I finished Before Your Eyes last night and I felt I should write some thoughts on it, since I never see anyone talk about it (and I'm waiting for my next game to finish downloading).
-
Before Your Eyes (BYE) is an indie....adventure game? Narrative game? What do we call these games now that have very minimal interaction, but attempt to tell an emotionally compelling story?
- Anyway, its main claim to fame is that it's dubbed as a game that is controlled simply by blinking. This is...half true. While you can play it with standard mouse controls, you can (and they recommend) play it by setting up your webcam wherein the game will use your eyes blinking as a substitute for a mouse click. You still have to look around with the mouse, but yeah, you can blink to click on whatever you're looking at (by using mouse look, there's no eye tracking). I have mixed feelings on this gimmick, which i'll get into later.
- As an adventure game, it's about 90 minutes front to back. There's some "choices" you can make here and there, but aside from changing a couple of meaningless plot points that are abandoned within 2 or 3 minutes to loop back into the main path, it's a strictly linear affair.
- I don't want to get into the story too much, as at 90 minutes long, it's tough not to delve too deep without getting into spoilers. The main setup is that you play a person who has just died and is being ferried to the gates of non-denominational afterlife judgement. You aren't able to speak, but the boatman can read your thoughts and he requests you to recall your life, as he'll need to be your voice when speaking to the final judge, who will ultimately determine whether you go to the good place or the bad place. The bulk of the story is played out in first person vignettes of your life from being a baby to a child and onwards. As your character can not speak, only blink to confirm certain actions, the story is told basically by listening to the people around you, what they say about you to others and how they communicate with you and to you.
- If you've played and enjoyed games like
Florence or
That Dragon Cancer, or to a lesser extent,
What Remains of Edith Finch, you are in for a similar experience here. I will occasionally flippantly lump these games as "tragedy porn" as they romanticize otherwise painful things as the lovely parts of life. In general, these types of stories don't work for me. There tends to be a lack of maturity in this type of writing in the games space; a wallowing in maudlin plot points that can mistake tragedy for poignancy. I will say that
BYE is incredibly sincere. I can
feel the sincerity of the story and I have no doubt that it means a lot to the people who worked on it. I can also understand how someone can be emotionally affected by these type of stories (if you are the type of person who cried at the opening of Pixar's "Up", I would suspect that this game could touch you), but the sincerity of the writing comes across to me as someone shouting YOU ARE GOING TO FEEL THIS, while the modern-indie-folk acoustic guitar starts plucking away.
You know the type.
- In general, I enjoyed the presentation; the art style is pitch perfect for this type of story and budget, as the visual character abstractions do a lot with very little. The characters emote with simple facial geometry, and it sells emotion far better than probably anything but the best of the uncanny-valley riddled polygonal performances in the games industry. The voice acting is generally solid throughout but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that there were some characters that were "doing a voice" rather than that character "having a voice", if that makes any sense. Like an actor doing an accent that isn't their native one, whenever their real voice slips through, the facade is kind of broken. Occasionally the actors swing for the fences and there's some real "Theatre Kid Energy", but I can't quite tell if it's the writing or the acting or directing. Probably a combination of all of the above.
- One thing about the presentation - the characters appear to be mocapped. This isn't a crazy thought for an indie game in 2021, as there are even apps for your phone now that can give you decent mocapping results, even without a suit or studio. This definitely helps the animation, but there's a few too many places where they didn't clean up the animation, so you'll have, say, a character put their hand on their knee while getting up from sitting down, but the hand will be floating 6 inches above their knee because the game character doesn't have the same limb dimensions as the person doing the mocap. Or them holding up a piece of paper and pointing at a place on it, but their finger clips through the paper every time and you can see it come out the other side. I get it, indie studio, low budget, etc. but it puts in stark relief two things:
i. If you're going to do something, you have to go all the way with it. None of these problems would have occurred with key framed animation, so if you are going to invest in mocapping, you have to be willing to do some cleanup on the other end, and
ii. The less focus you put on player driven gameplay, the more obvious your shortcomings in other areas will be. If all your game is watching a story play out in front of you, all the little issues will become more apparent. No one cares when your bowling ball pauldrons in Dark Souls clips through your face when you swing your sword, but they definitely notice when Ellie's teeth clip through her lip when she's yelling at Joel.
- Speaking of needing to fully commit - the blinking controls. I've got two criticisms of them and one is worse than the other, but both probably affected my experience equally:
i. When I first booted up the game, I went into the calibration and was amazed at how accurate the blink tracking was. Like, right off the bat, with almost no calibration, it read my webcam properly, showed a video of my face (with proper lens distortion correction too, which was nice), and read my blinks almost 100% consistently. I didn't even have to pantomime blinking like a cartoon, i could just blink normally and it would pick it up. It caught even the subtle half blinks when my eyes would flick to different parts of the screen.
but...
...about halfway through the game, it just started randomly registering blinks every second on the second at an even pulse, no matter what I did. I re-calibrated (and the calibration would just keep firing off erroneous blinks no matter where i moved or looked or anything). I tried rebooting, re-calibrating again, unplugging, plugging back in, changing my lighting, changing my distance, you name it. Same thing. I scoured the forums, did all the dev tips and eventually got it to work by turning down the blink sensitivity so low that i had to act out "blinking" like whiteguyblinking.gif to get it to read properly and even then it only kind of did. But anything higher than lowest sensitivity would just cause a rapid series of blinks.
I can't really fault the game too bad for it, even though nothing in my environment changed, it just sort of happened. Maybe the lighting subtly shifted in my room. Maybe my webcam went on the fritz. Who knows, but this is the type of risk a developer takes with a novel control scheme and it ends up, for better or worse, becoming part of the experience. You take the good with the bad. Will it happen to you? Probably not, but who knows, and I would be dishonest if I just said that everything worked out hunky dory.
ii. Blinking as a gameplay mechanic...it's just not...great. I believe that the blinking-to-progress mechanic is fundamentally opposed to creating a simulation of the player experiencing the intended emotions the game is trying to convey. See, in the game, the vast majority of scenes play out by having a short intro sequence of mandatory story, then a metronome will appear on screen. While that metronome is on screen, if you blink it will automatically skip ahead in time to the next scene in your life. But the metronome appears, in most cases, well before the story content has finished playing out.
This means that, to experience as much of the story as possible, you are constantly concentrating on not-blinking. So when the cute girl in school is teasing you about your dumb drawings, and the more she talks, the more you're listening for cues that she actually might like you, you are also trying not to blink while your eyes dry out. While your parents in the other room are arguing about poor finances and your mom starts crossing the line verbally to your father and you are listening for clues about the subtext to the argument, you are rolling your eyes around the screen to keep them from drying out so you can experience the breadth of the dialogue without blinking.
While one could argue the player shouldn't be gamifying their blinking experience but should just go with whatever happens, it doesn't feel congruent with the game design. In a game about learning about someone's life it literally just smash cuts and moves to the next one when you blink. If they were trying not to make it gamey, why does every scene play out as a staring contest between me and the story? I don't know what they were attempting to equate between the player in real life and the character in the game. Doing a staring contest with a webcam to see more of the story in the drama playing out in front of me never pulled me into the story more or made me feel like I was the character. Becoming acutely aware of your own blinks doesn't center you emotionally in any way.
I could see one thinking "hey, a person will strain their eyes, causing them to well up, which will make them more vulnerable and more able to cry." But that's like thinking if I punch you in the face when a character finds out their dog died, you'll be more likely to cry. That's an orthogonal shortcut to a physical response, not an emotional one. In Metal Gear Solid 4, they make you jam the X button to crawl through the electrified hallway to make you feel the physical strain that Snake is feeling int he game. You feel as a player, like Snake does in the game...physically struggling to make it to the end. Forcing your eyelids open to make sure not to blink so you can see the rest of the story of your mom lamenting how her parents treated her....just isn't it.
Anyway, I don't think the game is bad. The story is clear and the emotional beats have universal appeal. There's some twists and turns and some decent characterization. If, like I said, you liked
Florence or
What Remains of Edith Finch, you may like this in the same way I had similar problems with those games. At worst, it'll probably still make you want to hug your mom.