Before Your Eyes Is Our Game Of The Year

It has been an undoubtedly excellent year for gaming. Frankly, there’s been far more games this year worthy of talking about than we could ever really manage. Irrelevant of your genre preferences, there’s been at least one game that’s been released in 2021 that will probably have had you grinning like a child. Sometimes though, a game isn’t good because it’s fun, but because of the impact it has. That’s why Before Your Eyes is our game of the year.

We’re not going to actively avoid spoilers here, so from this point onwards, it’s important that you’ve actually played the game, otherwise, you’ll ruin it for yourself. So, this is your last chance to go and buy it and then play through the three-hour experience fresh. Now then, Before Your Eyes is a game about death, grief, pain, and suffering. It’s also a game about finding joy in the small things in life. It’s hard to get through because it hits impossibly hard.

Along with the inherent tear-jerking nature of the story anyway, you navigate through the game by blinking, which means you’ll be working your eyes anyway. The combination of this means that the game takes it easy on you at first, and keeping your eyes open to see every scene in full is easy. When that gets harder though, every blink will skip you ahead, and you’ll struggle not to blink when tears are streaming down your face. The last moments of the game in particular, where it flits between your parents and what is effectively god talking to you, can often go by almost as though it’s a picture book. Before Your Eyes is affecting in a way that few games could ever hope to be, and in our opinion, is a perfect example of what makes gaming so essential. Please play it if you’ve not done so already, just keep a pet nearby to hug afterwards.