I went into Goodnight Universe with that stubborn gamer brain-the one that automatically tags “experimental webcam game” as a gimmick to survive. Before Your Eyes won me over years ago, but I still caught myself side-eyeing the premise here: first-person baby, optional camera tracking, mind-reading, and telekinesis. Cute elevator pitch, but would it hold at feature-length? By the end of my four-hour run on PC, I was sitting in the dark listening to the end-credits song and thinking about my family’s group chat photos in a way I wasn’t fully ready for. The wildest swing this team takes-turning inner thoughts into short, sound-only theater-is the one that landed hardest for me.
For context: I played on a mid-range PC, mostly at my desk with a cheap webcam clipped to an ultrawide. I spent the first hour with standard inputs (mouse/keyboard), then switched to camera tracking for the middle chunk, and finally went back to the keyboard for the last act when I just wanted to soak in the story without fuss. I don’t say that to undercut the camera. When it worked, it absolutely added to the illusion. I just want to be honest: sometimes I craved the tactile certainty of a key press over a blink that might also be a twitch.
Booting up, the game calibrates the camera in a minute or two—tilt your head, blink a few times, find the light. Even this little ritual sets the tone. You’re asked to be present, literally face the game. Then you’re in a high chair. The tray is right there, plastic and slightly sticky-looking, and the world comes at you at adult height, except your view is low and slightly wobbly. Mom and Dad talk around you. A kids’ show starring a chipper goat fills the corner with hypnotic colors. I laughed out loud when I realized the very first thing I did was just bang the tray (which feels exactly like the real-life sound), then froze when I caught myself reading Dad’s thoughts as if they were layered radio channels.
Goodnight Universe gives you that superhero origin twist early. Isaac—the baby you’re inhabiting—thinks like an adult, and he has a light touch telekinesis that the game maps to small gestures. The first time I “cleaned up” a mess by closing my eyes and listening to blocks whirl toward each other like a mini tornado, I felt that tiny surge of “oh, this is clever” dopamine that has to be rare for a mechanic this simple. Later, I shut a kitchen cabinet with a lazy swipe and blinked to turn on a night light. The language is intentionally childlike—almost everything is about proximity, sound, and direct cause—and it works because the game keeps its verbs few and extremely readable.
You can play this two ways: with camera tracking (webcam) or traditional inputs. The game’s own tutorial suggests “leaning in” if you’ve got a camera and space, and I absolutely recommend trying it. Mind-reading is most potent when you feel like you’re tilting your head toward someone and literally tuning a dial to catch their inner frequency. The gestures are intentionally gentle—a sideways drift of your palm to brush a door closed, a deliberate blink to push the story forward, a soft nod to confirm. It made me sit up straighter and stay engaged. That said, when the baby action ramps up—and yes, there are sequences that move—you may find the camera demands more precision than your setup allows.
After failing a particular “shut everything before the grown-ups notice” bit three times because my room lighting confused the blink detector, I swapped back to keyboard. The mapping is simple and customizable—blink becomes a key or click, telekinesis is a hold-and-drag, with confirm and cancel on whatever you like. The game doesn’t punish you for switching, which I appreciated. It also makes a difference for accessibility; I have a slight eye twitch when I’m tired, and on long sessions it was nice to avoid turning that into a hazard. Pro tip: if the camera’s not cooperating, don’t tough it out—use your keyboard.
What I didn’t expect is that Goodnight Universe’s best trick is sound. When Isaac reads someone’s mind, your screen doesn’t explode with HUD elements. Instead, the game drops you into short audio vignettes that feel like radio dramas spliced with musical interludes. Dad’s surface calm becomes a tangle of calendars and late-payment notices clacking like train tracks. Isaac’s older sister smiles through a forced conversation while her inner monologue detonates into fast, thrashy drums and shouted fragments. A grandparent’s memory drifts and returns with the woozy warmth of AM static and swinging strings. It’s theater of the mind done with empathy and humor, not just style points, and it’s why the emotional beats hit so hard later.
This audio-first approach makes a lot of sense given the perspective. You’re a baby. The ceiling looms. The world is mostly voices, rhythms, and smells. The way the game colors each character’s interiority through sound hints at things you won’t fully understand until the ending reframes them. It made me think of the best scenes in Psychonauts, yes, but with less cartoonishness and more aching humanity. I found myself leaning in during these moments—literally—and letting the mechanics disappear. By hour two, I realized I wasn’t “playing a mind-reading minigame.” I was eavesdropping on the people who would shape Isaac’s life, which is a lot heavier than it sounds when you’re trapped in a crib.
Before Your Eyes told a relatively grounded life story and then walloped you at the end. Goodnight Universe keeps you in baby mode much longer and takes more surreal detours. There were stretches where I wondered if it would hold together. Action sequences sometimes cross the line from “tactile, infant chaos” into “gamey hurdle,” and one late set piece made me think, “This is one beat too big.” And yet, the last act ties back to the central fixation—time, and how families spend it together—so beautifully that the detours feel intentional. The finale doesn’t just go for tears; it recontextualizes Isaac’s role in a way I won’t spoil, except to say I sat still through the credits because I needed a minute.
The writing is the secret sauce. Dialogue has that specific, slightly awkward patter of people who love each other but are tired, or proud, or hiding hurt. The parents aren’t idealized. They make jokes that are a touch too brittle, they argue through glances, they say “we’re fine” while their internal audio says the opposite. Isaac narrates as an adult looking back, and the way his voice softens when he talks about mundane rituals—bedtime stories, a theme song humming from another room—gave me the same goosebumps Before Your Eyes saved for its final chapter. This studio understands how memory actually feels in the body.
You don’t pick A or B and fork the plot. Instead, the game lets you color scenes: choose how Isaac labels his own baby-ness (tiny god or tiny tyrant), decide the tone of an apology, tilt the mood by smiling or frowning on camera. They’re small twitches on the narrative dial. A purist might ask why they’re there if they don’t split the path. For me, they felt like a natural extension of a story about perception. If you’ve ever tried to soothe a baby, you know a slight shift in tone can change everything. The game lets you inhabit that idea without pretending you’re the puppet master of fate.
Everyone in Isaac’s orbit is cast with care. The actors find the space between archetype and person—the striving parent, the checked-out teen, the well-meaning elder—and make them feel lived-in. Even the children’s TV host, who could’ve been a broad parody, sits at the edge of wholesome and uncanny in a way that makes total sense once the plot reveals itself. The musical direction threads the needle between playful and bruised, with motifs that resurface right when you need them. The end-credits track, a collaboration from the game’s director-composer and an indie singer whose voice sounds tailor-made for wistful goodbyes, is a heart-stopper. I stayed to the very last note, then reopened my save just to listen again.
– Sitting in the high chair, slapping the tray in rhythm with the goat show’s theme, while hearing Mom’s inner monologue count down tasks.
– Holding my breath during a scene where a sibling pretends to be “fine,” while their thoughts shred with frustration, and deciding to frown—not because it changes the plot, but because it felt right to acknowledge it.
– Accidentally blinking during a delicate conversation and jumping time forward a hair too soon. That sudden loss—missing the last word—felt like an unintentional metaphor for how days disappear.
– A tiny, perfect joke with kitchen cabinets that made me laugh after a heavy stretch. The game knows when to let you breathe.
On my machine, performance was smooth throughout. Load times are minimal, and I didn’t encounter bugs beyond a one-time hiccup where the camera calibration reset after I tabbed out for too long. The webcam implementation is remarkably stable considering how finnicky most consumer cameras can be; the game offers a quick calibration screen and a sensitivity slider so you can dial in blink detection and head tilt. Lighting matters a lot. When I repositioned a desk lamp to avoid glare, false positives dropped noticeably. If you’re on console, you’ll be using standard inputs only, and you won’t miss anything critical—the design clearly scales to both modes.
Comfort-wise, younger players or anyone sensitive to close-up camera movement might want to take breaks. There’s no first-person sprinting around corridors here, but you are low to the ground, and the world can tower and loom. There are toggles for subtitle size and interface clarity, and the game is generous about letting you skip a timed interaction after a couple of failed attempts. That kindness matters in a narrative this emotionally tuned; nothing kills a gut-punch like reloading a checkpoint five times because you blinked wrong.
Let’s talk friction. The handful of more complex set pieces can be just precise enough to feel like you’re wrestling the systems. I don’t think the game needs those moments to prove it’s “video game enough,” and every time I had to re-run a sequence purely for input finickiness, I drifted out of the trance. The surreal mid-game detour also risks tipping too far into sensational—more Saturday-morning cliffhanger than intimate memory. But the writing and final movement pull it back, and the cumulative effect is undeniable. This is a story about how families triage time, attention, and love when both are in short supply. The mess is the point.
– If Before Your Eyes floored you, this is the next step—bigger swings, more texture, same core obsession with time and memory.
– If you dig narrative-first games like What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch, or Oxenfree, you’ll appreciate how this plays with perspective and sound.
– If you’re skeptical of camera gimmicks, try the first hour with keyboard, then flip the webcam on for a chapter. I bet you’ll feel the difference during mind-reading sequences. And if not? The standard inputs are excellent.
– If you’re a parent, an aunt or uncle, or someone who’s spent any time rocking a baby to sleep with a show humming in the background, prepare for a strangely personal mirror. I’m not a parent, but I’m “Uncle Lan Di” to a trio of chaos goblins, and this game pulled at those very real memories—warm, exhausting, fleeting.
Goodnight Universe is the rare follow-up that understands what made its predecessor special and dares to build on it without shrinking. It’s more playful. It’s weirder. It occasionally trips over its own ambition. But it also nails the human stuff so consistently—the way people lie to protect each other, the way love shows up as small chores, the way time disappears—that its missteps feel like scuffs on a beloved family photo. The new mind-reading sequences, the optional camera play, and the storm of tiny, tactile interactions help you inhabit a point of view I hadn’t seen before. The final chapter cements it as something I’ll recommend the moment it comes up in conversation, right after I ask the person I’m talking to when they last called their parents.
Score: 9/10
Goodnight Universe is mechanically simple, emotionally complex, and sonically brilliant. Play it with a webcam if you can, switch to keyboard when you want a frictionless ride, and let it gently wreck you. It’s a story about time disguised as a game about a baby—and it earns that disguise.
Get access to exclusive strategies, hidden tips, and pro-level insights that we don't share publicly.
Ultimate Reviews Strategy Guide + Weekly Pro Tips