Before Your Eyes (GoodbyeWorld Games) is a beautiful game about exploring the memories of one’s life and the way we can’t really ever hold on to the past. When the player opens the game, they are greeted by a wolf carrying them on a boat through the waters of the afterlife. The wolf explains that he is taking the player to the gatekeeper, and that he needs to understand their life in order to allow them to pass through.
So the player is greeted with a string of memories from the past — of growing up with a natural skill for piano and then experiencing change and excitement and love and disappointment along the way. One of the interesting things about this game is its unique mechanic, in which the player blinks to interact with objects and to progress the story forward. In many cases, this act of blinking (an act that we cannot always control) can jump the story forward before the scene is completed — even cutting off a line of dialog mid-sentence — which reflects the way memories are often fragmented and life moves forward beyond our control.
Unfortunately for me, I downloaded the game onto my phone (from Netflix) and was unable to get the blink system to function for me. As a result, I used the touchscreen controls, which meant that I had much more control over the experience and could hold onto a scene to the very end. And things meant I didn’t have the intended experience of the game.
As much as I wish I had the opportunity to play it the intended way first, this game was still incredibly moving. And by the end, I found myself weeping in response to the way the game ultimately expresses loss and heartbreak, revealing that the value of life is in living it.
Jumping into a completely different vibe, let’s talk about Little Nightmares II (Tarsier Studios). The sequel presents us with a new character, a little boy wearing a bag over his head, named Mono, who must traverse through a nightmarish world full of giant, terrifying monsters — such as a vicious hunter in the swamps or an abusive teacher in a school full of violent, puppet children — that make the character (and player) feel very small indeed. Early on in the game, the player meets meet a little girl who joins up with Mono to survive this strange and threatening world.
Little Nightmares II is a game I want to love with my whole heart. The vibes are all things I love — puzzle platforming with creative puzzles combined with a stunningly beautiful horror aesthetic and an evocative narrative exploring the nature of one’s fears. However, the movement within the game often stymied me, causing me so much frustration at certain points that I almost quit the game. Transition movements (such as from running to a jump) are not always smooth, and one of the most difficult things for me was that the depth perception was not always clear. So, I’d be running away from a monster only to slam face first into a chair, bringing the character to a complete stop with no easy way to recover and start running again — leading to inevitable death.
Whenever I face these kinds of gameplay challenges, I always wonder: how much is this my own lack of skill and how much is the game itself. I’ve heard from a few people to reassured me that this game does have some funky mechanics here and there. Despite that I love everything else about this game.
I jumped in to Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red), starting with the character creator, which I had a great time messing around with to get my punk lady self looking just right. So far, I have progressed past the opening sequence of the game and am deep into the main story. I’m
The world is vibrant and gritty and gorgeously rendered. The characters are complicated and interesting, and the gameplay — involving a combination of talking to characters, hacking computer and robotic systems, and stealth or running face first into combat situations — is quite fun. There are ton of interesting side quests in addition to the main story, and I’m looking forward into diving deeper into this game (as soon as I have the time, because life is super busy right now).
I also played a few tiny browser games this month (since I have more than 170 of them in my “want to play” queue). Below are the ones I particularly liked — all three made with Bitsy.
“the rest of your life” by Carly Smallbird is a little game about waiting at the train station that never seems to come. It reflects the feeling of waiting for your life to start and has a lovely mechanic in which the world starts to crack and decay around you as you continue to play.
“fall” by tallywinkle is a lovely little interactive poem exploring the pleasures of autumn.
Another wonderful tine game from tallywinkle is “needle & thread,” in which the player moves the avatar around the screen to stitch together an image, while the narrator share’s a story of how they came to love embroidery.
If you’d also like to know about the books and movies that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for September.