There’s no dialogue, only a repeated pointing toward a destination. Thatgamecompany’s Journey is a story told in silence. It’s one of the wildest endings I’ve ever experienced in a game. And then, bam, the game ties it all to a JFK conspiracy theory and kills a senator. The rest of the game is all about a gritty story of revenge and street-level crime bosses fighting each other. I have no idea what the developers behind the game had planned for a future sequel. At this point, Donavan takes out a handgun, promises he’ll track down all the others who were involved, and shoots the senator dead. And then he reveals the final wild bombshell: The senator running this hearing, who’s been asking him questions the entire game, was also involved with the murder of JFK and working with Marcano. He reveals that Sal Marcano, the mob boss who you killed after destroying his entire empire, was connected to the Kennedy assassination. It’s at this moment that the former CIA operative and war vet reveals why he was so eager to help Clay take down the mafia. It fired him up and he promised to figure out who really killed JFK. And how, when he was stuck in the mud and blood, doing anything and everything for the United States, he learned the President had been killed. He tells them all a horrible story of how he cut up a person in Vietnam to get info to save lives. And at the very end of the game, something wild happens in this hearing.ĭonavan, having told the story of the game to the senators and his involvement, begins asking the lead politician questions about the assassination of JFK. And during the game, you see clips of your best friend and CIA operative Donavan being grilled in a secret hearing in the US Senate. It’s very well done and gives the open-world action game a unique feel compared to other GTA-likes. Mafia III’s framing device is a documentary that mixes interviews, old news clips, and other bits of footage from the past to tell the story of Clay and his fight against the mob. No, I’m here to talk about a scene that takes place after all that. But I’m not here to talk about Lincoln Clay’s war against the Mafia, its bosses, or his decision to stay and run the city or leave it all behind. I really enjoyed the end of Mafia III, it has a satisfying conclusion that also ties in your decisions up until that point in a way that makes sense. But in its final moments where Ben blinks between life and death, it reminds us that to be human is to be more than ourselves, it’s to be everything we are to those we care about, and to know that sometimes they see us more clearly than we’ll ever see ourselves. Mortality’s vice grip on our existence, shame in unfulfilled dreams, and how we all ascribe some kind of storytelling to our lives when sometimes, the world stops following the script. Before Your Eyes mediates a lot of profound themes. In this sequence, you listen to the Ferryman tell Ben’s tale, but as you blink, the game seamlessly swaps between his narration and Ben’s mother, as they tell the same tale in perfect sync. Meanwhile, the Ferryman, having learned the truth of Ben’s life, also sees him with a new clarity, and is able to tell his story to the powers that be. Ben has spent all of Before Your Eyes hiding who he was because he was angry at the life he lived, and is grieving the one he wished for. After Ben has reflected on his life, remembering his attempts to write his life story down at the end, he remembers his mother reading a revised version of the story he wrote that is much kinder to him than his was. That is completely recontextualized in the game’s final moments, because blinking is key to a full understanding. Blinking is inherently discouraged, because if your eyes are closed, you’re going to miss something. As you relive Ben’s life, your webcam tracks every time you blink, and will skip through a scene. The narrative adventure game focuses on Benjamin Brynn, who is reflecting on his life after his death and recounting the story to a Ferryman looking to help him ascend to whatever’s next. GoodbyeWorld Games’ Before Your Eyes spends roughly 85 minutes of its 90-minute runtime training you to feel like something as natural as blinking will hinder your understanding.
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