Skip to content
Before Your Eyes is a new PC game which employs an input style I’ve not yet come across before. As you go through the story, carrying out various actions, you’ll skip through periods of time, which can go from anything between a day to several years.
What makes this different is that you can blink if you have a camera or, if not (like me), just click the left mouse button, in order to move to the next scene after you’ve finished the current one. Quite frankly, the latter would be easier anyway, in case I got something in my eye at the time. Aside from that, you can move your mouse about to see everything, meaning Before Your Eyes would work well in VR.
The only major problem with this input method, though, is that since you can only do it from when a metronome appears onscreen, it is annoying that the metronome comes up *before* the scene is over, so you might click it too early and then miss part of the scene, since the dialogue can be a bit sporadic, and on a first playthrough, I found myself clicking JUST as someone was about to speak. Grrrr!
Before Your Eyes has an interesting graphic style, which may look more simple on the surface than it is, but as a scene plays out, certain parts might fade out while others fade in, and so on. Plus, many areas of the image go into focus as you move your mouse over those parts of the scene. Plus, I like that the videogame controller mirrors that from an Apple Pippin console.
A lot of the time, you’re playing a straight story, but occasionally, you’ll make choices along the way, such as choosing whether to get some information about Greece or Egypt as the place to go on holiday well viewing old family photos. Okay, so not game-changing ones, but while there is one later that’s career-based, I still went with it on both playthroughs because I didn’t want to muck up my gameplay video 🙂
There are 12 chapters, but I wish it would tell you, during the game, which chapter you are on. It just goes through the whole lot and you don’t know where you are up to unless you quit out of the game and if you do that you’ll have to repeat parts of the current chapter. So, that’s one thing I would change.
Overall, Before Your Eyes tells a beautiful and emotional story as you live the live of a young lad Benjamin Brynn, from being born into adulthood, and going through it a second time really does Reap benefits, as I picked up on certain things in the dialogue which I missed first time round.
Score: 10/10
Before Your Eyes is released on April 8th on PC/Steam.
Cast:
Elle: Sarah Burns
Richard: Eric Edelstein
Ferryman, Dean, Art Professor, Eddie: Stephen Friedrich
Chloe: Heidi Kang
Mr Isaac, Doctor: Benmio McCrea
Art Agent: Sarabeth Schedeen
Adult Chloe: Minnie Schedeen
Important info:
- Developer: GoodbyeWorld Games
- Publisher: Skybound Games
- Players: Single player campaign
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.