![]() In the short span since their game was released, the team has been inundated with messages from players sharing their reactions to Before Your Eyes - with many using the game to tell their own life stories. Three core members of the development team at GoodbyeWorld Games - Lewin, CEO and founder Will Hellwarth, and lead engineer and designer Bela Messex - spoke with Inverse about why they believe accessibility is the future of video games, and revealed how they created one of gaming’s most unforgettable narratives. “We always talked about wanting players to walk away with something that was meaningful,” Lewin tells Inverse, “But we didn’t expect this.” The game’s director and composer, Oliver Lewin, wasn’t expecting the outpouring of praise and emotion Before Your Eyes has elicited. ![]() Where some players can enjoy games without giving inputs much thought, complex control schemes make enjoying modern releases far more difficult for people with disabilities. While Before Your Eyes’ emotive yarn and clever tech impress, this largely hands-free control scheme triumphs for another reason – its accessibility. Reading your webcam as a controller, players use a combination of blinks and mouse movements to navigate environments, closing their eyelids to jump between protagonist Benny’s memories, as his life flashes… Before Your Eyes. Playing the debut release from LA studio GoodbyeWorld games is an incredibly powerful experience - and that’s largely down to its innovative control scheme. As the poignant riff of a guitar-led ballad softly rung out over the game’s credits, I found myself bawling uncontrollably. Somehow this webcam-controlled indie game had utterly broken me - eliciting a stronger emotional response than any TV show or album in recent memory. It's forgettable in the end, and not as memorable as some other short adventure titles I've played in the past, but it's fun and worth a look.As my hour and a half journey with Before Your Eyes reached its end, I could barely see the screen, thanks to the tears blurring my vision. It's a very short game and doesn't let you really connect with the characters enough. Overall, Before Your Eyes is a charming game with a lot of heart and a fun gimmick that works well when it wants to. I feel a game like this misses the mark due to its short run time, but the gimmick would get tiring for more than 90 minutes. The scenes rush by too fast and you're meant to understand the moral of the story more than connect with the characters and get behind their motives and feelings. You can finish the game in about 90 minutes, but I did connect with the character to an extent, but not wholly. It didn't make me tear up, but it was really sad for sure. You'll most likely not really feel the game's impact until the last 20 minutes when things get really dark and sad. A big fear is your child being born with some sort of debilitating disease. ![]() The whole game reminded me a lot of That Dragon, Cancer, but I can't connect to this game as much as it's shorter and at the time I was expecting my first child so that game hit home quite a bit. It's an interactive adventure with interesting visuals. The game does a great job detecting your eyes even in low light, and I was using a laptop webcam which isn't that great. With headphones on this is a great effect. I won't spoil anything as to how or why, but the only times the blinking gimmick felt right was when you had to close your eyes to focus on someone talking. You slowly progress through the story only to find out that you need to retell the story correctly. Most of the time I couldn't do it (it's very dry where I'm at here in the summer). When a metronome appears you can blink and jump to the next scene or try to hold your eyes open and see the scene to the end. Sometimes an eye will appear on objects for you to blink at and interact with. Each scene is full of mostly black with just what you can remember being in view. You start out as a child and you eventually learn your mother is an accountant and failed music composer and wants you to follow in her footsteps. He's to be taken to a being in a large tower whom he has to sell his life story so he can pass on and the ferryman can be paid. You play as a boy named Benjamin Brynn floating along the river of death in a boat with a wolf as a ferryman. Not often does the gimmick feel like it's influencing something important, but when it does it works well. While it's wholly gimmicky and can be played with a controller, the game uses your webcam to see your eyes blinking to determine when to change scenes in the game or interact with objects. Gimmicks that use various types of hardware are nothing new since the days of the Wii made that mainstream, but very few games use your camera outside of a home console for gameplay. By ivory_soul | Review Date: June 24, 2022
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