Just a little over a year ago, Blumhouse Games published their first game, Fear the Spotlight, which I was a big fan of. Their latest publishing endeavor is SLEEP AWAKE, the debut game from EYES OUT, a studio founded by Cory Davis of Spec Ops: The Line and Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck. That’s a lot of diverse talent associated with this title, so anticipation was high before I even knew any details. Trailers promised a dystopic world brought to life with psychedelic visuals, but there seemed to be very little indication of what kind of gameplay to expect.
It’s easy to see why they led with narrative information, because SLEEP AWAKE is a very story-first game. You play as Katja, a woman who is trying to survive in a world where anyone who reaches delta sleep is taken by a mysterious force known as the Hush. It’s a bleak world that’s desperately finding ways to stave off sleep as society is barely holding itself together. Several factions are vying for dominance, believing they have the correct solution to staying awake. What starts as a simple run to try to deliver supplies to a loved one ends with a journey that confronts the Hush itself.
So what exactly does it play like? SLEEP AWAKE falls into the same category of games that I would put last year’s Still Wakes the Deep. It’s a heavily narrative first-person experience where you spend most of your time traversing spaces, while doing some light puzzle solving and occasional stealth along the way. For me, this type of game is nothing revolutionary, but can often be a great way to dive headfirst into a world and learn about it firsthand.
Your first few hours of exploring do a good job of setting up these different factions, showing you the wild extremes they go to in order to prevent themselves from getting taken in their sleep. You learn about groups like the Pain Eaters, who use torturous devices to get themselves awake, and the Mechanists, who try a specific form of electrocution to keep them from hitting delta sleep. These each have some neat imagery associated with them, but often just feel like something you’re learning about incidentally while passing by without fully exploring the concepts or integrating them into your narrative. It’s a good way to make the world feel rich and lived in, but for me they didn’t really feel essential to Katja journey in a way that added any depth to the story.
There is also the DTM, an authoritarian group that roams the streets, providing you with the stealth challenges early on. Sneaking around in this game is fairly rudimentary, but it gets the job done. There’s lots of crouching under tables as guards go through fairly basic patrol routes. Rarely did I feel like I was outsmarting an enemy with my tactics, instead just going through the motions along a linear path while waiting for an enemy to move past. Later in the game, there are some enemies introduced that have neat twists on the stealth mechanic, but in the first half it’s never as interesting as it should be, feeling more like a task than a challenge.
Exploring the spaces also ends up being pretty linear as the game moves you from story beat to story beat. While the set up about why the world is falling apart is unique and clever, most of the areas you move through are pretty standard post apocalyptic fare, with crumbling buildings and decaying cityscapes. There are some nice touches related to the factions that spice up areas, but there are a few too many generic broken streets and darkened rooms that didn’t convey much personality. The environments are definitely well-rendered and detailed, but this sometimes clutters up the area in a way that can sometimes make the critical path hard to find. Usually there’s some lighting that will be obvious enough to guide your way, so most of the time I wasn’t searching for the way forward for too long.
As you explore, Katja will hear the memories of her family members that she lost to the Hush as things she runs across remind her of them. It’s a nice touch that tries to bring something more personal to her journey, but it often feels like the content of these little auditory flashbacks are just filling in details about the world rather than her character, which makes it feel a little flat. You also have the opportunity to learn more about others who have fallen when you run across Void Shadows, glowing silhouettes left behind when someone is taken in their sleep. Katja can interact with these by singing, something she was taught by her father, and is able to see their last moments. There’s potential for these to be great little short stories, but they rarely go beyond a one sentence memory like “I hope I dream about my family tonight” or “good night my love.”
The puzzles in the game rarely go above the level of finding the key/object to progress, but the few that do stand out. One of my favorite early puzzles involved looking around the room for hidden symbols to help tune a frequency, and I wish there were more instances like this in the seven hours I spent with the game. As the game becomes more abstract near the end, there are puzzles that feel a bit more vibes-based, in a good way, and I think the game could have also leaned on this a bit more, especially as a way to infuse a sense of the surreal into its more grounded first half.
The psychedelic moments end up making for some of the stronger imagery in the game. Since we’re working with a character that’s going through sleep deprivation, SLEEP AWAKE plays a lot of visual tricks on the player to help sell this effect. Your vision kaleidoscopes and blurs, sometimes preceding moments where you lose time and find yourself in a different area. There’s also some full motion video sequences in the game, mostly consisting of abstract images that remind me of edgy music videos. I’m a sucker for FMV, so these did add a bit to my enjoyment of the general vibe of Sleep Awake, even if I did wish it was integrated in a more meaningful way.
One of my main issues with the game is that no matter how much I was told how tired my character was and shown it through visual effects, it never felt impactful because it wasn’t something I could influence through my decisions. The concept of being sleep deprived is one that’s a bit tricky to convey in a medium like this, and I think having some kind of mechanic tied to it would have helped. In the first half of the game, you’re trying to deliver an infusion to a loved one, and you keep dipping into it yourself as you travel, but this type of narrative beat would be more affecting if it was a choice I made myself in response to my situation, rather than a pre-scripted narrative beat. Obviously they were not going for a survival game when designing SLEEP AWAKE, but it seems like the type of story that would benefit from having a mechanical layer that’s related to the core concept to fully sell how desperate the world has become.
I wish the narrative of SLEEP AWAKE did a little more for me, as the set up for the world was clever, even if the moment to moment events that happen to you weren’t exactly revelatory. This could come down to what I previously mentioned about the actual environments feeling pretty standard for this type of story, but I also think that with how much more I enjoyed the second half that delved into the details of the Hush, I wish the first half weren’t such a standard delivery-the-medicine story. It definitely provided the game opportunities to show me the various factions, but that didn’t make my actions any more interesting or develop your character. The inclusion of music as a key plot point was my favorite little twist in the narrative, and I would have liked to see that more naturally integrated into the core concept over the course of the entire game.
There’s plenty of great elements in SLEEP AWAKE, but to me it just never really came together as strongly as I expected it to. It always felt like I was just a tourist in this world, not really someone who was actually surviving it. The stealth and puzzles were nice to add variety to the traversal, but neither were mechanically interesting enough to give me something to sink my teeth into. While the final act was definitely more compelling in terms of both gameplay and visuals, too much of what preceded was fairly boilerplate post-apocalypse storytelling that didn’t really do much for me. If you’re a fan of first-person narrative games like this, it’s worth checking out, but it won’t do much to sell the subgenre to people who aren’t familiar with it.
Review code provided by publisher. SLEEP AWAKE is available today on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series.
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