Eye Blink Twice turns a single button into a way of reading a damaged mind, and the idea is strong enough to outlast puzzles that keep asking it the same question.
The blink without the body
In 2021, Before Your Eyes pointed a webcam at your face and moved its story forward every time your real eyelids closed. It turned an involuntary reflex into an act with consequences, and it worked because your body was in on it. Time To Wake Up, the debut from Belgian studio Eye Blink Twice, takes the same reflex and puts it on a button. There is no camera and no fight against your own tear ducts. You press, the screen shuts, and a different version of the room is waiting on the other side.
That choice tells you what kind of game this is. Before Your Eyes treated the blink as a clock you could not stop. Time To Wake Up treats it as a switch, a tool you control rather than a pressure you resist, and the whole game rests on whether a switch can carry the dread that a reflex carried on its own. Having seen it through to the credits, my answer is that it carries the dread very well and the puzzles rather less so.
Eye Blink Twice is a two-person studio from Kortrijk, founded in June 2023, and this is its first commercial release. It launched on PS5 and Steam on October 12, 2026, with Serafini Productions publishing the console version and Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch versions planned for later. Serafini Productions kindly provided a PS5 code for this review.
What the game is about
Alan Malone is trapped in a dream he cannot quite place in time, and the dream is made of school. Hallways are stitched together out of bedrooms. Classrooms refuse to end. There is a library where the clocks cannot agree on the hour, and a maze of lockers wrapped around a book Alan is fixated on without being able to say why.
He is not alone in there. A voice keeps him company, one with an unsettling fondness for his eyes, and it offers to help him find the way out by walking him back through his own memories. The help is practical as well as emotional: the voice opens doors for him, sometimes figuratively and quite often in the plain hinge-and-handle sense. Classmates stand in the corridors and stare, and the game asks you to keep your distance. Who that voice belongs to, and why Alan’s eyes matter so much to it, are the questions the story exists to answer. I am not going to answer them here.
Tone deserves a clear word before anyone starts. The developers describe the content as including strong language and unprocessed traumas, and both halves of that phrase are accurate. This is a game about a man who has never dealt with something that happened to him as a child, and it does not soften that for anyone’s comfort.
Gameplay: one button, two worlds
The mechanic takes a sentence to explain. Press blink and the world flips to its other version. A spinning platform resets, a dry room fills with water, a corridor that dead-ended turns to face somewhere new, and moving parts switch state or snap back to where they began. Objects you are holding come with you, so much of the puzzle work involves picking something up in one version of a space and putting it to use in the other.
At its best this produces a pleasant kind of double vision. You start reading every room as two rooms, noting what sits where in each, and solutions come from holding both layouts in your head at once. An early puzzle built around an apple that rises or sinks depending on which world you are in shows the idea cleanly. The object stays the same while the space around it changes, and the job is to find the reality where it lands within reach.
The voice doubles as a hint system. Stand still long enough and it starts talking, often in a way that tilts you toward the next step without spelling it out. A journal fills with pages as you go, readable at any time and scrollable with L1 and R1, and it is where recovered memory fragments collect into something like a case file on Alan’s own life.
There is light platforming in between, a jump onto a ledge, a staircase assembled from lockers, but nothing that tests reflexes. The game cares about where you are standing when you close your eyes, not how fast your thumbs move.
Where the puzzles run thin
I will be honest about where it slips, because it slips in the same place more than once.
The blink is a narrative device of real depth. As a puzzle verb its range is narrow, and the game reaches the edge of that range sooner than it should. Too many sequences reduce to the same loop: move as far as this version of the room allows, blink, move a few steps further in the other, blink again.
The flooded bathroom in the middle of the game is the clearest case. Its layout is genuinely interesting to decode at first, with sections reachable only above or below the waterline depending on which world you are in. Then the solving is done and the executing begins, and what remains is a long stretch of swimming and flipping that drains the scene of the tension it opened with. The sequence that follows asks for something very similar, which is the moment repetition stops being a lapse and becomes a pattern.
None of it is hard. The logic is clear enough to finish without a guide, and that is to the game’s credit. Clarity without escalation turns into routine, though, and routine is the last thing a psychological thriller can afford in its middle act. A second rule layered onto the blink, or a handful of rooms where the two worlds interfere with each other in less predictable ways, would have given the back half of the puzzle design somewhere to go.
Story: what Alan will not look at
This is where Time To Wake Up earns its place, and it earns it with interest.
The writing works by escalation. Each recovered memory reframes the ones before it, and every time it seems the game has shown you the worst of what happened to Alan, it finds something heavier to put on the table. Seeing a childhood through an adult’s damaged hindsight is an uncomfortable vantage point, and the script uses it well. The school is not frightening because of monsters. It is frightening because it is ordinary, and something in it went badly wrong.
Here the blink finally shows what it was built for. A mind that keeps flipping between a bearable version of a memory and a worse one is a precise picture of how avoidance works, and the mechanic quietly makes you complicit. You are the one choosing, over and over, which version of the room to open your eyes to. When the puzzles drag, that idea keeps the scenes alive.
The ending lands somewhere I did not see coming, and it changes how the title reads in retrospect. I will leave it at that. It keeps working on you after the credits roll, and for a debut from two people it shows a confident sense of what the whole thing was for.
It is not a pleasant story and has no interest in being one. Fun is the wrong measure. The right one is whether it stays with you, and this one does.
Graphics and performance on PS5
The art direction favors a stylized, slightly soft look over photorealism, and it is the right call. Realistic school interiors would pin the game to a particular decade and country; this look floats free of both, which suits a dream that cannot locate itself in time. The libraries, all towering shelves and quarrelling clocks, are the visual high point. The bedrooms-turned-hallways have the specific wrongness of real dreams, where architecture is assembled from feeling rather than floor plans.
Blink transitions are where a game like this lives or dies technically, and on PS5 they hold together. The swap between worlds is quick and clean. The studio spent its demo and pre-release updates on exactly the problems this design invites, tightening blink handling so the player cannot clip into or get stuck inside objects, and improving path tracking so a blink never drops you somewhere you should not be. The finished release is clean on that front, and in a game whose whole language is relocating the player between overlapping spaces, that cleanup matters more than any visual flourish.
Overall this is a polished release with no game-breaking bugs. The PS5 version includes a Visual Comfort option that lets you play without the camera movements and effects that can cause discomfort, a sensible inclusion in a first-person game built on abrupt visual shifts. Voice acting is in English only, with on-screen text in English, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
Soundtrack and sound design
The smartest audio decision in the game is tied directly to the blink. Each version of the world has its own variation of the music, so a blink changes what you hear as well as what you see. The switch registers in your ears before your eyes have parsed the new room, and over time each world acquires a mood you learn to recognize: one you want to stay in, one you want to leave.
Record players sit in the dream’s bedrooms with tracks of their own, small pockets of melody in spaces that otherwise feel muffled and wrong. The score also knows when to drop out entirely, and the silence is often more unnerving than anything it plays.
The voice work is excellent, and it has to be. So much of the game is carried by conversation between Alan and the voice, and the performance behind the voice in particular walks a fine line between comforting and predatory without tipping its hand too early. Smaller touches do a lot with very little, like the grunt of a bully waiting in the first hallway.
Player experience
Time To Wake Up is short and linear, and it is better for being short. A longer cut would only have meant more of the repeated blink loops, and the story is paced to land in one or two sittings. Play it in the dark with headphones on, in as few sessions as you can manage, because the dread accumulates from scene to scene and evaporates if you leave it for a week.
Difficulty is low by design. Puzzles are readable, the voice nudges you when you stall, and the journal keeps track of what you have pieced together. Anyone comfortable with first-person exploration games will reach the end unaided. The trade-off is that there is little here for players who want puzzles to push back. The challenge is emotional rather than logical.
The subject matter is the real gate. Childhood trauma sits at the center of the game, and the developers’ own content warning is there for a reason. Players for whom that material is raw should take it seriously.
Verdict
Time To Wake Up is a debut with one excellent idea and the good sense to aim it at the right target. As the engine of a puzzle game the blink is underused, repeating itself through a middle act that should have been tightening the screws. As a way of dramatizing a mind that keeps choosing which version of the past to look at, it is sharp and memorable, and the story it serves is bleak, superbly voiced, and capped by an ending that rewrites the title.
Buy it if you want a short, uncomfortable story you will still be turning over weeks later, and if you value atmosphere and writing above puzzle design. Skip it if you came for the puzzles, or if childhood trauma is not somewhere you want to spend an evening.
