This is a review, of sorts, of the game “Before
Your Eyes.” It does not contain any spoilers for the game,
which is available on PC, costs $10, and is about an hour and a half long. It does contain digressions, detours, footnotes,
asides, time jumps, parentheticals, segues, rambling,
On some level, before I even started it, I knew Before Your Eyes would destroy me. It’s the most a game has ever pulled me
in through concept alone. Are you ready to hear that concept? “It’s a game where you live out a character’s
life, and time moves forward when you blink.” That’s it, that was all it took. I was sold. I have long been fascinated by experimentation
with controls. Do y’all remember the microwave hallway
from Metal Gear Solid 4? It’s okay if not, I’ll attempt to explain
it. Towards the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, there
was some very important server room in the middle of a ship, and that server room was
protected by a number of ridiculous things. One, it was on a giant aircraft carrier, two,
surrounded by highly trained guards, yada yada yada. But the most memorable part of the ship’s
defenses was the final countermeasure: a hallway filled with microwave-weapons. And wouldn’t you know it, you eventually
have to make your way through. The way the game does this is- Sometimes a game asks you to push a button
a lot, really fast, typically within a quicktime event or something. “Stop that car, Spider-Man, press square
as fast as you can!” The fun of these are...debatable, and they’re
also a real accessibility concern- many games give you the option to turn them off now-
but one reason developers use them is they’re one of the only ways to make players perform
any kind of physical effort. Playing a game often takes quick reflexes
or strategic thinking, but in most circumstances, the moment to moment of playing a game doesn’t
require much exertion. By making you hammer that square button, it’s
offering just a second of physicality, taxing your lil fingy in an approximation of Spider-Man
stopping that car. Is it a 1:1? Not even close, obviously. But it’s not the worst way to tie the player
a little closer to the events on screen. So, the microwave hallway. You start walking down this microwave hallway. Your suit is exploding, you’re sweatin,
it’s a bad time. And at some point, you collapse, and have
to mash the triangle button to move forward. It’s not a momentary prompt either, not
like stopping that car. No, you have to keep pressing triangle- the
animation suggests you press it as fast as you can- for minutes. You have to keep mashing on that thing. At the risk of immediately getting shoved
in a locker after saying this, it gets tiring! As you inch closer to the end of the hallway,
it does feel on some level like you’re dragging yourself forward. It is a clever trick that dances on the edge
of being annoying, aka The Kojima Special. But hell, more than a decade later (oh my
god it’s been a decade), I still remember the microwave hallway, as being one of the
more interesting ways of meshing the players physical experience with that of the character
on screen. Anyway, Before Your Eyes is a game where time
moves forward when you blink. Let’s start with some of the technical stuff,
because this does work differently than virtually any game I’ve ever played, and it does require
a little setup. Before it starts, it gives you a little window
of your webcam, tells you where to put your head, and asks if you’re wearing glasses. And then you simply blink, and it can tell. This is my actual setup of the game, you can
see the little circle filling in whenever I blink. It is remarkable how well it works. This isn’t actually brand new tech, there’s
accessibility technology that’s been working with blinks for years, but for my naive ass,
this felt like an entire new world opening up. It was, for me, not janky, not continuously
recalibrating. It just worked. Also for those of you understandably nervous
about letting a game film you the entire time, it does promise that it’s not saving or
using this video stream for anything other than just getting the input from your blinks. You can play it offline, or even without a
webcam and with a controller if you really want to. But I’d encourage you not to do that last
one unless necessary, because the blinks really are the raison d’etre here. They’re what make Before Your Eyes feel
unlike any game I’ve ever played. Here’s an example of a scene, no spoilers,
just a thing from early in the game. You’re in history class. You’re watching the teacher give a fairly
uninteresting presentation, when the girl sitting next to you- who also happens to be
your nextdoor neighbor- asks you for help. You show her your notes, and she answers,
and the teacher says [“Indeed it is. Although I’d prefer for you to answer without
the help of your b-”]. And then you blink. I didn’t mean to blink there. In fact, I really didn’t want to, the teacher
just called me her boyfriend, I wanted to see how she’d react! Well. The teacher sounded like he was going to call
me her boyfriend. Maybe he was gonna say best friend. Maybe he was gonna say, I dunno, bosom buddy. I don’t know what he said. And then we’ve just smashed into the next
scene, so quickly that I don’t even have time to think about the last one because if
I do, I’ll miss this one as well. The larger framing device of Before Your Eyes
is that you’re telling someone about the past events of your life. In the moment, that history class might have
felt interminable. Those minutes after the teacher said boyfriend
or best friend or bosom buddy might not have been fun. Depending on her reaction, they might have
been excruciating! But you’re not actually in that moment,
you’re years in the future, looking back. Because of the way memory works, some of the
details of this scene are clear as day, you close your eyes and you can instantly see
them, but everything else has just… Richard Linklater’s movie “Boyhood”
follows the life of a boy, and his family, over 12 years of real time- it was filmed
from 2001 to 2013, reuniting cast and crew every year to create a fictional story that
took place over a real adolescence, kept current with the changing of the times. And while that feat is impressive- a movie
filmed over 12 years!- it’s always kinda frustrated me that that’s where the conversation
starts and stops about Boyhood. Because, to me, as impressive as the years
spent in production is the way the story and filmmaking are in conversation with the idea
of time itself. One of my favorite things about the years
passing in Boyhood is how little deal is made out of it. There are no chapter titles or timecards. It just kinda melts into itself. Early on, I found it challenging to even tell
when the jumps were. Six-year-old Mason just becomes seven-year-old
Mason and not much in his visible life has changed. The movie also deliberately avoids the typical
“big life events” you might expect in this sort of thing. We don’t see Mason’s high school graduation,
we see the car ride home. We don’t see a dramatic first kiss, just...a
kiss. Because of its commitment to showing the minutiae
of life, when something exciting happens, like a home run at a baseball game, it feels
spontaneously thrilling. It feels, as was often the case, that the
movie just happened to be filming at the right time. Watching Boyhood is, for me, a particularly
striking experience because I am, give or take a year, basically the same age as the
kid in the film. Watching him and his friends ripstik down
the street while listening to Soulja Boy, or go to a midnight book release, or start
college around the same time smartphones became ubiquitous... It is an affecting thing to more or less watch
yourself grow up The beautiful metaphor of Before Your Eye’s
central gameplay conceit is its inevitability. There are no scenes in that game that progressed
without me. In every one, I played a part in it, I moved
it forward, I blinked and set the hourglass spinning. And yet, I didn’t have any choice! There’s a long-running british documentary
series called Up- as in 7-Up, 14-Up, 21-Up, etc. It is, in some ways, Boyhood on steroids. Boyhood filmed over 12 years, from 2001 to
2013. The Up series, at this point, has filmed for
almost 60. Starting in 1964 with 7-Up, the series chose
14 kids, each 7 years old, to interview. Kids from different places in England, different
social classes, some individually, some in groups. They did their best- for 1960, at least- to
pick a diverse lot. Some were already planning to go to very expensive
schools, some would take whatever they could get. But the one uniting factor amongst all of
them, the true main character of the series, is the same as Boyhood: time. The Up Series, a documentary instead of a
fictional story, is significantly more explicit about the role of time. The change in tech and style is radical; from
black and white to HD within the same series. It’s also not shy about playing into this
dissonance. Frequently, entries in the series end with
a flashback to a party the kids had when they were 7 with “What Would I Do” by The Monotones
playing, a scene that feels more distant with every point of comparison. There’s also the hilariously ominous ending
note they’ve held onto for more than half a century- [“This has been a glimpse of
Britain’s future.”] But obviously, any technical change pales
in comparison to the subjects of the documentaries, the 14 kids-turned-adolescents-turned adults. The greatest special effect I’ve ever seen
is playing an interview from one of the previous entries in the series, and then just revealing
how that same person looks 7, or 21, or 49 years later. It never gets old. Especially when watching them in a relatively
short time span, like I did, it feels like a magic trick. I blink and they’re married. I blink and their kids have moved out. The participants struggle with this as well. The seven years between 7 and 14 might as
well be a century in terms of growth, a lifetime is spent between 14 and 21, and yet since
the program only comes on that set schedule, these are the snapshots that are preserved
of themselves, and all we have to judge them on. The interviewers force them to be self-aware,
interrogating them about the ways they’ve changed or haven’t. Are you still religious, do you think this
upbringing was good for you, are you happy you got married when you did? And you can feel them struggle in their responses-
should I have changed? Should I stay consistent? ["I don't want to change, because if I change,
it proves the other tony was fake"]. One of the many genius segments of Before
Your Eyes asks you, after living out a childhood and adolescence, to summarize your life in
big, video gamey, binary choices. Were you a happy kid, or a lonely one? Was your mom encouraging or demanding? And because you’ve just lived it, you know
these are false binaries. You know, even through your haze of memories,
cut off at crucial moments, you can’t sum up your life like that, can’t decide between
a 1 and a 0, and yet that is how these stories work. The even more agonizing thought though, is
that by making a declaration like this, that might become the way you remember it. Memory is imperfect. Things slip away or are forgotten, and these
simplifications replace them. There’s no way that the documentarians of
7-up managed to truly capture every piece of these kids, but 60 years removed from the
filming, these portraits may be clearer than anything the subjects remember themselves. I interrogate myself about this constantly. Do you actually have childhood memories of
going to disneyland? Or did you just watch the video your dad filmed,
over and over, until you were pretty sure you remembered? Memory’s images, once they are fixed in
words, are erased, after all. The mirror image to Boyhood is the Before
Trilogy, another series of films made over vast spans of time- and also directed by Richard
Linklater. Where Boyhood is a sequence of not particularly
bombastic moments that, over years, sculpt the image of a person, Before Sunrise, Sunset,
and Midnight, are each a single day that go on to utterly define the characters. Beginning with the almost unbearably romantic
notion of two strangers deciding to get off a train and wander a city together, each subsequent
film takes place- and was filmed- ten years after the last one. So in the first movie they’re barely into
their 20s and moonstruck, the second, 30s and career-focused, the third, 40s and reflective. They are, first and foremost, unbelievably
good movies. The filmmaking is daring, the acting is superb. But where they transcend the sum of their
parts is in the presence of time, the distance between each entry. Because unlike the Up documentaries or Boyhood,
each time these two reunite, it’s clear that they, too, have been thinking about the
events of the previous film for the last ten years. Those are the long memories that overtake
all of the tiny ones. They’re not just the defining moments for
us, the audience- those days are the defining moments for Jesse and Celine, the characters. Our experience and theirs are almost perfectly
in parallel. One of the longest single scenes in Before
Your Eyes is one in which little happens plot-wise. But because you can keep drawing it out, because
it’s one of the few moments you can really luxuriate in, it becomes a pillar of who you
are in the game, a memory that’s prominence only makes more sense as you progress. Just before studying abroad while in college,
I started taking one second of video every day. I thought it’d be a fun way to remember
the trip. Then the trip ended, and I just...kept doing
it. That was over five years ago. The video, now over 30 minutes-of-seconds-long,
is a weird object for me. It is chronically imperfect. I often forget or put off the second until
late in the evening, leading to many shots of my dinner or brushing my teeth, the visual
quality did not start very high, the sound keeps getting off track. And yet I find it...immensely affecting. Thousands of blink and you’ll miss it memories,
past relationships and pets and the foundations of friendships and the deaths of family members. And I have each for one second. My friend and I used to talk constantly about
this idea of perceived lifetime. The idea, in short, that time passing represents
smaller and smaller fractions of our entire lifetime, and so it feels like it’s passing
faster. When you’re four, one year is fully 25%
of the entire length of your life so far. When you’re 25, one year is 4%. This only increases, with years passing in
the blink of an eye. That perception works in other ways too though-
when I watch back my combined clips, it always floors me that the idyllic vacation to the
mountains, the one I feel like I can remember every moment of, takes only 3 seconds to play
out. It’s half as much space as any given workweek
from which I can’t recall a single thing. There are a few moments in Before Your Eyes
when the game asks you to close your eyes and keep them shut. It will not progress if you have them open. And in those moments, every piece of the artifice
of video games and controllers and computers melts away, and it is just you and the characters
and your memories. I have never felt anything close to the way
these moments made me feel while playing a game. In 5 years, in 10 years, I don’t know how
much of this game I’ll remember. Maybe it’ll be canonized as one of the best
of all time, with retrospectives coming out every anniversary. More likely, it’ll be held close by a small
but passionate number of people. Perhaps there will be another game, controlled
by blinks, that blows it out of the water- although I doubt it. I do think I’ll remember sitting at my desk
with my eyes closed, almost totally engulfed by the game, glad to be alone and able to
purely feel. I want to hold on to that. This video was sponsored by Skillshare… ...which means it’s time for another art
assignment! I recently really enjoyed watching Rosalie
Haizlett’s series on painting landscapes. She is very cool, and has made art for the
national parks service and all sorts of stuff. This series is both about learning watercolor
painting for your incredibly chic little notebook of art, but also about the idea that spending
time thinking about your surroundings-the way you do when creating art- is valuable
in itself. There are many thousands of classes on Skillshare
on basically anything you could imagine, but exploring the site, I’ve found the kind
like Haizlett's to be my favorite. Hyper-specific, practicing creative skills,
timeless-feeling. And, as you might have guessed, the first
1000 people to use the link in the description will get a free trial of Skillshare’s premium
membership- enough time to watch the whole landscape lesson and I dunno, jump into her
next one on painting textures. I would say it’s hard to put a price on
this kinda thing- Skillshare would...disagree, and tell you it’s less than 10 bucks a month
with their annual plan. Whatever! I’m not arguing! Mostly I just want to see the things y’all
make, see where your memory lives. Get that free trial, get making some art,
and then show me so I can tell you you did a good job. Because you did.
Jacob puts out some really great stuff. I came across this game before but Jacob’s take along with the Linklater references were really something.
If you want more Jacob Geller he sometimes is on the Cane and Rinse podcast, which does 2 hour episodes deep diving into a single game and all of its history, mechanics and story. Off the top of my head I know he’s on the Sekiro, Furi and Shadow of the Colossus episodes. The SoTC episode is particularly interesting because he attributes his video on it to when he became big on YouTube.
clicked on the video cause of the interesting title
bought and played the game
Spoiler: cried my eyes out
love this guy's videos. this one was great but the outer wilds one remains his best imo
That was beautiful, thank you for sharing. For where I am in my life, this is something I needed to watch.
I liked the video more than the game. The twist didn't really work for me. At first because I thought it was not established you could lie or even why would you be lying, but when the wolf guy started accusing me of doing something terrible I thought that would go that way. But having the "got terminal disease as a child" point doesn't say anything to me. Yes, it's unfortunate and terrible and that's it, it's just unfortunate and terrible, there's nothing else to discuss here. It's also a bit against the whole "blink and you miss it" concept since for Ben himself will miss it blinking or not.
Finally, there's a part of the game that a character says something like "don't blink, you need to look at it!", the idea being it's a negative moment so you would try to skip it, but I just blinked, I wasn't trying to skip it.
Cool, concept, but far from a master piece.
This is an exceptional essay by Jacob. Might even be the best one yet for me, since it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently.
Apparently another one might be even better, but I’m still working through that game.