Before Your Eyes

GoodbyeWorld Games’ Before Your Eyes spends roughly 85 minutes of its 90-minute runtime training you to feel like something as natural as blinking will hinder your understanding. The narrative adventure game focuses on Benjamin Brynn, who is reflecting on his life after his death and recounting the story to a Ferryman looking to help him ascend to whatever’s next. As you relive Ben’s life, your webcam tracks every time you blink, and will skip through a scene. Blinking is inherently discouraged, because if your eyes are closed, you’re going to miss something.

That is completely recontextualized in the game’s final moments, because blinking is key to a full understanding. After Ben has reflected on his life, remembering his attempts to write his life story down at the end, he remembers his mother reading a revised version of the story he wrote that is much kinder to him than his was. Ben has spent all of Before Your Eyes hiding who he was because he was angry at the life he lived, and is grieving the one he wished for. But she sees him so clearly. Meanwhile, the Ferryman, having learned the truth of Ben’s life, also sees him with a new clarity, and is able to tell his story to the powers that be.

In this sequence, you listen to the Ferryman tell Ben’s tale, but as you blink, the game seamlessly swaps between his narration and Ben’s mother, as they tell the same tale in perfect sync. Before Your Eyes mediates a lot of profound themes. Mortality’s vice grip on our existence, shame in unfulfilled dreams, and how we all ascribe some kind of storytelling to our lives when sometimes, the world stops following the script. But in its final moments where Ben blinks between life and death, it reminds us that to be human is to be more than ourselves, it’s to be everything we are to those we care about, and to know that sometimes they see us more clearly than we’ll ever see ourselves. — Kenneth Shepard