If you just let yourself blink as you would normally, you’ll end up skipping ahead of insightful dialogue and arresting visuals constantly. It’s certainly easy enough to “cheat” the game by looking away from your camera’s field-of-vision so it can’t see what you’re up to, but that’s hardly the intended spirit of play. In its worst moments, it feels like you’re locked in a staring contest with the game, though if you can keep your eyes open long enough, some amusing hidden dialogues await. In order to linger on small details of a given scene or even hear dialogues to completion, you’ll need to betray one of your body’s most unconscious behaviours by fixing your gaze unnaturally and straining to avoid blinking. For the game to encourage players to speed their way past gorgeously crafted sequences in mere seconds – and you’ll probably do so accidentally more than a few times – devalues an otherwise mature and transfixing throughline. Though the game insists upfront that you shouldn’t fight the tide and just ride the wave it takes you on, that does little to quell the frustrating fact that players will end up blinking their way through tender, carefully curated moments and missing crucial emotional details. The bulk of the game sees players living through Benny’s memories and dreamlike visions from infancy to demise, moving across these scenes by blinking whenever a metronome appears at the bottom of the screen. Even in a well-lit room with a relatively high-quality webcam, I found tracking calibration fiddly and time-consuming, the latter proving all the more frustrating given the game’s brief length. Still, the overall outcome isn’t nearly convincing enough to justify the clear effort expended on its implementation, as the blinking is rarely able to get out of its own way and simply let the far more interesting story play out. The potential for technical issues per the eye-tracking gimmick – yes, it is a gimmick – speak for themselves, even as the developers have made a fair effort to compensate for players with glasses and non-ideal lighting conditions through a pre-game calibration process. Across its brief 90-minute play-time, Before Your Eyes conjures an appealingly off-kilter existential odyssey, the particulars of which are best left unspoiled.īut the successful emotionality of the story is constantly at war with how it’s presented to players. While hardly treading new thematic ground for the artsy indie game, these touchstones are nevertheless rich enough to merit continued exploration. To that end there certainly is plenty here worthwhile from a story and character perspective a wistful, aching meditation on the passage of time, memory, parenthood, mortality, mental health, and the pains of an artist’s life.
BEFORE YOUR EYES INDIE GAME FULL
As they embark on their journey, the player explores choice moments from Benny’s life, their eye blinks pushing them forward seconds, days, or even years in time as the full extent of Benny’s existence – his joys, his anxieties, his unrealised dreams – are unfurled.
The first-person dramatic adventure game begins with our protagonist, Benny, sat on a boat being ferried to what appears to be the afterlife by an anthropomorphic, animalistic Ferryman. Said conceit is nothing if not daring, though – to shepherd players forward by using their own eye blinks as inputs, which the game tracks through their webcam.Ĭonsidering the oft-frustrating clash between this envelope-pushing new control scheme and the more delicate core narrative, it’s something of a saving grace that developers GoodbyeWorld Games also allow more traditional, non-ocular play, using mouse clicks in place of blinks. Affecting, character-driven drama is undermined by a clumsy central gameplay conceit in the well-intentioned yet only partially successful new indie “experience” Before Your Eyes.
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