Before Your Eyes uses webcam tech to tell a brilliant, tragic story

“Blink and you’ll miss it,” is something of an old adage, usually prescribed to an event happening so fast that you’ll need to focus your complete attention to actually witness it. Skybound Games decided to show one of their trailers. The World Before Your Eyes, a game that uses a camera to track the player’s blinks to progress the game.

This mechanic was initially conceptualized back in 2014. Kickstarter came out in 2016. Get Close to You(the title it would one day become).Before Your Eyes), it wasn’t until 2021 that it would release as a fully realized project. It combines soft and rounded graphics with a melancholy story that shows what time means to each person. This game tackles the big question: What happens after death?

Players assume the role of Benny Brynn, an errant soul wandering the afterlife, freshly plucked from the river styx by the enigmatic Ferryman — a strange, dog-like creature that explains the premise of the game. To gain passage to the afterlife, players must experience Benny’s life from his first memory to his very last. Through these memories, we also meet Benny’s mother, whose failure to become a renowned composer makes her project her regrets onto Benny. However, The World Before Your EyesThis story of an unfulfilled expectation from a parent turns quickly into a moving tale about how lies are used to help us get through the darkest hours.

Image by Goodbye World Games/Skybound Games

It also examines the expectation of society (and sometimes cultural) that people must give something to someone else after they die. The World Before Your Eyes is acutely aware of how the need for awards, accolades, and praise can weigh on a person — it also understands how quickly the parent-child relationship can fray as a result. It’s this very tension that strains Benny’s relationship with his mother, and fuels the game’s examination of poignant, fleeting moments that Benny can never get back, despite reflecting on them mournfully.

The World Before Your Eyes deploys Egyptian mythology as the story’s backbone. Anubis inspires The Ferryman in judging the spirit of an innocent child who wants to live a good life. Benny died as an artist, not as a musician for children. Benny’s deceit is called out when the Ferryman makes Benny relive his earliest experiences with death. The first finds Benny eavesdropping on a phone conversation about his grandfather’s passing. The second is much more grisly: It forces you to stare, unblinking, as coyotes push around the corpses of kittens you had just moments before watched nurse on the family’s beloved cat.

“The Ferryman is probably a good example of Benny’s fear. He’s the coyote who is constantly trying to pry the truth out of Benny,” Lead Artist Hana Lee told me in a recent Twitter DM. “This directly ties into the very tense scene where Benny sees a pack of coyotes eating his cats. The existential fear that Benny felt from recalling this memory makes the game transition to him telling the truth about his life.”

GoodbyeWorld Games/Skybound Games

Benny’s first taste of existencealism is when he finally confronts his mortality. These short, but increasingly meaningful instances draw upon a child’s understanding of life and death; something simple, but sorrowful and harsh. Although the vignettes themselves are profoundly moving, the players must relive them in full. This allows them to reflect on how they have changed their understanding of death and the impact it has had on them. Explore your own views of death. The World Before Your Eyes challenges the notion of a “meaningful” legacy. It instead purports that the life we’ve lived is enough, including hardships we may have faced along that journey, and ugly truths we may not have been willing to face otherwise.

Along with the game’s unique use of blinking, Watch What You See Before Your EyesIt has created an engaging narrative that is compatible with the mechanic. Its storybook-style visuals help soften an otherwise tragic narrative that makes a child confront one of humanity’s darkest fears. This game, despite its serious subject matter, manages to show compassion by emphasizing hope. The World Before Your EyesQuestions whether awards and fame are all worthy legacy options. Instead, it suggests that maybe, the life we’re living, as mundane as it may seem, is already a story worth telling.