Before Your Eyes Review (PS5 / PSVR2) | Push Square

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There will be no dry PSVR2 headsets among those who choose to try Before Your Eyes. This truly unique 90 minute narrative experience asks you to set aside your DualSense, and relies on the headset’s eye tracking as its primary form of engagement. Rather than using the controller, you’ll instead blink to interact with objects and progress through scenes, with your head enabling you to look around. You can turn off the eye tracking for a more traditional experience if you like, although we’d argue this strips the release of its USP.

The story is divided into a collection of different memories, each presented in a rudimentary, block colour art style. While its presentation is basic, the developer does more than enough to communicate information in each brief scene, whether it’s a birthday party or a first day at school. Therefore, it rewards you for drinking in your surroundings and piecing unspoken parts of the plot together yourself.

The voice acting is outstanding, and the 3D audio mix is among the best we’ve experienced on PS5 to date. This is perhaps aided by the fact that there are moments where you’ll be asked to close your eyes and keep them shut, allowing you to hone in on a single conversation or sound, which is used to poignant effect.

You play as a character called Benjamin, who’s brought aboard a boat by a wolf in an anorak. While it all seems quite fantastical at first, once you begin to relive your memories, it settles into the rhythm of a much more human tale. The story definitely plays for heavy emotional impact, and thus leans into some pretty upsetting themes, but it never feels particularly overwrought or preachy.

In fact, we were impressed with the brief sequences of levity interspersed between the