They shape who we are, and they teach us more about ourselves.įinally, the end of Benjamin’s life happens once again.
I desperately wished to blink to move to the next moment, but sometimes we are forced to live through dark and unsettling moments in life. At times, there were moments that I didn’t want to relive. This time, his recounting made me feel sad the honesty was tough to endure but necessary. During these moments, the metronome would appear as an hourglass, which meant that I couldn’t blink until the time was up, forcing me to experience the situation on the screen. As I revisited the past this time, I noticed things that I hadn’t the first time. In this truthful retrospective of Benjamin’s life, it is found out that he was diagnosed with a terminal illness at a young age. He then prompts the player to revisit Benjamin’s past again, honestly this time. However, everything is suddenly thrown back to the boat with the Ferryman as he accuses the player of lying. Toward the middle of the game, the narrative arrives at the end of Benjamin’s life, where it seems he has become a world-renowned painter. The game forced me to stay present and grounded by keeping my eyes on the screen. However, the blinking mechanic is a reminder that time is uncontrollable, just like how we cannot control when we need to blink. At certain times, I would find myself accidentally blinking, worried that I may have missed something important to my story. The theme of time in this game is both haunting and honest. I wanted to listen to the dialogue and view the vibrant, colorful graphics around me. At any given moment, a metronome will appear on the bottom of the screen, signaling that the next blink will begin a transition to the following snapshot.Īt times, I didn’t want to blink. The sound resonates throughout the 3D environment, telling the player where to look and where to blink.
We can only see small portions of each setting - the essential bits - as they are only a faint memory of Benjamin’s past. The game threw me into each moment with no information. Through these snapshots, we find out why his life is important to the plot. He prompts the player to venture back through Benjamin’s past by blinking through short snapshots. The short 90-minute story immerses the player in the first-person point of view of the protagonist Benjamin Brynn, as he ventures through the afterlife with a mysterious wolf-like Ferryman (voiced by Stephen Friedrich). It not only refreshed my memory of how video games can be an exhilarating interactive medium, but also inspired me to view my life through a different lens. In fact, I had not played an entire video game in years, before sitting down this week to play Will Hellwarth and Skybound Games’ newest creation, “Before Your Eyes”: a game that requires you to control the story with your real-time blinks via webcam. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a gamer.
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