Face Jumping review (Venice Immersive)

Face Jumping is a 30 minute production, set in a cartoonishly surreal bizarro world, that experiments with eye tracking as a form of navigation. Stare into a creature or person’s eyes and you’re transported into their body; after a while, you can literally throw eyeballs around to help make this journey more fluid. The official synopsis claims this method of navigation enables it to explore “how seeing and being seen shapes reality, perception, and self”—a rather highfalutin description for an experience that involves, in one quirky scenario, observing clouds of swirling colour being emitted from dogs’ anuses. 

This moment is indicative of the playful approach characteristic of Tender Claws, a studio with a rich and zany history in experimenting with spatial storytelling, particularly navigational elements. I’m particularly fond of the “scrunching” they invented in their 2019 game The Under Presents, which involves reaching out and pulling the background towards you—a novel method of moving around that looks and feels great. While that production offers several hours of gameplay and a vivid central setting—a crumbling night club on the edge of existence—Face Jumping is brief and derivative.

It begins with a “pistols at dawn” style standoff between three gun-slingers in ye old wild west. Extreme close-ups of their eyes evoke the wall-rattling finale of Sergio Leone’s great spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with of course the aforementioned interactive element, allowing us to “face jump” into any of the characters. This sounds fun and liberating, but there’s a catch: if you don’t want to be transported, you must defy the natural human instinct to examine their eyes, creating an odd “to look or not to look?” tension that doesn’t feel intentional. 

There isn’t really a plot, or even a narrative foundation: the piece is essentially a collection of kooky set pieces—never dull, though not especially memorable. In one, we’re situated inside a waiting room hued with green and aquatic like colours; god knows what we’re actually waiting for. In another, we’re situated on an escalator reaching up, up, up, into the clouds, past various floating objects and debris, defying the laws of gravity.

At another point we’re positioned inside a train, which is populated by cute Casper-like floating ghosts. This scene reminded me of Manifest 99—another short, narrative-driven VR game, released on various platforms in 2017. Set on a train travelling through purgatory, where we encounter various anthropomorphized animals with dramatic backstories, it uses a very similar navigational method despite eye-tracking technology being well off into the future. 

As I wrote in my review: “We make our way through the train by being transported into the body of various crows situated throughout the carriages. And this is sight activated: we look into a crow’s bright eyes, take its form, then look into another’s eyes.” Each of these transitional moments in Manifest 99 reiterates that “we’re somewhere unusual, somewhere beautiful but sad—an otherworldly place situated outside reality, informed by the language of dreams.” 

Without getting sidetracked into a detailed discussion about the differences between gaze and eye tracking, the latter offering a different set of features and specificity, it does feel odd, not to mention disappointing, that Tender Claws didn’t come to the party with something that feels notably more evolved than a production that arrived eight years ago—a virtual eternity in VR land. (In terms of eyetracking experimentations, it’s also worth checking out Before Your Eyes—a narrative experience comprised of scenes that last until you blink). 

My mind might not have gone there had Face Jumping gripped me emotionally, or been a blast to experience. It feels more like a proof of concept than a fully realised standalone work.