Game Review – KissTheGames

Before Your Eyes

…is a deceptively dark game that will take you on an experience from charming to devastating.

PlayStation VR2 is really beginning to feel natural the more and more I use it. The motion sickness I would find with every session of the original PlayStation VR is not present here. Now without any sickness VR experiences are immersive, and the distractions of the outside world fade out. Before Your Eyes will take you on an immersive and emotional experience using only your eyes.

The game starts off with you as a soul on a ferry. The ferryman of the boat is a wolf who is taking you to be judged on the life you lived. On the way the ferryman wants to hear your story, all of it, from birth to death. Starting from a baby you experience some monumental moments, maybe too many, at first they are of birthdays, your first pet, learning the piano. As you age the weight of the world gets deeper, and more sorrowful. The ferryman brings you back from time to time and it’s here that you understand some unexpected events that reinterprets the whole story you’ve experienced. To say more would spoil a story that is one of the best narrative experiences I’ve played in a game.

Before Your Eyes is just that, every moment passes with the blink of your eye. The eye tracking never misses a beat, showing how well it works when the whole game is reliant on using it to function. When the narrative ramps up into adulthood I was blinking much more as my eyes tired and I would have scenes skipped faster than I wanted. Sometimes you blink forgetting that you shouldn’t and you are onto the next scene. When I was blinking more I enjoyed the pacing of the story better. Personally a downfall of the game is there is too much context to the story at times. One of my favourite games is Virginia and it cuts to the next scene before you are given all the context allowing for me to fill in the blanks and give my own interpretation to the story.

There was a bug that crashed the game for me when I was three-quarters through. When I booted it back up I had to start again, so I waited till the next day and finished it without any problems in one sitting. The game is so good that it didn’t even annoy me that I had to replay most of the game again. The second time I sat in a chair more relaxed and didn’t hold the Sense controllers. Towards the visuals, I think the screenshots in this post reflect an accurate look of how good the game looks in PlayStation VR2.

Before Your Eyes is a beautifully woven narrative that will leave you feeling very empathic by the end. This game is worth getting a PlayStation VR2 for.

Robert Ring

What Remains of Edith Finch

Few games are perfect from front to back.

Three games that I consider perfect are Gone Home, Virginia, and What Remains of Edith Finch. All these games are walking simulators, however Edith Finch is like a vignette of poems.

The story follows Edith Finch as she goes back to her abandoned family house to unearth the secrets buried within. The Finch family have all died in unusual circumstances, as if the family was cursed, and for the majority well before their time. Edith traverses through each room reading the notes and diary entries of her departed family members, and you play out the way they die in the most fantastical of ways. Each story is played bright and cheerfully which is contrasted against the ironic way they die. In light of this you’re playing with a pit in your stomach because you’re not taking the story lightly when it clicks as to how they are going to die. Each story strengthens the game’s greatest achievement, the house. It is layered with clues and mysteries as delve deeper and deeper.

I first played this game five years ago after hearing a lot of positive reviews, and yet the selling point for me was the game length. You can easily complete this game in two to three hours. It requires no challenge, just an unforgettable experience. The PlayStation 5 version released this week and is a free upgrade to owners of the PS4 version, which makes a beautiful game shine even brighter than before. For trophy aficionados there is a platinum this time around that nearly matches the original list.

In another five years I suspect I’ll be ready to play this game again and once more visit the Finch house. Developer Giant Sparrow hasn’t made a game since this game so hopefully we hear of what they’re working on soon, and with any luck it will equal the quality of this one.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a perfect video game that you should check out.. and maybe bring the tissues.

Robert Ring

Doom

The early nineties were this place of exceptional and experimental games. There was this new type of immersion taking place where the games industry were trying to make games feel 3D and from your point of view. This was the future of gaming for kids like me and our minds were blown. Before Wolfenstein 3D (1992), we were playing the terrible Prince of Persia (1989) or games I fondly remember like Commander Keen (1990). To get the games running required a basic understanding of programming. But when Wolfenstein 3D booted up for the first time it felt like you were this character. Like you were shooting and being shot at. It was the first time I can recall having some form of gaming adrenaline. The drawbacks of Wolfenstein 3D were not even understood until Doom (1993) came out and gave us a fluid shooter in a complex and realized world.

Doom was the game that became a showcase for how cool gaming could be. It was shared among everyone. At the time businesses were transitioning to computers in the workspace and Doom became popular in this space too. So Doom was getting a lot of attention. With that came a lot of bad press all throughout the news, which only gave it more popularity. It was a weird time when parents were trying to navigate whether or not the game was detrimental to their child’s health. For me, I was allowed to play it. It was always over at a friends place I played it and loved it. I can still remember playing on those big clunky keyboards, back before you played with a mouse. And the smell of the old CRT monitor with its eventual yellow glow.

Doom is being talked about again for a few reasons. Firstly, the reboot in 2016 proved to be a massive success and its sequel is releasing later on in the year. Sure the reboot was good, yet I’m still not quite into it like I was the original. Luckily for me, the original Doom, Doom II, and even Doom 3 became available for purchase on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One. After playing Doom (1993) again on the PlayStation 4, I find it still immerses me back into the Hellscape I came to love. The narrative finds you by the amazing world-building along with the classic enemy archetypes in this groundbreaking first-person shooter.

The story of how Doom came to be is rather interesting and I highly recommend the book Masters of Doom by David Kushner. Not only is it an interesting look behind video games it’s a fantastic drama between the two men who shaped the video game industry. The book is currently being adapted into a television show, so more on that as it happens.

For now, forget Pong and play Doom.

Robert Ring