I won’t spoil the game, but be aware if I was in a spoiler-y mood there would be a lot to spoil. Each scene is voice acted to perfection, making already moving moments even more effective. Your guiding fox shows you scenes one at a time, moving to the next whenever you blink and prompting you with choices to steer the story. The casual art style alleviates some of the heaviness of this scene, and you begin the game excited to experience the life of this person in detail. The fox warns you against lying, exaggerating, and confirms that the yawning frogspawn-like entities all around you are souls left in limbo. You are on your way to tell your story to the one who will decide your fate, persuading her that you are worth a trip to paradise. But is the game actually any good? Did the gimmick have to do all the heavy lifting? Well, honestly, Before Your Eyes might just be a masterpiece.īeginning your journey on a riverboat, faced with a fox that sounds like a watered-down John Goodman, your character is already dead. I love the idea, and it bought up all sorts of flurried thoughts about accessibility and progressive software. This in itself was a lot of fun, and surprisingly easy to get used to. We just don’t get enough wacky gimmicks anymore.ĭoes anyone remember that game where you’d speak to the main character through the computer mic and she would be “directed”? Or the game that called you up at work and sent you faxes to blur the lines between fact and fiction? Or URU Online, where you were dumped in an alien world and essentially had to figure out everything from the basic controls to the intricacies of a new language? What binds all of these (great) ideas together is the scope of their ambition… and the fact that, beloved as they are by a few, they never really worked. I like detail, I like innovation, but for a long time that has been represented as a storyline twist, or a predictable ARG extension. The sense of wonder feels lost on me these days, another console, another graphics update… but I never really feel like much has changed. When I was a kid, that pleasure felt reliable, a semi-regular occurrence that had me raving about games that my friends just had to try for themselves.
God, it’s been a long time since I sat back and thought just how clever a game was.
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