Going into my latest adventure on the PSVR 2, I had no idea what to expect with Before Your Eyes</em>. Would it be a first-person shooter? Would it be an adventure game? What is Before Your Eyes? You should know that it’s a visual novel. And it isn’t just any novel, it’s an emotional journey through the eyes of a person who has passed on and the judgment that awaits them in the afterlife.
Get ready for some Grave of the Fireflies type of emotion.
Grab those tissues and let’s get through this together.
The journey through
Before Your Eyes starts out interesting enough. The story revolves around a character named Benjamin Brynn, who awakes to find himself on the boat of a strange wolf named the Ferryman. He helps to get lost souls to the other side of the afterlife to be judged. His purpose is to determine whether a soul is ready to be judged and if the soul has a great opportunity to get beyond the restrictive gates of the afterlife. If everything works out for the soul, fantastic. They get to go to the next part of life. If it doesn’t, well…they turn into a seagull and stay with the Ferryman for the rest of their days.
To determine whether Benjamin’s life was worth the risk, the Ferryman requires Benjamin to go back and relive moments to see what truly happened to him and how they lived their life. The journey is an emotional one as it is short. You’re looking at about an hour or so of playtime, but don’t let that stop you from the experience. The story is best suited for a virtual reality platform, as it does put the player in the shoes of Ben from birth to death.
*SPOILER ALERT*
The story takes Ben back to every moment of his life with his parents and first love. The first time around, Ben lies to the Ferryman about how he lived his life. He talks about a restrictive mother who wants him to follow in her footsteps as a pianist. How she wants him to be so good that he gets into a highly-rated school for the gifted. It also takes him through some tough spots, such as being in bed for a year due to sickness. The first journey ends with Ben taking an art route, being successful, and then losing his mother in the process to a terminal illness.
And all of that, well, it was a lie.
The second time around, the truth trickles out until it’s a waterfall. Ben never made it beyond 11 years old. He was sick, bedridden, and got worse in the year he was in bed. It shows the hard times that his parents went through saying goodbye to their son and knowing that he would never reach 12. All of this is a gut punch. His stages in the story during the game would not have been impactful if they weren’t in VR. Being enclosed in a VR world, shutting the outside world off completely, and having a front-row seat to a tragedy is breathtaking as it is devastating.
I didn’t expect the game to go this route at all. When I took off the PSVR 2 headset after the experience, it was tough to immediately recover. It’s even worse if you have kids of your own because generally, you can block the noise of losing a child out of your mind, but when you’re playing the scenario on this type of platform, it’s impossible not to feel it.
*SPOILER ENDS*
This game’s story is brilliant, it’s real, and I never want to go through it again (respectfully). Much like Grave of the Fireflies, experiencing it one time is enough to keep it with you at all times.
Gameplay is simple, yet appropriate
Put down those PSVR 2 controllers and just look and listen to this game. Those are the core gameplay mechanics. Before Your Eyes uses the eye-tracking capabilities of the headset to lead the gameplay mechanics from beginning to end. When you see an eye icon pop up, you point your eyes at it and blink to reveal the next piece of the story’s puzzle. For example, when you start as a baby in the game, to progress and open up the next part of what you’re looking at, you will find an eye pop-up on the screen. You just point your noggin in that direction and blink. In this particular scenario, your mom asks you to look at a spikey plant on the beach and to see it you have to blink once.
To progress from scenario to scenario, as you travel through your many years, a metronome will crop up. You simply blink when you’re ready to move to a different time on its mark. Those are the two main mechanics in the game and mostly you’re just listening and moving to and from with them. Now, that’s not a bad thing, as it does allow you to focus on the story unfolding. It wouldn’t make sense to get the thumbsticks involved, as they would be little more than a distraction and go against the purpose the gameplay and story are trying to establish – paying attention to the moments. This game was designed to elicit emotion and to make you feel Benjamin’s journey. Disrupting that through freedom of movement via thumbsticks would break the gameplay design and experience.
All that said, there are branching moments of the game that shift it and make it somewhat replayable. There are moments when you must decide how you handle situations. For example, there is a moment when Elle (Ben’s true love) wants to sneak out and meet him at the beach. You have the choice to do that or to go to bed because you have a recital the next day. I would imagine that either direction would lead Ben down to the same conclusion, but having that choice embedded into the scenario at least provides an illusion of gameplay freedom. A common theme that the game perpetuates quite often.
Occasionally, the gameplay will give you some temporary options to interact with the environment. There are moments when Ben has to play the piano for his mom, and you simply look at the piano’s keys and slide your head back and forth with the lit areas around the keys. While it might give your neck a cramp, it doesn’t nearly last long enough to be tiring. It does break up the story and provides the player with something to do other than sit, listen, and progress. There is also an occasion when you’re given a camera to take pictures and you take them with your blinks at given points. Ultimately, it does nothing to progress the story, but much like the piano, it provides an interactive break in the visual novel. At the very least, it helps balance out gameplay and prevent the story from feeling like it’s an overwhelming burden.
Getting back to mechanics, the eye-tracking and reactionary controls are brilliant. They are accurate as they are useful. Blinking and having the game react are almost simultaneous. It’s impressive that the eye-tracking here works so well. Using those mechanics, developer GoodbyeWorld Games does enough to keep the situation interesting and to gut-punch you properly when the time is right. Some of the content in this game is brutal as it is engaging, so the gameplay complements rather than gets in the way. The story is first and foremost in this experience. Everything else is secondary.
Visually appropriate
I know, that sounds like a tag that you would see on the ESRB rating. Quite frankly, it’s an accurate tag. Visually, the game is simple. It’s like something straight out of an Annapurna Interactive game, though this one is published by Skybound Games. The animation is simple, and playful at times, and doesn’t nearly match the brutality of the story told. I would imagine this is on purpose. If you give innocent visuals to the player and then take them through a gut-wrenching journey they won’t soon forget, you’re balancing out how tough you want the result to be. Going back to my <em>Grave of the Fireflies</em> example, if it wasn’t an anime, it would be harder to deal with it. Because it is innocent animation, it’s easier to take yourself out of the moment when you need to do so, as it is not real life to the viewer. If that movie had actual actors, it would have been far worse to experience it. The same is true for Before Your Eyes. The art is simple, and playful at times, but it compliments and balances out the brutality that comes with the story.
You’ll feel this one, folks, just like anyone who has seen Grave of the Fireflies, and quite honestly, you should feel it. Sometimes you need a bit of brutality in a story to appreciate the real life around you. It can be a healthy reminder to hug people and treat them right. We can sometimes lose sight of that in our day-to-day lives.
Beyond the visuals, I know a lot of gamers will complain about the price. For me, $14.99 isn’t a bad price point for this game. It tells a very real story, gets the player involved, and keeps the player there long enough to make them feel it. It’s a perfect amount of time (one hour and some change). It’s a game that belongs in VR and you shouldn’t spend a minute longer with this story.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Before Your Eyes is a devastating journey in VR that you won’t soon forget. While the journey itself doesn’t last that long, the story is long enough to leave an imprint on the gamer for years to come. It has a very Grave of the Fireflies vibe to it, so bring the tissues.
