This is quite boring and again reduces the immersion of quickly seeing Benny’s life flash before your eyes. You will reach a point where you have seen and heard everything that the game lets you, and you’ll be stuck there watching nothing new happen. Playing the game this way makes it feel less emotional without the feeling of life going by fast, and you miss out more on one of the most defining aspects of the game: using your eyes as a controller to see Benny’s life through Benny’s eyes.īut let’s say that you really wanted to hear everything and feel that you’d get more out of the story by using the mouse. Some players opt to use the mouse rather than the webcam, but this greatly reduces the immersion of the game–I know this because I had to rapidly speed through a segment of the game that I already played after the game crashed. We get a better feel of just how fast the past goes flies away, and this immerses us in Benny’s reminiscence of his life. What limiting how much we can see and hear does is make for a more real experience in that we better feel the sense of urgency that life presents to both Benny and ourselves. Like Benny, we cannot dwell on the great and horrible parts of our past: we must move forward. While we may want to stay in the present, we simply cannot and have to pursue the future. We watch Benny’s lives unfold before us, and the memories they hold quite literally go away in the blink of an eye. The Ferryman tells us early on that while we may want to stay back and see all of Benny’s memories, we cannot. However, this is a great thing narratively. One may think: but I want to see everything! Yet, the eye-tracking system hinders you from doing so – of course not so much if you hold the Guinness World Record for the longest time with your eyes kept open. The most prevalent eye-tracking mechanic, however, is that blinking when there is a metronome on the screen moves us to the next memory in Benny’s life, making us miss out on the rest of the game narrative from the previous memory. This made us feel more of the loss of Benny’s innocence as he was exposed to life’s cruelties. We usually had to close our eyes to listen to Benny’s parents discuss their depressing, emotional thoughts on Benny that he wasn’t supposed to hear. The game starts us off by immediately introducing us to the eye-tracking system.īlinking while hovering over the eye symbol on the screen will allow you to interact with objects/ take pictures, shutting your eyes while prompted to (via the shut your eyes symbol) lets you progress through and hear more parts of the story, and keeping your eyes open while the hourglass symbol appears allows you to progress while blinking inhibits you.įorcing you to keep your eyes open such as when we had to view Benny’s dead kittens and hearing his grandfather died, allows us to better feel the horror and intense emotions that Benny experienced when he lived through those dark times. Such choice further immerses us into reliving Benny’s life, bridging choice to the narrative, making it as if WE are Benny shaping Benny’s story. We even get to see the effects of some of our actions such as viewing the paintings that we created in the art gallery near the end of Benny’s idealized life. Although they do not affect the ending, we can create our own artwork, decide to answer phone calls, choose to crumple up and throw contracts/ sheet music, and more. Throughout the game, we are presented with many choices. To further our experience, the developers utilized another form of immersion: choice. By living through a character, we better understand them, and the emotional impact of the story gets much, much more real. A great example to support this is that we didn’t know all the hardships that Chloe was feeling until we were told that her mother died. Such emotion was created by living as Benny, and I do not think it could have effectively been conveyed if we didn’t play in Benny’s perspective. I instantly felt dread inside my body as I watched Benny feel and write as if he was worth nothing. One of the saddest moments that stuck with me was reading Benny’s typewriter as we see him call himself a loser and self-loathe. We feel more emotion and better feel how Benny’s feelings by playing this way.
This strategic form of storytelling already makes us feel as if we are Benny reliving Benny’s life, immersing us in recalling his life story. We instead see Benny’s life through Benny’s eyes. We never actually see what Benny looks like in the story.
“You can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”
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