A Brief Review of "Before Your Eyes"

Available for: Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

I've played my fair share of emotional indie narrative-driven games in my time. If Found..., That Dragon Cancer, Last Day of June, games like those. So when MoistCritikal (or however he spells that handle) put out a video today (as in, the day I started writing this review) strongly recommending a new game in that genre, I figured I'd give it a shot. In case you couldn't tell from the title of this review, that game is Before Your Eyes, a game published by Skybound and developed by GoodbyeWorld Games, a developer that I'll be keeping a close eye on in the future. As I've already said, I'm no stranger to small indie sad games like this, but I don't think I've ever experienced one that felt as special as Before Your Eyes. So here I am to do a very, very brief review just to get my thoughts out there and make it eligible for my GOTY list. Bear with me as I bumble through this quick discussion.

The central premise of Before Your Eyes is this: you play as Benjamin ("Benny") Brynn, a departed soul that has been fished up by a humanoid wolf/coyote thing in a boat. This wolf is taking Benny to "the gatekeeper," an entity that judges whether or not souls depart into paradise, but that's just the frame narrative. It's the wolf's job to tell a soul's life story to the gatekeeper, so the meat of this story is Benny reliving his whole life. Sounds pretty par for the course for a game like this, right? Dead guy remembers his life, maybe has one or two regrets, maybe has a dark secret? If you've played games like this before, you could be forgiven for starting to make educated guesses about where the plot is going to go. But part of what makes Before Your Eyes feel so special is how unique the meat of the story actually is. Certain lines of dialogue would happen and I'd start counting down the minutes until typical sad indie plot event x happened. But the game subverts the expectations you might have in believable ways just about every time, and in the one instance where I was right about something, the key takeaway and execution of that plot point was handled in a way that I've never seen it handled before. BOY do I hate writing small reviews like this, paragraphs just never seem to come together in a clean way when I do! But I digress. Obviously I can't talk too much about what happens in this story, but what I'm trying to emphasize here is that it manages to avoid the classic pitfalls of sad indie narrative games. 

One of the ways it avoids those pitfalls is that it's not just sad. It gets very sad at times, but the point of the story isn't "are you crying yet?" Throughout the game's runtime, I found myself saying "awww!", feeling anxiety, laughing out loud (thanks in no small part to the stellar writing), having something in my eye, and then smiling through the somewhat blurry vision that resulted from that something in my eye. This is a story about Benny's entire life, so as one ought to expect, the story is filled with all sorts of emotions, and that variety across the game's 2-hour max runtime ensures that the story both never gets stale and succeeds in whatever tone it's going for in a given moment. I...wish I could elaborate more on this, but for me the best part of the game was its message and overall point, and to elaborate further on the game's use of emotions would be to spoil that, so I guess we're moving on. 

Now, I've been talking about this game for a little bit, but there's a thing to keep in mind: I didn't get to experience Before Your Eyes as it was intended. See, the intended experience has the game use your webcam to monitor your eyes, and when you blink, you skip forward in time. Is that perhaps a bit on the nose for a game about reliving your life after the fact? Maybe, but I think it's charming. Anyway, that's how the game is marketed, but it's slightly misleading. I don't have a webcam on my Windows machine, so I had to use the game mode where you click to simulate the blinking, and you only actually skip forward in time when you "blink" when there's a metronome icon on the screen. So as far as I can tell, you aren't going to miss any important plot details on accident. It's just that there's a lot of extra dialogue to help flesh things out even more after that metronome comes up. With that in mind, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that my time with Before Your Eyes would've been even better or not as good if I played with a webcam. I can't say for sure, but I'll say that I can see the desperation of wanting to hold on to some of these story moments just a little bit longer possibly adding to the experience. 

Normally I do a full technical session, but this is a small indie game, so there's really not much to discuss. The framerate is solid, the art style is pretty to look at, I never experienced any glitches or audio/visual bugs, and the soundtrack here is just excellent. Moving on. 

There's one last thing I want to talk about before I end this mini-review. It's something I briefly touched on already: the writing. Good heavens the writing on display here is excellent! Whether it's the banter between Benny's parents, the witticisms of one of his teachers, or the utterly convincing statements made by his tomboy childhood friend (i.e. something to the effect of "try to take a picture of me running to my house. I'm pretty fast so I don't know if you can but you can try"), every line of dialogue from every character is believable and filled with personality. And towards the end of the game, when...*sigh*...yeah I can't elaborate on that either...but just...when the waterworks start flowing, it's largely due to the love that was put into the writing. 

So there you have it: a miniscule review tossed together over the course of exactly half the time it takes to beat the game, one that doesn't go into much detail at all and just kind of rambles about how everything is good. But dear reader, I have to re-emphasize: everything is good. This was a short, simple, yet emotionally resonant story told excellently, and it came with a message that has made me think, and I believe it's going to stick with me the next time things get bad. It's 2 hours long at most, costs about $8 on steam, and unlike something like That Dragon Cancer or Last Day of June, it'll make you feel things without ruining your whole day or week! I have no complaints.

The final score for Before Your Eyes is...

10/10 - Masterpiece

Excellent work, GoodbyeWorld Games, excellent work.