There aren’t many games I recommend as wholeheartedly as 2021’s Before Your Eyes. GoodbyeWorld Games’ brisk, beautiful narrative adventure game is a devastating, cathartic, and clever project that rolls a lifetime’s worth of ups and downs into its quick 90-minute play time. Its eye-tracking control scheme is one of the most meaningfully frustrating ones I’ve experienced, as it skips through entire segments of its story every time your webcam sees you blink. Goodnight Universe, the follow-up from Nice Dream Games, extrapolates this idea into a 3-and-a-half-hour experience, and it feels like turning a really tight Pixar short into a feature film, for good and ill.

*Goodnight Universe *has the same sentimentality running through its veins that made *Before Your Eyes *an incredibly heartwarming story despite the tragedy at its center, but it’s far less introspective. The new release is the story of a baby named Isaac who, somehow, has adult-level intelligence, though he can’t communicate that to his frazzled mother, spritely sister, and suspiciously chill father. But because he has an adult’s intuition, he can observe all the chaos of their lives and try his best to be a helpful son and brother. Sometimes that takes the form of just being a chill baby who isn’t causing trouble; at other times, he gets a bit more hands-on. What can a baby who can barely crawl do as his family navigates all their adult bullshit? A lot, actually, because Isaac has psychic powers.

© Nice Dream Games / Kotaku

Where *Before Your Eyes *was entirely built around eye-tracking tech as a bit of narrative design, Goodnight Universe’s implementation of a webcam is far more mechanical in the traditional sense. Blinking activates Isaac’s psychic abilities in a way that often changes depending on the situation. It can shut down machinery, help you clean up a mess in your bedroom, and if you close your eyes and turn your head, you can listen in on your family’s worried thoughts. In this game, blinking is basically an extra button that certainly still feels novel, but it’s not quite as effective in what it communicates. *Before Your Eyes *made an entire mechanic out of “blink and you’ll miss it,” but when *Goodnight Universe *uses the same webcam-based control scheme, it feels like something that could have just as easily been communicated by pressing a different button on your controller. In a way, it feels more like a reference to the team’s previous history than it does something truly integrated into everything *Goodnight Universe *seeks to explore.

Some of the later game sequences, in which *Goodnight Universe *sheds some of its focus on its supernatural family story in favor of some surprisingly dark science fiction and espionage twists, have you blinking as Isaac navigates mazes of obstacles and threats to his safety, and the game registers these inputs based on where your cursor is if you’re playing with a mouse and keyboard. I played through all of *Goodnight Universe *with headphones to listen in on my family’s thoughts and a webcam to blink my psychic will onto the world around me, but in its effort to stretch out Before Your Eyes’ concise ideas into something longer, *Goodnight Universe *fails to develop as strong of a grasp on why it’s implementing these ideas, beyond the team wanting this approach to gameplay to feel like a signature facet of their work.

© Nice Dream Games / Kotaku

I don’t want to keep comparing *Goodnight Universe *to Before Your Eyes, but the contrast between the two is one of the most interesting things about Isaac’s journey. It’s about twice as long, but doesn’t feel like it overstays its welcome, even if it’s lacking the same singular vision. The game’s psychic set pieces are more mechanical, but they’re doused in a childlike mischief and naivete that is delightful, and that makes the moments when reality intervenes as devastating as any slap on the wrist you received as a kid. Despite Isaac’s adult-level intellect and grown-ass voiceover from Thunderbolts* actor Lewis Pullman, *Goodnight Universe *hits at childhood shame, embarrassment, and familial resentment like they’re all raw nerves. Then it gradually becomes about so many other things that even gesturing at its many twists and turns risks spoiling it entirely.

*Goodnight Universe *runs with every idea it has with a childlike confidence, but it’s also such a different story by the end than it is at the start that I wouldn’t be surprised if people find that one half of its tale resonates with them, while the other falls flat. When it’s at its best, it feels like being cradled and read your favorite story; then come moments when it’s as if the reader got bored with one story and picked up an altogether different one. What it lacks in focus, it makes up for in a heartwarming message at the end, but it’s a bit of a rollercoaster getting there. At least it’s worth riding for the highs.