I'm still in childhood on my playthrough, presumably with a great many years still to come, but I'm keen to see where it goes. The blinking does feel a little bit magic. I mean, I would be interested to see another game try that too. I don't know how long I could go trying to drink everything in without blinking, unless the game was only a few minutes long. I had expected lots of fast cuts because of that implication, but it often takes its time.
Often you're free to blink, or need to blink over specific things (selected by mouse) to interact. From what I've seen, scenes will play out a fair bit before you reaching a point where blinking will move you on.
While the game suggests every blink will advance time, nah, that's only at specific points. And to control all this, you're using your eyes as a left-click to select things or cut ahead to the next scene. This means you, player dear, are watching vignettes skipping across the days and years of a life, with a few decisions along the way. You're aboard the boat to the afterlife, sans mouth, telling your life story to the Ferryman (a suspiciously dishevelled dogman) by reliving memories.
It’s currently available on PC via Steam here.There you are, dead. And it is, in my opinion, something you need to set aside an evening for. In a year of some big games, Before Your Eyes is something you’re not going to experience anywhere else. But even when I was right, the way in which it did so, and how it used the eye-tracking as part of it, worked so well that it still floored me. At some points, I thought I knew what emotional strings it was going to pull on. Yet if you have the capabilities, Before Your Eyes is an experience you absolutely need to undertake. Needing a PC and a webcam to play isn’t always the easiest ask. I had to recalibrate my eye tracking a few times, and its best experience requires a very specific setup. Even major life events punctuating the mundane are all, eventually, just blinks of your eye.īefore Your Eyes definitely has a few stutters. Every little car trip, every little conversation, can all blink right by so mechanically. The notes we passed in history class, playing with a toy boat in a tub, listening to a loved one play a tune at the piano. It flits by, much like the little events in life. We don’t think about blinking, at least not until someone points it out to us. It’s something we do that’s so mechanical, it’s automatic. The usage of eyes-blinking and staring and shutting-as a mechanical concept works incredibly well. And Before Your Eyes belongs in the same conversation. Games like Florence and Gorogoa take one concept, and then twist and turn that concept to tell a story that fits so well. What if you don’t want to leave? What if you want to stay here, in this moment? Better keep those eyes open.Įvery once in a while, an indie project simply stuns with its execution on an idea. It’s a nice reminder that can, in some circumstances, become menacing. Every time an advance is coming up, a metronome will appear, signaling that your next blink will take you further into Benny’s life. It was so easy, early on, to accidentally blink and skip through a major scene. In the way that fellow indie game Unpacking-another on my backlog-touches on the tactile, Before Your Eyes hones in on the visual. To say more is to spoil more, and for a game that will take just about 90 minutes to see through, it’s really best to just go in as unaware as possible.īecause really, Before Your Eyes has become one of my big knockout surprises of the year. Benny’s life is not an easy one, and you sit in the driver’s seat as he goes through family drama, growing pains, and difficult moments in life.
You might be starting to get the idea now. Sometimes, it’s how you leave one moment in time-potentially forever. Sometimes, that’s how you select options or advance through a scene. Using eye-detection software, the game will recognize when you’ve blinked. The crux of the experience is that you play Before Your Eyes with a webcam plugged in. And sometimes those choices are whether or not you blink. From birth to death, you see it all in a first-person view. Going back through Benny’s memories, you relive all of it through his eyes. You are Benjamin, Benny, and you are reliving Benny’s life. Stepping into the head of someone else, you watch through their eyes as you whisk through their life. If you haven’t heard of Before Your Eyes, it’s a narrative adventure from GoodbyeWorld Games with a pretty interesting premise. And frankly, it’s really taken ahold of me. So in my efforts to catch up with some missed notables in the run-up to award season, I decided to boot up indie narrative Before Your Eyes last night.
It’s the first day of December, and all through the blog, the writers of Destructoid are clearing their backlog.