Indie Roundup: Before Your Eyes, Adios, and Genesis Noir

FOMO has never been more palpable in a video game than it is in Before Your Eyes.

Before Your Eyes
Photo: GoodbyeWorld Games

FOMO has never been more palpable in a video game than it is in Before Your Eyes (GoodbyeWorld Games), which uses your webcam to literalize the notion “blink and you’ll miss it.” Players step into the disembodied shoes of one Benjamin Brynn, a lost soul who’s been fished out of a vast, limbo-like ocean. Your guide and savior is a boatman, a wolf, who offers to speak on Benny’s behalf before the afterlife’s judge, and what follows is a series of memorable slice-of-life vignettes from Benny’s birth to death.

As a disembodied soul, your interactions within each memory are limited. Mousing around each screen reveals eye-shaped icons, and if you actually blink at these points, you’ll reveal additional backstories. But there’s a wrinkle: A metronome will sometimes appear on screen, and if you blink while it’s visible, you’ll jump forward in time. This is regardless of the events depicted onscreen, from your looking at a bunch of toys scattered across your floor, to your best friend—and perhaps true love—inching toward confessing how she feels about you.

Before Your Eyes is a quiet, contemplative game (its most action-packed scene is a piano recital), but behind even the most mundane moment is the powerful uncertainty of what may come next. Is the phone call from Benjamin’s mother a routine one, or is it the last time you will hear her voice? There comes a point where you may start to dread the act of blinking, and while there are a few narrative choices that feel irrelevant throughout, that’s only because the past is always beside the point here. There’s only the present, and so when Before Your Eyes reveals its final trick—convincing you to close your eyes—it will leave you shook.


In one of the earliest conversations in Adios (Mischief), a slice-of-life game made up of 17 short, lightly elegiac scenes, a hitman (D. C. Douglas) and a pig farmer (Rick Zieff) philosophize about whether or not pigs know that they’re going to be killed. The game doesn’t answer this question. It does, though, invite you to draw your own conclusions about how this affects the farmer, because over the course of the day you spend with him, it’s clear that his choice to quit the mob’s corpse-disposal business will lead to the deadliest of severances.

In a nod to this inescapable fate, Adios largely restricts a player’s options, whether that’s limiting their mobility within scenes, preventing them from stopping the hitman (there’s a fourth-wall-breaking achievement if you try to kill him), and never compromising on the farmer’s decision to quit. Mundane dialogue choices all lead to the same place, and big responses are greyed out, most notably when the farmer tries to reconcile with his son and cannot bring himself to say the words that he’s shown to be thinking. Despite being firmly grounded in realism, Adios evokes P.T. in the way that the hitman follows you around, the key difference being that P.T.’s Lisa is a spectral figure silently hiding behind you, waiting to pounce, while the hitman chattily announces his presence. The two of you can fix a car, milk goats, and shovel manure, and at the end of it, after you’ve made dinner, he’ll kill you.

With no control over your final destination, you find yourself fixating on the smallest details, whether that’s the irreverence of the score in your final game of horseshoes (3,427 to 4,674) or the life-affirming banalities of a neighbor’s rambling story—that is, should you choose not to interrupt her. At one point, the hitman asks the pig farmer why he keeps a horse on the farm, and the farmer tells him that it’s because he couldn’t imagine a farm without a horse. The biggest compliment one can pay Adios is to say that after an hour in the farmer’s shoes, this statement—which isn’t about a lack of imagination—makes perfect sense.


Genesis Noir (Feral Cat Den) is impressive not just for the way that it gives expression to cosmological ideas through a non-verbal, intuitive point-and-click framework, but for how it has made hard science so visually compelling. The game liberally adapts minimalist animation styles (like the abstraction of Soul’s Great Before and the sharp frames of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack) in a way that disproves, or at least challenges, the game’s own epigraphic note that the reality of the Big Bang was too complex for visual perception.

Genesis Noir never talks down to players who don’t know about, say, abiogenesis or the Big Crunch, framing these events in the context of an accessible noir. The “Big Bang” here is a bullet fired by a jealous musician, Golden Boy, at a nightclub singer, Miss Mass. The game’s hub world, so to speak, is Miss Mass’s studio, the bullet frozen in time as you, No Man, attempt to prevent its fatal collision by manipulating pivotal moments throughout time. Cosmic background radiation manifests itself in this world as the faint audio cue of a jazzy riff that No Man trails through the elevated trains and streets of Harlem, New York City, and the Penrose process by which energy is extracted from a black hole comes to life in a psychedelic flurry of love-making. In the world of Genesis Noir, science isn’t just a fact, it’s a whole damn mood.

Genesis Noir’s parallels aren’t consistently evocative or even particularly clear. A sequence that transitions from a trail of asteroid chunks falling toward earth to hunter-gatherers in pursuit of arrowheads, then wool, textile, and pottery, is more than a bit on the nose, while a lengthy Japanese tea ceremony feels disassociated from any planetary event, namely “thaw” (or ice age) that gives the chapter its title. There’s an indulgent late-game recap that abandons any sense of puzzle-solving so as to demonstrate a particular special effect—a whopping 12 times in a row. But if it takes a few wildly ambitious misses to land the connection between an asteroid colliding with the Earth and a lovestruck No Man getting blotto, so be it. As any jazz aficionado can tell you, a few sour notes don’t spoil a dizzyingly inventive improvisation.

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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