Sure, and I’m all for a game which makes this point. I’m just in doubt about the effectiveness of being too stealthy about it. In my view, the really excellent writer would be the one who could casually but clearly indicate the character is blind, then proceed to demonstrate how normal (by somebody’s standard) this is.
To me, the stealthy way is like writing a lipogram without using the letter J, and not telling anybody about it. Whatever point an author would be making by having characters “leap” instead of “jump” would become too subliminal to be effective.
As tangential examples, C. J. Cherryh’s SF novels Foreigner and The Pride of Chanur come to mind. Each involves a human transported, alone, to an alien world. One book is from that human’s viewpoint, while the other is from the aliens’ viewpoint, but in both cases she is able to make the reader feel that a human character is the foreign substance in a totally normal world. It’s not accomplished by avoiding the details which differentiate humans and aliens, but by giving the reader a real understanding of these worlds.
IMO the stronger idea is to say “here is how a blind person moves within the world AND it’s totally normal” than to say “here’s a blind person moving within the world and I’m implying it’s totally normal by letting you assume the character is sighted”. TELL us the knife thing, TELL us about feeling the knot on the banister to know when you’ve reached the landing (or whatever), make us feel that we personally do these things every day without thinking, and I think it’s a stronger presentation.
I wouldn’t agree with that in general, but as Arnold Schoenberg said:
“Everything” has always been allowed to two kinds of artists: to masters on the one hand, and to ignoramuses on the other.
What I mean by quoting this is that while good writers (and masters) might, not uncommonly, do things that could be characterized as misleading the reader, if the result is any good they’re doing something more subtle than that. Based on my experience with detective fiction, good authors won’t so much mislead the reader: they will present a very involved situation which doesn’t initially have one clear interpretation. Instead of immediately clarifying the situation itself, the author clarifies the situation’s degree of complexity. In the process they’re able to drive the plot and make a nod to genre conventions. Some “too obvious” solutions are probably part of the situation’s complexity, but when there are 200 more pages left in a book, who would believe the mystery is already solved?
A good writer has an understanding of what’s actually important in making a book fit together, and doesn’t have a use for rules like “don’t mislead the reader”. But as a heuristic, I would still promote “how can I be clearer” (about what’s important to this idea).
Imagine reading a detective novel, relishing the big reveal of the perpetrator at the end, then months later reading an interview with the author, in which they mention that actually the perpetrator was entirely different than they had claimed in the book. You reread the book, and you can’t find anything that explicitly rules out that interpretation. Maybe the author successfully made some obscure real-life point, but it would hardly make them better as a writer.
Similarly here, unless the purpose is to bait the player into assuming the character is sighted in order to demonstrate that we habitually assume characters are sighted (which I don’t think it is), I don’t think the presentation gains much from being subliminal.