My third child is due in January. When my wife and I sent our first child to kindergarten, we were among the youngest parents in our school community. But when this next baby is grown up and ready for school, I’ll be over 40. I sometimes think about how our kids get more or less time with us on this planet based on when we had them. I’ll be in this child’s life for less time than I was in their siblings’ lives, necessarily. It’s simple, unconquerable math, and it bums me out. I promise myself I’ll stay healthy and attentive to the best of my ability so that I can wring every last day out of my life with them. But even in the best-case scenario, there’s no catching up in years. How do I make those days count when they feel so numbered? How can I make up for lost time? Goodnight Universe, the next game from a team comprised mainly of those who made Before Your Eyes, explores this space magnificently and, as should be expected if you played the team’s last game, to heartwrenching effect.
In Goodnight Universe, you take on the novel role of a baby named Issac. Played in first-person and using optional camera tracking (on PC, but not consoles) like Before Your Eyes, you’ll live out Issac’s unexpectedly adventurous life. Early on, you’ll meet his parents and sister, as well as his grandfather and other significant figures who enter his life. As an adult, Issac narrates his memories from infancy, and you’ll live them out yourself, smashing the tray attached to your highchair, playing with your teething toys, and finding yourself utterly mesmerized by the children’s TV show, Gilbert the Goat.
While these sound like typical things a baby would do, it doesn’t take long for Issac to admit he was different–special, even. According to Issac, from birth, he could think fluently and problem-solve like an adult. He could even go beyond those behaviors. As a telekinetic, he’s able to move things with his mind or read people’s thoughts. In gameplay terms, you’ll perform these supernatural feats using a controller if you prefer, but more engaging is to use camera tracking and perform them with your own face and hands.
During a bedtime story, Issac could read his father’s mind and understood he was stressed about adult problems–money and time, mostly. So when his dad leaves the room, you help him out, cleaning up the blocks scattered around the floor by simply closing your eyes for a moment, while you listen to the mess swirl like a tornado into something cleaner. You can swipe your hand from side to side to shut cabinet doors that are left open. You can blink to turn on your night light. These mechanics take what Before Your Eyes did–namely blinking to jump ahead in time, never knowing if you were jumping a few minutes or a few years–and expand them to be more involved but still relatively simple in terms of their execution.
The best of these abilities Issac possesses is the mind-reading. I say that not because I’m especially nosy, but because of how Goodnight Universe depicts these moments. When Isaac’s college-bound sister is visited by a recruiter she finds frustrating, she outwardly puts on a smile, but listen to her inner monologue, and you’ll hear a punk-rock cacophony of thrashy, screamed vocals and percussive mashing, comically illustrating how she really feels. Moments like these are so richly designed that they play like brief radio dramas. Without a sight to be seen, the game masterfully pulls you into a moment, be it a funny one like this, or, as is often the case, a more somber one.
Whereas Before Your Eyes told a relatively straightforward story about a young boy’s life as he grew into a young man, Goodnight Universe sticks to the baby concept for much of the game. However, it’s also less grounded, and not just because of the telekinesis. At times, the story grows so outlandish that I grew worried it wouldn’t stick the landing. I happen to really love bittersweet stories, or even straight-up sad ones. I seek them out. I went in expecting something like that again, and there are moments where I wondered if I’d fooled myself with such specific expectations. If you played Before Your Eyes, you know that game’s finale is so incredibly moving. I played much of Goodnight Universe wondering if the team could recast that magic spell–and at a point, if they were even trying to. Thankfully, they certainly are trying to and do stick that landing by the end of the four-hour story.
Like Before Your Eyes, Goodnight Universe’s best strength isn’t the novel approach to control schemes and gameplay mechanics, as neat as they are: It’s the characters themselves. The story is written with such a strong sense of authenticity in its dialogue that I was constantly mesmerized by it. Issac’s family is messy, but loving. Hurt, but hopeful. They’re often trying to wishcast something that only each of them–and the interloping Issac–could know about. Nice Dream Games is home to incredible writers who thoughtfully infuse every word or phrase with so much weight, and, like before, much of that weight isn’t fully understood until the very end, or even until a second playthrough.
Performances are also excellent across the board, helping further lift up the already emotionally complex writing. I guess it’s a sign I’m getting old, but I found so much to relate to with the parents, how even when things felt difficult, they’d hold their children up like demi-gods in their minds. But it also doesn’t glamorize parenthood. Goodnight Universe feels like peering into a real family with real people’s problems–they just happen to also have a telekinetic baby.
The original music, including an incredible end-credits song from director/composer Oliver Lewin and lo-fi idol Tanukichan, reliably kept me swimming in the story’s emotional waters. When it needed to be lighter to match the game’s dry wit, it was. When action picked up–yes, the baby game has action sequences–it was. Of course, when it intended to punch me in the gut, its aim was spot-on. I’m not sure why this team loves grappling with bittersweetness, but I appreciate it greatly since I do too.
Though the story doesn’t truly have branching decisions, you’ll often get to flavor different scenes with minor choices, like when Issac starts to become self-aware, he says he had come to “understand a baby is…” before the game lets you choose “a kind of deity” or “a torture device.” Elsewhere in the story, Issac can choose why he wants to apologize for his wrongdoings, or even how he feels about certain people and events, which uses the camera and prompts you to smile or frown. These aren’t branches on the story’s tree; they’re twigs, but they allow you to color certain interactions how you see fit, giving you agency in the tone of some hugely pivotal scenes.
One thing that’s present no matter what minor tweaks you make to the story is its obsession with time, thematically speaking–fitting coming from this team, I’ll say. Similar to how Goodnight Universe further explores and expands on a camera-based control scheme, Isaac’s story is one that feels more layered than Before Your Eyes, but it’s interested in the same uneasy questions and answers. How we spend our time, how easy it is to lose, how hard it is to get it back–these are things that are clearly on the minds of its team yet again, but it takes a very different approach, with wholly new characters, outcomes, and perspectives to consider.
Before Your Eyes was Benjamin’s story. Goodnight Universe is presented as Issac’s, but in time it becomes apparent that he is more like the vessel through which you experience the lives of everyone around him. It left me thinking about how my kids may perceive me or others in their lives. What are their earliest memories? What formative moments made them who they are today? When did their smile stop being the mirroring response of a baby and become their genuine expression of happiness? When did they first cry, not because it was the only language they knew, but because they were sad? As fantastical as it sometimes gets, Goodnight Universe is emotionally authentic. Life is messy. Even a baby knows that.
Because the gameplay mechanics are a bit more involved, they come with a few sequences that are more frustrating, demanding you execute your eye and hand movements with nearly perfect motions at times. The camera tracking is extremely reliable, but even still, a few moments felt too video-gamey, leaving me to face checkpoint restarts in a way that briefly pulled me out of the experience. With a game so focused on story above all else, I never wanted to be pulled out for these kinds of reasons, and so those few times I was left Goodnight Universe feeling slightly worse than its spiritual predecessor in terms of pacing. They didn’t significantly hamper my experience, though.
Given how strange this game gets compared to its predecessor, I expect many will experience it in a way similar to how I did: thinking you know what you’re getting and, to a significant extent, getting something quite different, before it ends back where you’d expect, with a bittersweet, emotional blow that shifts everything you thought you knew. Goodnight Universe employs similar tricks to the team’s previous award-winner, but it takes bigger risks along the way, all before an emotionally messy, loving, gut-punch of a finale.
Life is far from perfect. Everyone would agree, yet it’s in exploring that obvious fact that this team has achieved something so memorable once again. Nice Dream Games’ Goodnight Universe is both mechanically simple and emotionally complex. Presented as a story about a baby, it’s more accurate to say it’s about the time we spend on Earth, with whom we spend it, and what we leave behind when our time is up.
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