After hundreds of hours with a load-order built around Devious Followers I've been testing out a SL/Devious playthrough centered around a solo experience, leaning more on licences in SL Survival as a money sink.

I've set up Deviously Enchanted Chests to have a 7.5% chance of a trapped container, with a 15% chance at finding keys in containers and corpses once I had at least one restraint. The thought being that it'd give me a window of time where I had to put up with the devious device, but I'd eventually get a key and unlock myself if I just pushed on. (The higher key chance was necessary, given that I couldn't rely on a Devious Follower this time round as a(n expensive) key dispensary.)

I started out in Solitude, again. It's such a fantastic and thematically-appropriate hub to start in I suspect it was at some point in development supposed to be a vanilla starting town. Been making my way slowly to Whiterun to start the main quest. I hadn't been doing a lot of dungeon-diving, so I just haven't looted that many chests. A third-way through Bleak Falls Barrow, I finally triggered a trapped container (draugr mummy), which equipped a blindfold on me. Usually, I'd just take the financial hit and immediately ask my Devious follower to remove it for me, but this time it wasn't an option. I was stuck in it, at least until I can find a key or pick the lock.

Devious Devices has a few modes for its blindfolds. "Leeches Mode" applies a blur(?) effect not unlike taking off your glasses as a myopic person, while "Dark Fog" shrouds everything beyond a certain distance in pitch black. Neither is fully satisfactory on its own - everything is basically still visible on Leeches Mode even at max strength, just a bit blurry; with Dark Fog you get clear unimpeded vision in the immediate vicinity not plunged into total darkness. But by selecting one after the other you can kind of trick the system into applying both, leading to this claustrophobic view:

This, I think, is supposed to simulate my character being able to vaguely sense her immediate surroundings, but nothing beyond that. It's a really good compromise between giving the feeling of being trapped in a blindfold, while still being playable. 

It turned what was a fairly routine dungeon run into a terrifying, intensely claustrophobic affair, where I'm groping around and flinching at every draugr groan and scuttle. (The tension was undercut a bit by the fact that this was maybe the sixth time I'd run through Bleak Falls Barrow in the past month, and could navigate a lot of it by sheer muscle memory. But it was still a breathtakingly unique experience.)

The uncertainty, too, was part of the thrill. Without a Devious Follower to ask for keys, I was entirely dependent on RNG. What if I don't manage to find a key by the end of the dungeon? It would be very dangerous for me to waltz around town with a blindfold on because of the way I'd set up the Proximity Rape parameters in SL Adventures.

I actually didn't end up finding a key in the whole of Bleak Falls Barrow. Running very low on lockpicks, I tried one last time to pick the blindfold's lock before I camped at the end of the dungeon for the night... and by some miracle of chance it worked! To my immense relief but also, I confess, slight disappointment.

Have cranked up the trap settings to 15% trap/20% key, because this is definitely an experience I want to have more often.