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Goodnight Universe is a narrative adventure from Nice Dream, the Los Angeles indie studio formed by members of the team behind Before Your Eyes. This time, players follow Isaac, a six-month-old baby with psychic abilities and an unusual awareness of the world around him. The game builds on the studio’s interest in expressive controls while taking its story in a lighter, more playful direction.
How Goodnight Universe grew from Before Your Eyes
Before Your Eyes, released in 2021, follows a departed soul revisiting his life in the afterlife. Its distinctive control system uses a webcam to detect players’ blinks, making eye movement part of the storytelling. The game’s emotional narrative and unusual mechanics found an audience, and some players have even created their own work inspired by it, including a university musical-theater adaptation.
Writer Graham Parkes and producer Oliver Lewin say that response encouraged them and other core team members to establish Nice Dream. Their aim is to make focused, relatively short games that put narrative at the center. The team’s experience also gave it confidence to experiment with ideas that might have seemed difficult to communicate before.
Nice Dream’s team includes Bela Messex, lead designer and lead programmer; Richard Beare, lead engineer; Dillon Terry, audio lead, composer, and designer; and Elisa Marchesi, 3D artist. During early development, the team considered different concepts and made prototypes. It agreed that eye-tracking and face-based input could support another story, but this time the technology would help players feel as if they were using psychic powers.
Why Goodnight Universe stars a psychic baby
The idea took shape while Messex’s daughter, Io, was regularly at the studio. The team had initially considered beginning with a baby protagonist who would grow older. As it experimented with the concept, the infant point of view became compelling in its own right. Io also provided a reference for the character, and Terry recorded a collection of baby sounds while playing with her.
Isaac is born prematurely, and his family has faced health scares since his birth. He is intelligent and aware of his psychic abilities, but he cannot explain himself in words. As he notices that his family is hiding difficult feelings from one another, he decides to keep his own powers secret. He tries to help them from within the limits of being a baby.
That premise shapes both the story and the gameplay: Isaac can use telekinesis to move objects and telepathy to learn what family members are thinking and feeling. The studio says more abilities will appear as the adventure progresses, although their full details have not been specified. In an early example, Isaac can blink to change the channel on a television show he dislikes.
Face controls and puzzle gameplay
Goodnight Universe expands on the blinking technology used in Before Your Eyes. Nice Dream is exploring additional facial inputs, such as smiling, frowning, and other gestures, as ways to activate powers. The exact implementation is still being developed, so the final range of face controls may evolve.
Players will also be able to use traditional controls. The studio noticed that many people enjoyed Before Your Eyes without a webcam, and it wants Goodnight Universe to work as a satisfying experience with either control style. Face tracking is intended to be more optional here than it was in the earlier game, where blinking was closely connected to the story’s themes.
The new adventure is planned to include more conventional puzzle-solving and a wider variety of gameplay situations. Some tasks involve using Isaac’s powers to complete creative objectives, with Untitled Goose Game among the inspirations mentioned by the team. Other moments draw on on-rails shooter design. Between these sequences, players will also encounter the everyday limitations and routines of being an infant.
A shorter, lighter story with meaningful choices
Nice Dream describes Goodnight Universe as more comedic and offbeat than Before Your Eyes, while still allowing room for heartfelt or serious scenes. The central plot involves Isaac being abducted by a secretive government agency. The team says it wanted a different emotional balance rather than simply repeating the earlier game’s most heartbreaking moments.
The planned playtime is roughly two to four hours, though the studio says that estimate is still being determined. The game is expected to be longer than Before Your Eyes, while remaining short enough for many players to complete in one sitting. This kind of focused runtime may suit players looking for a complete story without a lengthy commitment.
Decisions will also have consequences. Nice Dream says choices can ripple through events and lead to variations in the ending, but the game is not designed around radically different storylines. The precise scope of branching is still developing, so players should expect a focused conclusion shaped by their actions rather than a completely separate narrative for every choice.
What the team learned from Before Your Eyes
The positive reception of Before Your Eyes helped Nice Dream feel more confident about presenting an unusual premise and control scheme. The studio is applying what it learned while aiming for a bigger and more mechanically varied follow-up. Goodnight Universe was also selected as one of seven games in the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual games showcase.
For players curious about the project, the key distinction is its blend of family drama, psychic abilities, and optional face tracking. Its estimated two-to-four-hour length and traditional-control support may also help set expectations while development continues. The final details of the controls, abilities, and story variations remain subject to change.
Goodnight Universe continues the studio’s narrative focus
Goodnight Universe takes the inventive spirit of Before Your Eyes into a new setting: the limited perspective of a baby who can secretly affect the world around him. Nice Dream is pairing that premise with puzzles, facial input options, and a more playful tone, while keeping the experience concise and story-led. For anyone interested in Goodnight Universe, the most useful details to watch are how its evolving face controls work and how Isaac’s choices shape the finale.
