Venetian Blinds: A Game Done In By Its Own Ambition

When the Atari 2600 was released in 1977 on an unsuspecting world, it opened up a whole new frontier of entertainment. The television, having been a standby and constant companion for nuclear families for decades, no longer just offered entirely passive experiences. Instead of merely watching the television and reacting accordingly, you could actually dictate what was happening on the screen and have things happen on your own terms. The one-way street became a two-way and with it, our views of what was fun and amusing changed forever. In those days, developers were extremely limited with what they could have the 2600 output to screens and so, in order to make things interesting and engaging to the players, they had to exercise a lot of creativity. Even amidst such hurdles, though, some games dared to dream and strove to become larger than life. For some games, like Haunted House, Pitfall, and River Raid, their visions were a success and went on to be all-time classics, enjoyed for generations to come. Many others, however, tried shooting for the stars, but could never leave the ground, their potential most poignantly squandered. Activision's Venetian Blinds, unfortunately, is one such case.
 

The premise of Venetian Blinds is promising enough. Playing as an average 9-to-5 office worker, the game starts off with you waking up on a normal morning, your trusty hand-turned alarm clock having once again stirred you. Everything is normal and all is well. Your beautiful wife is still asleep and the kids are over at a friend's house for a sleepover. The neighbors' dogs aren't barking their heads off and, miraculously, those punk-ass frat kids who live next door to you actually didn't party last night for once. There is nothing but true peace and tranquility at the moment. However, you do have a job to do with which the game tasks you. Before you have breakfast, before you shave, before you even shower, you need to go to your living room window and open the venetian blinds. This past week at work has been rough on you and before you begin another day of TPS reports, you could use a little dose of the sunrise. It's a beautiful sight, sponsored by no one else but Mother Nature and it makes you feel like the world is really an okay place in which to live.
 

But while the ideas behind Venetian Blinds sound good in theory, the gameplay unfortunately doesn't live up to those ideas at all. As soon as you put the cartridge into the 2600 itself and turn on the power, you're immediately greeted with the venetian blinds that you need to open up. There's no build-up to this moment, as it turns out the entire narrative was only established in the game's one-page manual. You just start right there at the window, the game expecting you to know what you should be doing immediately. This is highly presumptuous of the development team, as the actual gameplay is so abstract that there really should have been a tutorial mode of some sort before you get started. There are no prompts on the screen whatsoever and no hints to even give you an inkling of how to move forward. The way Venetian Blinds starts off, it's just as though Activision is throwing you into the lion's den and hoping for the best.
 

Given sufficient time to experiment with the controls and to exercise all of your possibilities, you'll eventually realize that opening the titular venetian blinds entails pushing up on the Atari joystick. This is entirely unintuitive, since one would expect the controls to be inverted to account for the presence of the pulley system that is necessary to operate the blinds. Alas, that is not the case. Should you hold up for a long enough time, the blinds will hit their highest point and stop, revealing to you the landscape: a long stretch of grass, some incredibly brown, Unreal Engine-esque mountains, and that pink sunrise for which you were searching, sitting comfortably beneath a blue sky.
 
The visuals behind this moment are, admittedly, astounding, showing off the true potential of the Atari 2600 hardware. True care was taken in the art direction to ensure you feel the majesty of that sunrise. So much beauty has truly never been rendered with so few pixels. However, the joy you get at this moment fades away as you slowly begin to realize just how anticlimactic everything is. Sure, it's all pretty to see, but the journey you take to get there is short and unrewarding. Devoid of virtually any challenge whatsoever, there is no difficulty in actually raising the venetian blinds aside from the unintuitive controls. Your wife doesn't wake up early and interrupt you. There isn't an urgent phone call from work telling you that you're actually two hours late. There isn't even an incompetent paper boy anywhere to break your window in order to distract you. Everything ends before you even know it. Furthermore, aside from the landscape, there is absolutely nothing else out there. No Canadian geese, no bugs, no dew, nothing. It is completely barren out there. As it turns out, the protagonist lives in the most boring countryside ever imagined, which is hardly fitting for an adventure that is supposed to be as exciting as Activision makes it out to be.
 

There's just a lot of wasted potential going on with Venetian Blinds. Aside from raising the blinds, the only other thing you can do is lower them again. If you're really desperate for variety, you can choose to raise or lower them partway, but that only adds so much variety to what is fundamentally a very simple and unexciting core. It should also be noted that the lone joystick button, as well as the vast majority of the 2600 console's control panel, go entirely unused. Players should be able to press a button while the blilnds are still closed and get a peek of what's outside before formally bringing up the blinds, just in case there's something sketchy out there awaiting them. This was a feature that the game's chief designer, David Crane, had promised to the press while it was still in development, but it's nowhere to be found in this final version.  Also, even when the blinds are at the very top, the last three shutters remain completely unfurled. The Atari 2600, even when pushed to its breaking point with that sunrise, should have been perfectly capable of rendering the pulling of those final three shutters. Yet nevertheless, they conspicuously remain there, taunting you and showing that no morning is, in fact, truly perfect. The fact that there's also no handle that you can turn to manually open the blinds feels like a lost opportunity. Sound is noticeably absent, as well, a weird admission considering how integral the noise of rising venetian blinds is when operating them.
 
Such is the case with the Venetian Blinds experience as a whole. Going into it, it's very easy to have high expectations. After all, it is actually the sequel to the cult hit Curtains, which was a sublime window dressing game all around. Venetian Blinds tries to make that magical lightning strike twice and, unfortunately, fails miserably. With a plot that ends much too quickly, controls that are completely nonsensical to anyone who has ever operated real venetian blinds in real life, and bland, uneventful scenery, there just isn't a whole lot that the game does right. The first time you see what's beyond the window, it is indeed a joy to view, but it all comes crashing down quickly when you realize just how much the game's issues really bog things down. If you're in desperate need of a venetian blind sim of any sort, I recommend you just buy a real window and a set of blinds instead of getting the game. Together, they might be more expensive than Venetian Blinds' asking price, but at least you get access to photorealistic scenery and can decorate the windowsill. As it is, Venetian Blinds is a game that tries too hard and ultimately ends up pleasing nobody.