Before Your Eyes
Review

Before Your Eyes (2021) is a narrative game about an 11-year-old boy revisiting his life before "crossing over" to the other side. You play by exploring scenes that represent snapshots of his life. Unusually, you make choices and interact with the game by blinking your eyes (seen by your webcam or smartphone camera) rather than pressing a button. It uses this disarming interaction to intimately involve you in an emotional journey about the impossible expectations we place on ourselves and the regrets we carry with us.

Before Your Eyes begins on a desolate sea with a fox-like captain taking you to be judged. You're then instructed to 'remember' your life before you reached this place. When remembering, you blink to progress a memory by interacting with the objects you see, but soon a Metronome appears and your next blink will end the scene.

As you progress this use of blinking becomes second nature. The game leans into this and uses it in ever more intimate ways. If you blink by accident when the Metronome has appears dialogue is cut short and there's no way back. It creates a tangible tension of your inability to control time. Then there are moments where blinking makes a choice about how the story is told (although it's not branching). Or there are moments when you must keep your eyes open or close them to progress.

The result is a fascinating game that explores the unforgiving pace of life. The uncertainty of how much time you blink forward combines with your inability to hear everything you want to before moving on powerfully creates a sense of powerfullness and inevitability. This combines with the themes of illness, family expectations, performance anxiety and our legacy after death to tell a story that gets under your skin in ways a book or film is unable to do.

Our examiner, Ellen Robertson, first checked Before Your Eyes 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Ben Kendall and updated 8 months ago.