'Your Eyes' is an ambitious story that tries to blend so many genres and settings into one. My highest praise for this game really comes in the presentation of this game. It's very ambitious to use nearly all the different community sprites together in one game, and still have it feel cohesive. All the Ren'py animations, the visual effects, having characters be layered behind tables to show depth, making the inside of a spaceship be a fancy mansion, the way that audio is used to cut in and out, the use of perspective to show looking through a key hole, all really great examples of excellent direction for the visual part of a visual novel. I'll be talking in spoilers, so read the visual novel first before continuing.
It's also very ambitious to want to have so many different genres, from the romance plot of the main character and the captain, the drama plot of the relationships between the crew, the scifi plot of it being a decades long relocation mission, the thriller plot of the unexplained murders, and the mystery plot when only the crew are possible suspects. When it comes to writing the characters, they were all really well characterized, had distinct personalities, and the dialog between them was great.
Unfortunately, once the different genres started to compete for attention, is when the story started to get messy and unwieldy. To me, the best genre plot done is the scifi thriller part, because it was always tense and you didn't know where the story was going to go, and you felt the gravitas of this crew's mission and what was at stake. The murder mystery ends up losing it's focus, since there's usually a 'who-dunnit','how-dunnit', or 'why-dunnit', and for this story, the answers feel somewhat unsatisfying and come too abruptly at the end. As a result of the mystery plot reveal, the romance plot also suffers for this as well.
The reveal at the end of who the culprit is, felt like it under minded the mystery that came before it. The culprit's method for carrying out the sabotage and murders felt contrived and didn't seem to make sense with their motivation. As a result, the romance aspect of the story also feels a bit contrived. The final scene as well, which gives the story it's title, left me with a bit of a gut punch, both unsatisfied with the ending and emotionally drained. Which is a shame since I thought it had such a strong act 1 and 2. If I were to offer my perspective, it needed to pick a lane and either be a scifi thriller survival tale or a scifi murder mystery. The ending lends itself better to a scifi thriller tale with how it's goes into the backstory and explanation, so I feel like that would've been the route to take.
The implementation of the theme, 'the light in the dark', I believe is the planet that they're going too. While I think it informed the initial setting of this story, from a practical standpoint, I don't know how much it contributed to the narrative since it has such a bleak ending. The story itself has a very strong start and characterization, but I think lost focus in the third act. As mentioned, this story was very ambitious in it's scope, and it's evident that the writer has the chops to really immerse the reader. I feel that once this writer hones in on a story's plot, their ability to have the characters come alive will really shine through.