 Day 14, Before Your Eyes, which was suggested on almost every video in this series before finally coming out on top, with Moe's Milburn being second. The about page for the weekly review reads, part pretentious criticism, part not very good vlog, part leftish screed, mostly face. And I think most of that is mostly accurate most of the time. But it serves as an occasional reminder that I thought I was going to vlog more. Like I did a bit of it early on and then basically just stopped. Because every time I had to commit to the process, I didn't want to. I don't like the idea of losing a moment because I spent several minutes trying to capture some version of it forever. Setting up an interesting shot takes time and if I'm somewhere that it'd be worth vlogging, I'd rather just experience it. Images are a way to bring back memories, but if those memories are just me fiddling with a camera, doesn't seem worth it. Before Your Eyes is a game about memories. As it opens, you are a soul that has just been fished out of the River Styx or whatever by a wolf who brings people to be judged by the gatekeeper. But before you get there, he wants to know who he's just fished out, who you are. And so you, the soul formerly known as Benjamin Brinn, begin to remember. Each memory plays out as a little vignette from a couple seconds to a few minutes in length. You, the player, can look around and occasionally poke at things, but you can't move. Your primary interaction is a more passive and typically involuntary action. At some point in each memory, a metronome will appear at the bottom of the screen. And when it does, the next time you blink, the sequence will end. And I mean that literally to play the game as intended, you must grant it access to your camera and it watches you at all times. When your eyes close, you're on to the next sequence. Which is to say that developers Goodbye World Games turned that old idiom, blink and you'll miss it, into a game mechanic. And it's hard to overstate how special this feels in practice. Like one of the times the game was suggested, I was told to play this with the whole thing off to see it seen through to its conclusion. And that was terrible advice and I'm glad I didn't listen because let's be real, Benjamin Brinn's story isn't all that special. He's a prodigy with an overbearing mother who wants him to be something he's not. His dad is a listless professor who just wants to float on through life. There's a weird girl next door who he kind of likes. It's typical stuff and depending on how you think about it, it plays out pretty typically. And it's all well written and well performed with visuals that are mostly great and sometimes janky, but he was just a guy, neither the least nor most interesting to have ever lived. Yet, when you're in his shoes trying to literally keep his memory alive, you're interested in even the most mundane moments. Of course, the memories have to be something you want to be there with and solid writing and performances kept me intrigued to how each scene would play out. And yet I never saw them end. Many games offer the ability to skip cutscenes, but the choice to do so is not typically or ever a meaningful one. Before Your Eyes, which could not too reductively be considered a series of cutscenes, makes it meaningful by shifting the dynamic. Unless you actively work to keep your eyes open, the scene will end. And so each time that metronome appears, you face a real choice of how much you want to know about this moment in Benjamin's life. And there were times when I tried to keep my eyes open as long as possible and others where I didn't. And that becomes its own game of sorts, trying to end a sequence in a place that felt right. You can tell that a thought is ending, and you know there's probably a but coming, but if you can blink it just the right moment, you can feel as though you got what it had to say. Now, the tech isn't perfect, and if you aren't in a brightly lit room, so before I understood that, there were a few times where my open eyes registered as blinks. And at first, this is annoying, kind of like the fact that the game features moments where you are supposed to blink at parts of the level to reveal something new, and sometimes this will continue the same scene, others it jumps forward in time. There is no indication of which it will be, so you don't know in those situations what a blink is going to do. But eventually, all of this felt like it emphasized the point. I can follow the rules, but I can't always know the consequences. I can fight to stay in the moment, but I can't control external forces. And even when it's just me, my body may not listen to my brain. The moment where I involuntarily blinked seconds before completing a silly but impactful task looking up at the stars while lying next to that weird girl from next door outside was one of the most genuinely heartbreaking experiences I've ever had in a game. The only real time that it falters is in that framing narrative. I don't get why this very grounded emotional experience periodically breaks for that guy. I understand the need for a frame given where the story goes, and bigger picture a River Sticks type deal is as good as any, but the wolf is a confusing and inconsistent character who is the cause of easily the game's worst moment when he suddenly gets up in your face and starts snarling about something that the character knows, but the player doesn't. And when you are supposed to be the character, that's just bad storytelling. But fortunately, it's also a rarity here. And even if it wasn't, the moments that hit, hit so fucking hard that I don't think it matters. Look, I don't cry much, and not in a big tough manly man kind of way. I get emotional, but that's just not how I typically react other than maybe a single tear from this eye. I can't think of the last time anything truly brought a River of Tears. But before your eyes did, 9.0 out of 10. Thanks so much for watching, thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammering Marko, Kat Zarokata, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, Iron the Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great. If you want to see more, you can suggest what I'll talk about in three days in the comments. So do that.