Webcam games carry some baggage, thanks to years of novel but shallow experiences. 2021’s Before Your Eyes shook up the tedium with an emotional story you blinked through. The same team returns for Goodnight Universe, an interactive experience that reads your face and reacts accordingly. Goodnight Universe is a joy to play through and has at least a few moments that might linger, especially in the way they incorporate you, the player, into the story.
In Goodnight Universe, you play the role of Isaac, a child born to a seemingly normal, middle-class family. The only problem is, you’re anything but normal; you’ve got the inner monologue of someone much older, and if that wasn’t enough, you’ve got an arsenal of psychic powers like telepathy and telekinesis.
The idyllic family life is quickly shattered, as Isaac’s – your – strange abilities become apparent, and start to stretch out a family that’s quietly tearing at the seams. A tech company gets involved, a mystery ensues, and there’s plenty of action along the way.
Goodnight Universe is a story about families, and how one’s upbringing can shape who they become later in life. The parents of Goodnight Universe struggle with their responsibilities, trying to provide guidance for children who seem uncontrollable. It’s a short story, clocking in around five hours, but packs a lot of emotion into the runtime. While the story gets side-tracked in certain sections, in ways that blur the thematic drives it’s aiming for, I still enjoyed what Nice Dream crafted in this sci-fi adventure.
There are controller options, but the best way to play Goodnight Universe is with a webcam. Though you’ll still need some inputs for specific moments, you also get some of the blink-based controls carried over from Before Your Eyes. Blinking at a light can flick it on or off, for example, and closing your eyes over certain areas lets you rearrange them and open your eyes to a new structure, like reassembling building blocks into a tower.
My favorite use of the eye controls is the telepathy mechanic, where you “tune” into people’s minds by closing your eyes and turning your head like a radar dish to search for a signal. Once it locks in, you listen to their internal monologue. The effect of tuning in and hearing the voices works incredibly well with webcam detection and headphones, and makes for some really memorable instances of storytelling you can’t get in other games.
However, the emotional detection options were a little more finicky. At certain moments, the player is prompted to express joy or sadness through their facial expressions, once again powered by the webcam if it is turned on. I learned quickly that I had to over-exaggerate my smile and frown for the camera to tell the difference, and those moments didn’t make a significant impact for me compared to other fun baby-psychic-power segments.
Most of Goodnight Universe is spent watching the world play out around you, and reacting accordingly, occasionally nudging the virtual stage play along using your psychic powers. Some choices allow you to add context and texture to your story, and what your character is feeling in the moment, but it’s ultimately a linear tale. Still, it made some of the larger emotional moments hit harder by prompting me to engage with them; determining how I thought Isaac felt, or how I felt through Isaac, created an interesting dynamic in what would otherwise have been just a digital play happening around me.
The voice acting is also stellar, with the family and supporting cast putting on dynamic performances. Goodnight Universe’s sound design is powerful, from the aforementioned psychic “tuning” moments to subtle bits of foley or synth soundscapes that help communicate the story around you.
While it doesn’t land with quite the impact that I felt from Before Your Eyes, Goodnight Universe still shows there’s an impressive range of story and interactivity to explore in this space. Its hardware requirements and format justify themselves well through how the game utilizes those tools, creating truly moving moments through interactivity that you just don’t see often. Goodnight Universe is a wonderful exploration of what’s still possible with a simple webcam.
