Before Your Eyes Review
Our Rating: 9/10
Before Your Eyes is a narrative journey. A fantastic immersive experience that shows us a very interesting plot filled with feelings in the first person. However, to immerse ourselves even more in the experience, the devs from the small GoodbyeWorld Games studio decided that we could play the game with a blink of our eyes. Using any PC’s webcam!
Story Overview
We are little more than a consciousness hovering in the dark depths of the afterworld in the game. From here, we are rescued by a boatman. He is assigned to inform us of what has occurred and where we are. But we can’t interact with him because we don’t have a mouth. We can only blink.
The boatman is interested in learning about our background, so he will take us back in time, via our memories, to our early life. We’ll go through the crucial moments of our lives.
This is an incredible way to intensify flashbacks. Without giving anything away, the game’s story is extremely emotional, and this mechanic helps us to feel as if we’re playing it ourselves.
Gameplay
The designers have created a surprising and sentimental tale around the idea of the ‘last blink before death,’ which we will have to uncover by paying close attention to our monitor and, more importantly, our blinks.
During the game, we will use the mouse to move our eyes around to see what’s around us, but a blink will trigger all of the objects and interactive options. Our eyelids will mimic the click of a mouse. And the concepts work flawlessly with any webcam, any PC, and nearly any lighting condition.
Jumping in time
However, blinking acts more than just to activate components on the screen. It also functions as a jump in time. When a metronome appears at the bottom of the window in any scene, the scene continues to teach us until we blink.
We’re going to jump ahead in time here. The jump can last anywhere between five minutes and five years. But the crucial part is that that storyline would proceed with more dialogues and crucial information for understanding the story. But if we blink, we would miss it and go back in time. Trying to keep from losing something important will entail holding out as long as possible without blinking.
The Good, the Bad, and Overall Experience
The game continuously engages our sensations, particularly the eyes, but also the ear, for abundantly clear reasons. What’s more, the story is intertwined with the music, and the soundtrack is present throughout the adventure.
Voices that ring in your head
The game oftentimes requires us to close our eyes to focus and remember certain interactions that are understandable with our eyes open. The fact that you have to close your eyes to listen to them immerses us much more in the story and gives us the feeling you want, that they are truly personal memories.
Narrative adventures, which are becoming increasingly popular, do not demand much engagement beyond clicking on various elements on the screen, exploring, or progressing through the scenarios. Before Your Eyes makes things even easier by allowing us to move forward by raising our brows. This feature allows any player, regardless of disability, to participate in the story.
Interesting Artistic Section
The game has an intriguing creative component with colorful graphics that optimize the feeling of a dream or memory and are sometimes displayed in brush strokes, requiring us to blink several times to complete the scenes. Everything was done to create a story that will make us cry because of its intensity and the message it conveys. And, most importantly, how it is counted. A bottle of eye drops is highly recommended!
Final Thoughts
Before Your Eyes is an amazing interactive story. It’s very emotional and sad, but it manages to make us feel a lot of different emotions while we’re watching it. Especially since we interact with it through our eyes, which happens in the blink of an eye.
This device is much more than a demonstration of the capabilities of facial recognition technology. It immerses us in the story, almost as if we were playing a virtual reality game, but without the use of glasses.
It’s a brief but intense encounter. It took us an hour and a half to finish the stories, but if you’re more of an explorer and can put up with a lot of blinking, it could take up to two hours. Then there’s an extras section where you can replay any of the chapters. It’s a fantastic game that we can confidently say you’ve never seen anything like it before. It has pleasantly surprised us.