Goodnight Universe Is Nice Dream’s Bold New Narrative Adventure

Players who gave 2021’s Before Your Eyes a try were rewarded with a moving, superbly written narrative adventure built around an unusual mechanic. It follows a deceased soul travelling through the afterlife and revisiting his whole life, with webcam eye tracking allowing the entire game to be played through blinking (although the PlayStation VR2 version is the strongest way to experience it). I loved it, writing in my review, “It’s a concept I’d love to see further explored in a follow-up, and I couldn’t be happier that something like this exists.”

Graham Parkes, the writer of Before Your Eyes and now Nice Dream’s creative director and writer, felt much the same. Alongside Oliver Lewin, Nice Dream’s co-founder, producer and studio director, Parkes was part of Goodbye World Games, the loosely assembled collective of designers behind the game. Goodbye World spent seven years making Before Your Eyes, a process Parkes characterises as a winding journey full of reversals, complications and, as he puts it, “so many dark days.” When it finally released, he says he was simply pleased to have finished it. Neither he nor Lewin expected it to become such a major success, particularly with critics. “Honestly, I’m still sometimes kind of shocked by it,” says Parkes.

Before Your Eyes has evidently struck a chord with its audience. Lewin says a university student recently got in touch to explain that they had made a musical theatre adaptation of the game for their school. “We still see so many people kind of contributing their own creativity and imagination to it,” says Lewin. “And it sort of continues to live on in that way, so that's always really motivating and inspiring for us.”

Before Your Eyes

That continued inspiration led Parkes, Lewin and the other central Before Your Eyes developers to pursue a studio of their own after the game shipped. Their aim was to produce smaller, narrative-led games.

“Oli and I have always loved narrative games and [are] really just excited by the potential for games as the next narrative medium,” says Parkes. “I think that it's just about being so surprised by the success of [Before Your Eyes] and seeing that there is an audience that likes these shorter, focused narrative experiences and that being something that we've always really loved and believed in. And so it's like, ‘Oh, we have this shot to do that again’ and potentially build a studio around delivering those things.”

That is how Nice Dream came into being. The Los Angeles indie studio also comprises Bela Messex, lead designer and lead programmer; Richard Beare, lead engineer; Dillon Terry, audio lead, composer and designer; and 3D artist Elisa Marchesi. While considering their first project, the group held frequent pitch sessions, throwing around concepts, debating their next move and building prototypes. They were united on one point: they wanted to return to eye tracking. During the development of Before Your Eyes, the team had conceived several imaginative applications for the technology that did not suit that game’s narrative or design.

Before Your Eyes still found magical, more metaphorical uses for blinking and closing your eyes. Yet Parkes says fiction has long framed controlling something with your face as an expression of power - of performing actual magic.

“If you watch Eleven in Stranger Things or different characters with psychic abilities, often they'll be blinking, or they'll be closing their eyes and doing things like that, and this kind of literalizes that and makes you really feel like you're doing something magic,” says Parkes. “So I think that was kind of our initial thing that we were creating prototypes around, like 'Okay, what if this is a psychic kid story?’”

Goodnight Universe

The Birth of Goodnight Universe

At roughly this point, Messex became a father for the first time, to a daughter called Io. He brought Io into the office over the following months, and Parkes says that having her around began to shape the team’s thinking. Nice Dream initially considered opening the game with players controlling the psychic protagonist as a baby, before that character presumably grew older. However, as the studio prototyped a baby with psychic powers while regularly spending time around Io, it became increasingly charmed by an infant’s point of view. The concept’s narrative and mechanical possibilities soon began to fall into place.

Lewin also feels a baby protagonist naturally suits the usual structure of video-game progression. Like many game characters, babies quickly develop and learn distinct, essential skills through their experiences. You are also placed in an unfamiliar world without any understanding of its rules, encounter strangers on whom you depend to learn, survive and acquire knowledge, and discover a great deal simply by prodding things to see what happens.

Nice Dream had found the lead for Goodnight Universe. Io served as a reference point for the team, while Terry recorded an extensive library of baby sounds as he played with her; players will hear those recordings in the game. Goodnight Universe centres on Isaac, a six-month-old baby who has psychic abilities, exceptional intelligence and an unusually acute awareness of both his powers and the world around him. He is the newest member of a loving family that has nevertheless become emotionally distant from one another. Although his relatives do not know about Isaac’s abilities, his formidable mind is still constrained by an infant’s inability to speak. Their difficulties also teach him that he needs to conceal his powers.

“[Isaac] then realizes that it’s very important to his mother especially that he be a normal baby because he was born prematurely, and they had all these health scares when he was first born,” says Parkes. “And so he kind of takes the lesson that he needs to keep his powers and his differences secret from his family. And his decision to hide himself is sort of mirrored in what he’s learning about each of the family members and the ways that they’re hiding themselves from each other.”

Isaac consequently acts as a covert helper, watching his family’s problems unfold and using his abilities to lessen their load. He can move items through telekinesis and use telepathy to read his relatives’ minds, learning more about their thoughts and emotions. Nice Dream says further powers will unlock as the game continues, though it has not detailed them beyond confirming that they will be activated with your face. Parkes describes blinking as the input for smaller actions, including an early scene in which Isaac discovers his abilities while watching a children’s programme he hates. A blink lets him switch to a better channel - think of that unforgettable scene in X2 featuring the mutant child watching television.

Making Faces With Goodnight Universe

A more developed version of Before Your Eyes’ blink-tracking technology will support a wider variety of facial inputs for using Isaac’s powers. The team is still working out exactly how the system will function, but is investigating mouth positions, including smiles and frowns, as well as other expressions.

“We did kind of want to use all parts of the buffalo on this one,” says Parkes. “I felt like with Before Your Eyes, it was very much like, ‘Okay, the tech can do a lot more than just blink’…So we are trying to have fun with the camera. That’s part of the fun for us is just being like, ‘Okay, cool, what else can this weird controller do for us?’”

As with Before Your Eyes, Goodnight Universe will support conventional controls. Nice Dream noticed that many Before Your Eyes players preferred a traditional control scheme rather than using a webcam. Acknowledging that, the studio says it is making Goodnight Moon fully enjoyable whether players use their faces or a controller. Face tracking is not as fundamentally connected to Goodnight Universe’s story and themes as it was in Before Your Eyes, so it is intended to feel more like an optional way to play this time.

Nice Dream also calls Goodnight Universe a mechanically richer game, with a greater emphasis on familiar puzzle solving. In one example, players use Isaac’s powers to work through a checklist of inventive jobs inspired by games such as Untitled Goose Game. The studio also looked at on-rails shooter sequences for other sections and teases gameplay moments with a similar structure. “There may be a motorized crib,” Lewin teases. Between those psychic task sequences, however, Lewin says players will also spend time experiencing the unassuming everyday reality of being a baby.

For anyone still recovering emotionally from Before Your Eyes, Nice Dream positions Goodnight Universe as a lighter and more eccentric adventure by contrast. “We didn't want to just try to break everyone's hearts again,” says Parkes. This does not mean the story will avoid sincere or weighty moments, but Isaac’s abduction by a suspicious government agency forms its central premise, making it a more comedic adventure with a balanced tone.

Goodnight Universe will be longer than Before Your Eyes, while still remaining relatively short, with Nice Dream currently aiming for an experience of around two to four hours, although that target has yet to be settled. Parkes says he prefers creating games that can be completed in a single sitting, having seen that many people who started Before Your Eyes went on to finish it. He is also a keen player himself and, with so many excellent games constantly arriving, says he is more inclined to choose shorter experiences so he can enjoy a greater number of them.

The game will include narrative branches prompted by decision points. It is not designed around radically divergent storylines, but choices should create ripple effects across events. Nice Dream says the ending will remain a focused conclusion while offering different variations based on players’ decisions, though the precise scope of that system remains unclear and is still developing.

Growing Up

When I spoke with Parkes and Lewin, their enthusiasm for Goodnight Universe was unmistakable. Beyond the excitement - and anxiety - of discussing the game in detail publicly for the first time, Before Your Eyes’ success has clearly encouraged the studio to make something more ambitious and daring without abandoning the design principles that made its earlier game effective.

Lewin says the team had feared that players might neither understand nor connect with Before Your Eyes’ distinctive concept and mechanics. Its warm reception has now given Nice Dream confidence to take Goodnight Universe in stranger directions without worrying that people will not “get it.” Parkes adds that, having made it through Before Your Eyes, the group feels more assured about what it can accomplish. There is still the natural pressure of producing a follow-up - even a spiritual one, as in this instance - but it is now working from experience.

Goodnight Universe has made an encouraging start. It is one of seven games currently featured in the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual games selection. The game also has an adorable unofficial mascot in Io, who is now a toddler, which is rather nice.

Before Your Eyes stunned us with its originality and writing, and we are eager to see how Goodnight Universe develops in the months ahead.