Life Flashes Before Your Eyes With Each Blink In This First-Person Tragedy
Blink and you'll miss it
You know how it is. One minute you’re playing with toy cars in your nappy and the next minute you’re 35 years old and Jenkins wants those reports by Monday. Close Your [official site] is a first-person game that hopes to replicate the speedy passage of life. Each time you – the real you – blinks, your webcam will detect it and launch the story forward, sometimes by several years. You might be hanging out with your new mates on the first day of school, blink, and suddenly be in da club, dancing with strangers. Blink again and would you look at that, you’re at your desk job and there he is. Jenkins.
Alice wrote about Close Your back in 2014 but she must have blinked since then because here we are in 2016 and it has just launched a Kickstarter to fund a graphical overhaul. The team behind it are hoping to get it released in February next year, which will come along any moment now. Here’s a short trailer explaining things.
It looks like a first-person reimagining of that one scene from Up. At the beginning of the game you’ll be hit by a car, the developers explain, and then have a quick chat with Death as he gives you the tutorial for dying. Each blink might skip ahead a few minutes or whole years. Here’s what the developers, GoodbyeWorld Games, say about that:
"Since blinking is an inevitable physical process, each of these vignettes is imbued with inherent tension. You may close your eyes on your first kiss, and open them at your wedding, or close your eyes on a fight with your mother, only to open them at her funeral.
That sounds like good bait for uncontrollable weeping to me. There also seem to be subtle actions that will have an impact on what happens down the line. The story will change depending on how you behave in each scene, the developers claim, rather than relying on the "obvious moral choices" of games like Telltale’s adventures. If you decide to work hard at your desk instead of fraternising with your co-workers, for example, the game will track it and "reflect your unique disposition" later on.
The main thing for them now is getting the graphics re-jigged and making sure the real-world blinky feature works with everybody’s dodgy webcams. Hopefully nobody will figure out the obvious exploit of winking each eye independently.
Assuming it hits the $20,000 Kickstarter goal, Close Your is due in February 2017.