#Before your eyes review full#

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 review 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.