![]() ![]() As soon as her child is old enough to sit, she’s sitting him in front of a miniature piano, explaining the aural difference between a C sharp and a C minor. This dream deferred becomes one she dreams for Benny. You get to know Benny’s mother, Elle, an aspiring composer who, at some point along the way, took a job as an accountant a job which, over time, became a career. You get to know Benny’s father, Richard, a good natured, slightly schlubby professor. You keep blinking and the years pass quickly. Then, you’re back at the beginning of your life, as Benny, a baby on the sand, blinking up at the sky, blinking over at your mother in a beach chair. “Could be a second,” the wolf says, “could be five years." After that, if you blink, time will move forward. As the wolf explains, you’ll get a few brief moments to watch before a ticking metronome appears at the bottom of the screen. But, in order to learn your story, you and the wolf must watch your life from beginning to end. If the Gatekeeper is impressed with your life story (as told by the wolf), you’ll move onto whatever comes after death in this strange cosmology a “magnificent city,” if the wolf has it right. He’s taking you to the Gatekeeper, a mysterious entity that guards the entrance to the afterlife. You wake up on a boat where a talking wolf in a yellow raincoat and boots has just fished you out of a river of souls. ![]() From this distinct starting point, high concept mechanics meet an equally high concept narrative. It’s a memorable introduction to a game, and reminded me of the heady days of Nintendo’s mid-aughts experimentation a time when you might be asked to blow into a microphone, or twist your Game Boy Advance like a steering wheel, or swing your Wiimote like a golf club. Like mouse sensitivity, but your peepers are the mouse. If it misses some, you can up the sensitivity and if it records blinks when your eyes are actually open, you can tell it to ease up. To that end, Before Your Eyes presents you with a series of empty circles that fill in white as you blink. In this first-person narrative game, time moves forward each time your webcam sees you blink, so it’s imperative that the game can accurately detect when you’re actually blinking. That initial calibration is crucial for gameplay reasons, too. It’s strange, sure, but it helps set the tone for the wonderfully weird and moving adventure that you will help unfold across its impactful 90-minute runtime using nothing but a mouse, your webcam and voluntary and involuntary blinks. But Before Your Eyes is the only game I’ve played that asks that, before you start, you take a moment to do pretty much the same thing for your eyes. ![]() Plenty of games ask you to tweak the brightness or take a moment to scale the resolution to fit your screen before you begin playing. ![]()
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