark and navigated by ear, so two things matter more than the numbers above. Your screen. Almost everything you see lives in the darkest 12 of 255 brightness levels. You need a display that still shows separate steps down there, in a room dark enough not to wash them out, with any dynamic-contrast, black-boost or vivid picture mode turned off. There is a calibration swatch under the brightness slider in Options — set it before you play. It takes ten seconds and it is the difference between a world and a black rectangle. Your ears. Direction is carried entirely by binaural audio. That is not atmosphere, it is the navigation: it is how you tell which way the relay is ticking and how far the wall is. Headphones do this properly; speakers in a room smear it. There is no mono or speaker mode. Windows only, 64-bit only. Runs windowed or borderless fullscreen; there is no exclusive fullscreen and no resolution setting — use the Render scale slider instead. Keyboard and mouse or any standard gamepad, either one at any time, with nothing to configure.
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit
- Processor: Any quad-core — Intel Core i5-6500 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or better
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, AMD Radeon RX 560, Intel Iris Xe or better
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- Sound Card: Wired stereo headphones
- Additional Notes: This is 1080p at full render scale with Detail set to High. Worth knowing: there is no frame limiter, and the game draws at whatever your display refreshes at — so a 144 Hz panel asks well over twice as much of your GPU as a 60 Hz one for exactly the same picture. If frames drop, two settings do the real work: Render scale (down to 50%, which quarters the pixels being shaded) and Detail (Low, which shortens the draw distance). Turning Bloom off saves a little more. Nothing adjusts itself automatically, so those knobs are yours. The ideal setup is an OLED or a well-behaved IPS panel in a genuinely dark room, with wired headphones. Any sample rate works; 44.1 or 48 kHz is the sweet spot, since every sound is synthesised at your device’s rate and a 96 kHz output doubles the audio workload for nothing you can hear.