You begin aboard a mythical ship in the afterlife, traveling alongside a ferryman who wants to learn about your life. You’re then transported back into the memories of the protagonist Benny, experiencing them from his first-person perspective as they happened. The catch is that you control the story entirely with your eyes – specifically, your blinks.

When you blink, the scenes will change and the story will advance forward from one moment in Benny’s life to the next. You’re literally experiencing his life flash before your eyes, one blink at a time. Sometimes you’ll jump forward a few minutes, other times a few years. Your blinks become a tool to shorten, lengthen and heighten the story being told around you, which deals with themes of life, death, ambition, creativity, family and so much more. It’s absolutely captivating to behold and completely original in its execution, bringing you closer to the characters and connected to the world in a such a visceral manner.

Before Your Eyes is played completely controller-free, making it an incredibly accessible and intuitive experience. There’s a small cursor tied to the centre of your field of view in each scene, which you can position over interaction points by moving your head and selecting with a blink. At set moments in each scene, a small ticking metronome appears, indicating that the next time you blink, you’ll open your eyes to a new scene. You can choose to blink straight away or try to prolong the inevitable.

The blink mechanic is compelling as a storytelling device because it forces you to constantly progress onwards and yet also makes you savor each moment as it happens. At the start when Benny is a child, you’ll often be happy to skip forward to the next scene, keen to see what’s next. As he gets older and the narrative progresses, you start to feel time slipping away. You’ve formed connections with the characters and would be happy to spend a bit longer in each scene, but you’re constantly battling against the marching pace of life. There’s only so long you can stave off a blink.

There were points where I blinked completely by accident, tragically cutting a beautiful moment short. There were points where I was crying, making it much harder not to blink. There were points where I just wanted to blink as soon as possible to skip through a difficult scene.

This intersection of cutting-edge technology and well-written immersive narrative results in an experience that is both beautiful and confronting at the same time. It’s hard to speak more in-depth about the narrative, because it’s best to go in blind – no pun intended – but suffice to say that it’s engaging, touching and tragic. It does deal with some heavy content matter surrounding death and illness, but also presents an experience that feels representative and parallel to how we remember our own lives.