#BEFORE YOUR EYES GAME STORY SERIES#

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.

#BEFORE YOUR EYES GAME STORY SERIES#

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. Those are encouragements we don’t often get in such a short, pleasant package with only a handful of concerns apart from its spiritual conceit.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. We should take time to slow our rush, the game tells us, and to live even the bad parts of life well. But, there’s also some creative gameplay to be enjoyed here, and emotionally moving reminders that our existence does indeed pass us by, almost in a blink. This game’s spiritual context (which is never really explained in depth) might not sit well with some families. And there are one or two uses each of “h-,” “crap” and “d–mit” in the mix, too. We also hear misuses of God’s name in the dialogue. And the cat-like gatekeeper has a third eye and harkens to Hindi beliefs and other Eastern spiritualism. Though never pointed to or explained, the ferryman concept is drawn from ancient Egyptian religions. Content Concernsįor people of Christian faith, the biggest concern of this abstract “ferryman in the afterlife” story will likely be its spiritual worldview. And friendship, the game tells us, can sometimes lead to deeper feelings and commitments. Players also see that friendship can bloom between people who initially seem very different. In addition to those messages, the game also lightly stresses the importance of family, as well as the impact a loving family can have in shaping us. And your actions can, and do, change others, for good or bad. The tale also encourages players to love and encourage others, as well as living and being emotionally present throughout a “full life.” Even a short life on Earth can be something memorable, it tells us. But they do remind players that our choices matter in life. The choices you make in-game have a fairly minor impact on the overall story. And when you blink and open your eyes to the next page of the story it adds an emotional, fleeting-life resonance to the tale at hand. In practice, the blinking mechanism is quite ingenious and it makes you want to keep staring as you pick up important moments in the quickly aging young man’s life. (You can use the mouse as a substitute for blinks if your computer isn’t equipped with a camera.) These include connecting star-dots while sitting at night on a beach or playing a piano in rhythm-based challenges, among other challenges. You also use your mouse to make story direction choices and perform mini-games. The game learns to recognize your eye-movements and advances the story-several minutes, hours, days or years-as you blink. Gameplay-wise, Benjamin’s story becomes a series of blink-and-you-might-miss-it moments from his life. So, Benjamin’s story must be factual and honest if you don’t want fast passage to the nearest salt-encrusted dock and seagull misery.

On top of that, there’s one other stressor in the mix: the gatekeeper has the ability to quickly ferret out lies or untruths. It’s the Ferryman’s job to present that story to “The Gatekeeper.” Recounting the tale will either prompt the gatekeeper to let worthy souls enter into a heavenly city or be banished to exist as a seagull: sentenced to squawk endlessly at the world. Then a weathered dog-like Ferryman pulls him out of this river of souls and asks him to recount his life story. As things begin, Benjamin has already passed on and finds himself a bodiless soul floating in an abstract, dreamy world. This game lets you play as a young guy named Benjamin Bryyn-or at least as his soul. And Before Your Eyes-an indie visual novel game that uses your computer’s camera to track your blinks and eye movements as part of the gameplay-definitely brings that adage to mind. Life sometimes feel like it’s passing in a blink.

Before your eyes game story