Before Your Eyes tells a brilliant, tragic story using webcam technology

“Flash it and you will miss it” is something of an old adage that is usually dictated to an event that happens so quickly that all of your attention must be paid to actually witnessing it. This is how the publisher Skybound Games presents itself one of the trailers Per In front of your eyes, a game that uses a camera to track the player’s blinks to advance the game.

This mechanic was originally conceived in 2014 before a Kickstarter for 2016. appeared Close your (the title that would eventually become In front of your eyes) it was only published as a fully realized project in 2021. The game combines soft, rounded graphics with a melancholy narrative that shows what the passage of time can mean for a single person. It is also about the big question of what comes after death.

Players take on the role of Benny Brynn, a stray soul wandering the afterlife, freshly torn from the river by the enigmatic ferryman – a strange, dog-like creature that explains the game’s premise. In order to get to the afterlife, players have to experience Benny’s life from his first memory to his last. Through these memories we also get to know Benny’s mother, whose failure to become a renowned composer projects her regret on Benny. However, In front of your eyes

Image: Goodbye World Games / Skybound Games

The narrative also heavily questions the societal expectation (in some cases cultural) that we must leave something great after we die. In front of your eyes is aware of how the need for awards, accolades and praise can burden a person – it also understands how quickly the parent-child relationship can fray as a result. It is precisely this tension that weighs down Benny’s relationship with his mother and drives the grappling of the game with poignant, fleeting moments that Benny can never get back even though he thinks about it sadly.

In front of your eyes uses Egyptian mythology as the backbone of the story. The ferryman is clearly inspired by Anubis as he judges the soul of a child who is so desperately trying to paint the picture of a life well lived that he is lying. Benny did not die as an accomplished artist with a considerable legacy, but as a hopeful child musician. Benny’s deception is revealed when the ferryman causes Benny to relive his earliest experiences of death. The first finds that Benny overheard a phone conversation about his grandfather’s death. The second is much more gruesome: it forces you to stare without blinking as coyotes push around the corpses of kittens you saw recently while nursing the family’s beloved cat.

“The ferryman is probably a good example of Benny’s fear. He’s the coyote who’s always trying to get the truth out of Benny, ”lead artist Hana Lee told me recently in a Twitter DM. “This ties in with the very tense scene in which Benny sees a pack of coyotes eating his cats. The existential fear Benny felt when he remembered this memory makes the game move on to telling the truth about his life. “

Image: GoodbyeWorld Games / Skybound Games

In this taste of existentialism, Benny finally begins to face his own mortality. These brief but increasingly meaningful examples are based on a child’s understanding of life and death; something simple but sad and hard. The vignettes are deeply touching on their own, but by re-experiencing these cases in their entirety, it forces them to reconcile themselves with their own understanding of mortality and the shift in their perception from childhood to the present. In exploring our own perceptions of death, In front of your eyes challenges the notion of “meaningful” inheritance. Instead, it is claimed that the life we ​​have lived is sufficient, including the hardships we may have encountered on this journey and ugly truths that we may not otherwise encounter.

Along with the unique blinking of the game, In front of your eyes created a compelling narrative that works with the mechanics. His picture-book style imagery helps mitigate an otherwise tragic narrative that leads a child to face one of humanity’s darkest fears. And despite the severity of the topic, the game deals with this topic carefully and relies on hope: it elevates the interpersonal relationships we maintain with one another as something worth being proud of. In front of your eyes wonders if awards and reputation are the only worthy legacy we can leave behind. Instead, it suggests that the life we ​​lead may already be a story, as mundane as it may seem.