Before Your Eyes

This note last modified August 3, 2021

After I played this game, I listened to the end credits song on repeat for two weeks. That is only barely an exaggeration.

We want to stay in the comforting, stable moments, but we can’t. We have to move on.

We want to live glorious lives worth remembering. But is a simple life less valuable?

the pandemic
- I recently played Before Your Eyes, and a few months before I had played Outer Wilds. Both are games where time plays a central role, but I’ve been struggling to figure out what they actually have to say about time. More specifically, do they have a moral? Some advice? Or are they just laments about the pain that time brings? Both games involve the futility of holding on to dying worlds, both involve the melancholy of moving forward. Yes, moving forward leads to new beauty, but both games recognize and do not judge the desperate sadness of trying to hold on to what you had.
indie game recommendations
- Before Your Eyes (1-2 hours)
anything can be art
- And that makes me sad, not because I think they’re wrong necessarily, but because that type of dismissal means that you implicitly lock yourself away from so much beauty. If you dismiss video games as silly, you’ll never stumble upon the beauty of Before Your Eyes, the challenges of The Talos Principle, or the simple wholesomeness of A Short Hike