Before Your Eyes asks players to do something no other game asks of them: keep their eyes open. GoodbyeWorld Games built its 2021 adventure around a webcam that reads blinks as input, so every time you shut your eyes, Benny Brynn’s life skips forward. The mechanic is the whole pitch, and it is also the whole problem. The story lands. The technology does not.
Benny Brynn and the Boat
The premise is simple and strange. Benny, recently dead, floats on a dark sea until a Ferryman pulls him aboard. He cannot speak or gesture. The Ferryman can perceive his blinking, and that becomes their only channel of communication.
The Ferryman senses something unique in Benny and is taking him to the Gatekeeper for judgement. If Benny is deemed worthy, he enters paradise and the Ferryman gets a reward. If not, Benny becomes one of the seagulls that crowd the boat. To make his case, the Ferryman needs Benny’s memories. He asks Benny to recount them.
There is a catch, and it is the game’s central design idea. Benny cannot stay inside a memory. It flashes forward the instant he blinks. The player’s own eyes drive the story, whether they mean to or not.
A Seaside Childhood, Ernie, and Chloe
Benny grew up in a small seaside town with his parents, Richard, a professor, and Elle, an accountant and aspiring composer. The family takes in a stray cat and names it Ernie.
Benny develops a fondness for art, and especially music, because of his mother. One day, unsupervised, he plays one of Elle’s compositions on the piano by ear. His parents decide he is a prodigy and enroll him in lessons. He improves over the years and impresses his parents and their friends.
He also meets Chloe, his outspoken, adventurous neighbor, and befriends her. Elle eventually sets up an audition that could get Benny into a prestigious music school. He gets a year to practice several pieces. As Elle intensifies their sessions, Richard voices concerns about Benny, and the arguments start.
That is the material Before Your Eyes works with. A dead man, a boat, a mother’s ambition, a father’s doubt, a neighbor worth remembering. It is a drama and a mystery at once.
The Blink Is the Button
The player interacts with Benny’s memories through eye-tracking technology. Eye movements and blinks are registered by the game. Blinking is the main way to interact, and it moves time forward an indeterminate amount in Benny’s life.
That structure was inspired by the 1949 stage play Death of a Salesman, which tells its story partly through the protagonist’s memories. The comparison is fair and the ambition is real. The execution is where the game gives ground.
Players who cannot or will not use a webcam can play with a mouse instead. Clicking performs the same actions as blinking. GoodbyeWorld Games built the fallback in, and it is the reason the game is playable at all for many people.
The problem is that the fallback is also the better version. A mouse click does exactly what you intend. A blink does not. The game reads and responds to the player’s eye movement, and the criticism aimed at its eye-tracking feature is not noise from a handful of people. It is the central complaint, and it is earned.
| Feature | Webcam eye-tracking | Mouse |
|---|---|---|
| Primary input | Blinking | Clicking |
| Control over pacing | Low — blinks happen on reflex | High — clicks are deliberate |
| Equipment needed | A webcam | None beyond a mouse |
| Effect on the story | Time skips whether you want it to or not | Time skips when you choose |
| Reception | Criticized for unreliable function | The dependable option |
The table tells the story the game does not want to hear. The feature that makes Before Your Eyes notable is the one that works worst.
Death of a Salesman on a Boat
The narrative holds up better than the technology. Benny’s inability to stay in a moment is not just a control scheme. It is the game’s argument about memory — that you cannot live inside a good year, that it is gone the moment you close your eyes.
The Ferryman’s bargain gives the story its shape. He needs a tale worth telling the Gatekeeper. Benny needs to be judged worthy. The stakes are clear from the first scene: paradise, or a seagull on the deck. That is a clean, hard premise, and the game commits to it.
The family material is where the writing does its work. Elle hears a prodigy. Richard hears a child being pushed. The arguments between them are the kind of thing a memory would keep. Chloe gives Benny a life outside the piano. Ernie the cat gives the house a warm, ordinary center.
None of it is elaborate. The game does not need it to be.
The Ferryman explains that he senses something unique in Benny, and is bringing him to the Gatekeeper for judgement.
That line is the engine. Everything else is the fuel.
Where the Game Loses Its Grip
Here is the part worth watching, and the part that decides the score. Before Your Eyes is a game whose best idea is also its worst mechanic. Every time the technology fails — a blink not read, a blink read too early, a memory skipped before the player is ready — the game breaks its own spell.
The mouse option fixes the control but not the concept. Clicking to advance time is functional, and it is also inert. The whole point is that you cannot hold on. A click can be held. A blink cannot. So the fallback preserves the story and removes the thing that makes the story mean anything.
That is a real bind, and GoodbyeWorld Games does not solve it. The team’s previous project, Close Your, was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, and Before Your Eyes is a full imagining of it. The ambition carried over. The reliability did not.
The narrative was well received by critics, and it deserves to be. The eye-tracking feature was criticized, and it deserves that too. Those two facts sit next to each other and do not cancel out.
What the Score Says
Before Your Eyes runs on Android, PC, iOS and Mac. It is a first-person, single-player adventure with drama and mystery at its center. It released on Microsoft Windows on 8 April 2021, with a macOS port in September of that year. Android and iOS ports followed in July 2022.
The IGDB critic aggregate stands at 5.5 out of 10 across 8 outlets. That number is not a dismissal. It is a split verdict, and it is the right shape for this game.
What Before Your Eyes gets right, it gets right in a way few games attempt. A dead man on a boat, a mother who hears genius in her son, a father who hears damage, a cat named Ernie, a neighbor named Chloe, a ferryman who needs a story. The writing earns its ending. The blink does not earn its place.
The verdict is this: play Before Your Eyes for the story, and play it with a mouse. The eye-tracking is the headline and the mouse is the game. That is an uncomfortable thing to say about a project this ambitious, but the ambition is not the same as the execution, and the execution is what a player actually holds.
A 5.5 is a fair mark. It credits a narrative that critics received well and it charges the game for the feature it built its identity on. Before Your Eyes is worth your time. It is not worth your blinks.
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