Before Your Eyes is a first-person narrative adventure developed by GoodbyeWorld Games in Unity and published by Skybound Games in 2021. The game uses your real-life blinks as a way to control the flow of the narrative. An earlier version of the game, titled Close Your, received the Game Developers Choice award at Indiecade and the Student Award at the Independent Game Awards (IGF), before receiving funding through a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Welcome to the second monthly t/suki book club thread for July 2024! This thread is for discussing the game’s themes, characters, plot, and style. Feel free to talk about what you liked and disliked! It goes without saying that this thread will be filled with spoilers.
You can buy the game on Steam and the Epic Games Store. If you want to experience the game for yourself first, stop reading this thread now and go get the game!
What game should we play and discuss next? Remember that you can pick as many as you want! The game that has the most votes will be the game for August 2024.
- Emily is Away
- Frog Detective 1 + 2 + 3
- Hardspace: Shipbreaker
- Omori
- SpiritFarer
- Eastward
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
- Undertale
If you have any games you’d like to play in a future book club, let me know and I’ll include them in the poll.
I played this game on stream. It was an interesting experience! I was expecting the blinking mechanic to be pretty simple, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was explored and experimented with. In particular, they have a few parts in the game where instead of blinking, you need to keep your eyes closed, heightening the experience of the audio you are listening to. I feel like they could have gotten more leverage out of the mechanics and I wish they experimented more with it, but it was still very cool to see nonetheless.
As a streamer, I was also appreciative of being able to turn on a little camera in the bottom right; most applications take exclusive control of the webcam, so having that available so you could see my while I was streaming was nice.
I felt the game was pretty good at getting to the emotional points that it wanted to with the music and the scenes it would place you in, but I felt like the impact of those scenes was lessened by the fact that I found the plot a little confusing. The ferryman gets mad at you for lying, pointing out that you were not remembering some specific dark memories, but upon revisiting those memories it’s not clear (at least to me) what they had to do with lying. You could also miss some information from previous scenes by blinking too early, and this lack of information made some later scenes confusing. Did anyone else feel this way?
It would be really cool to see a VR adaptation of this game someday. Could you imagine having a game that operated only on your head movements and blinks as input? I feel like that would make for a surreal experience. Right now, I feel like if mouse input could be avoided, it would have the potential to draws you into the experience more. And, it would open some interesting gameplay possibilities.
