The best video games make us feel things, whether it’s thrill and panic in the closing moments of a Tetris run, the power fantasy of charging into battle in Dynasty Warriors, or the cackling joy of creating a weapon of mass destruction in Tears of the Kingdom. But there is one feeling that I have perhaps never felt from a video game before, and ironically enough, it’s one of the most core emotions of the human experience – the feeling of being loved. Primal, unfiltered love is at the core of Nice Dream’s Goodnight Universe, and that’s going to be its lasting legacy with me, long after my critiques have faded into memory.
Now of course, lots of games are built around the concept of love – dating sims have never been more popular, and many RPG fans enjoy trying to win the hearts of their favourite party members (Karlach, please call me!). Games like The Last of Us and the Like a Dragon franchises use parental love as a driving force in the plot. But despite love being a crucial aspect of these games, I always feel separated from it. I see it play out in defined ways in the story, or it’s happening to a character I’m roleplaying, but in the real world, I’m not basking in love’s glow. It’s a storytelling device, a way to gain an ability with a party member, or maybe the key to unlocking a romantic cutscene.
In Goodnight Universe, you play as Isaac, a six-month-old baby, which sets you up to spend nearly all of its ~4-hour runtime soaking in these nourishing rays of affection from your in-game family. And I felt it! I felt it in my real body, the warm and fuzzy feelings that come when somebody loves you unconditionally, just because you exist in front of them – quite a unique feeling for a game to give me.
Nice Dream’s trick as a studio is finding ways to remove the barriers between their stories and your emotions. Like their previous effort, the singularly great Before Your Eyes, Goodnight Universe utilises your webcam to track your facial expressions: whether your eyes are open or closed, whether you’re smiling or frowning, and how your head turns from side to side. And trust me, as someone who refuses to use face unlock features on my phone or AI assistants, it sounds creepy, but in this case it’s not.
In fact, I’d argue that the experience of playing the game would be severely hamstrung without utilising the camera tech. Video games have long used the first-person perspective to remove a layer of abstraction and help you inhabit your POV character, and the addition of physical actions such as doing a big smile to make Isaac laugh or closing your eyes to listen in on a distant conversation really brings you closer to slipping through the veil that separates you from Isaac.
A connection to the world around you is especially important here because again, you play as a six-month-old baby (please check your Boss Baby vibes at the door) who can’t do anything more involved than crawling or standing up with assistance. Each scene involves characters talking to you or in front of you as you would do with a baby – the baby doesn’t know what’s happening, right? Well, in this case you have the internal monologue of someone way more developed (I said check your Boss Baby vibes at the door!), and you also happen to have psychic powers.
With these abilities you can listen to distant conversations, beam your thoughts directly into people’s brains, rearrange pieces of cereal to spell out words, use telekinetic abilities to manipulate nearby objects, and much more. As you can imagine, hijinks ensue, and you eventually catch the attention of the local evil tech company, who desperately wants a piece of you.
If you’re reading this thinking, “That sounds like an insane idea for a story,” you are correct! However, Goodnight Universe keeps it all under control, and as the plot gets weirder and tensions start to rise and fall, one thing stays front and centre – your family’s unconditional love for you. And what a wonderful, believable family they are! The dialogue is well-written, with great voice performances and interpersonal dynamics, and the same can be said for baby Isaac’s internal dialogue, who is sometimes just as confused as the player.
The game will sometimes ask you to close your eyes and focus on a conversation between other members of the family, stripping away any other distractions you might have, and it really helps you to feel the emotions of the scene, as moving parts and emerging storylines will often have the family members scrambling to understand what’s happening and, more importantly, trying to understand each other.
So aboard the strong foundation of your family, their unconditional love for you, and the forces that are threatening that, the stage is set for emotions to run high until the floodgates open at the end. Only, for reasons that I won’t spoil here, Goodnight Universe never reached that breaking-of-the-dam moment, despite pushing hard up against it a few times. There were several moments throughout its runtime where I felt the waterworks start to move as the game filled me with emotion, only for something to jam the gears up again.
Sometimes it was an interjection from a character not letting a scene breathe, sometimes it was a heavy-handed pop culture reference, sometimes it was a fiddly on-rails timing puzzle, but more often it was just the simple fact that the big reveal, which lays a new base for the second half of the story, is inherently goofy enough that it was hard for me to fully invest my emotions at critical moments. This never completely disengaged me from the story, but when a narrative shows the potential to absolutely break you down and then fails to do so, that failure sticks out even more.
When reflecting on my experience with Goodnight Universe, I’m challenged to weigh what’s most important to me, and I’m not coming up with cut-and-dry answers. For every time I couldn’t fully buy into the direction that the story took or was pulled out of the experience by a cheesy reference, I also genuinely felt loved, hurt, angry and relieved. I’m conflicted, but I keep returning to those feelings as my lasting memory of my time with the game. And if that’s what you’re looking for from the art you experience, Goodnight Universe will take you there, too.
