Sleep Awake

When I tell you that the designer behind Spec Ops: The Line has teamed up with the guitarist of Nine Inch Nails to develop a horror game for Blumhouse, you’re probably picturing something dark and trippy. That turns out to be an understatement, because the brand-new game Sleep Awake is a surreal and often psychedelic descent into post-apocalyptic madness. It’s like a 1990s music video come to life, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack and a mystery that is guaranteed to get under your skin. You might want to brew another cup of coffee, because we’re about to review Sleep Awake, the debut release from Eyes Out.

Things are not going well for Katja. She’s stuck in a rundown apartment, where she spends her days gardening and doing everything in her powers to keep her grandmother from going to sleep. Just outside of those walls is what remains of a once-thriving city, now completely destroyed by a disaster that everybody calls The Swell. This is a dangerous place full of crumbling buildings, roving death cults and possibly even otherworldly forces. Maybe? I don’t know. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what is just an illusion, because Katja hasn’t gone to sleep in a really long time.

You see, as bad as the outside world is, it’s sleep that is the real enemy here. When people fall asleep, they are at risk of being taken by The Hush, leaving behind little more than a person-sized outline of where they used to be. To combat the very natural act of sleeping, Katja drips chemicals into her eyes, something that helps her stay awake, but also comes with some rather unfortunate side-effects. For one thing, she’s constantly seeing visions of a woman who seems to know a lot about what’s going on. Is she a hallucination? Maybe a guide? Or something else? Hey, where did she go? And where am I right now?

Believe it or not, that’s basically how it feels to play Sleep Awake. Forget having an unreliable narrator, Katja has this problem where she’ll suddenly realize that she has no idea where she is or how she got there. This leads to one of many encounters with the outside world, a wonderfully-realized retro-futuristic dumpster fire of a city that has been destroyed far beyond repair. It expertly walks that line between being a disgusting hell hole you wouldn’t want to live in and giving you a real glimpse into what the city would have been like before The Swell It’s a believable setting filled with a heavy atmosphere and haunting (and surprisingly gorgeous) moments.

In that sense, the game reminds me a lot of BioShock. It often feels like we’re a tourist in this post-apocalyptic world, so even the smallest details can help to flesh out the much larger narrative. You’ll walk into a bedroom or business that is otherwise unimportant, but the more you explore the surroundings, you’ll find that every nook and cranny tells a story. These small details helped to suck me in and ground me, something that is incredibly important given how much the game can jump around and try to confuse both Katja and the player.

As I mentioned at the top, Sleep Awake is the debut release from Eyes Out, a new studio from developer Cory Davis and famed guitarist Robin Finck. It’s really a perfect match, as the two styles mesh well and lead to some fascinating imagery. The game throws every effect it has at you, even dipping into full-motion video for some of the visuals. There are bits in this game that you could splice into a Nine Inch Nails music video from the 1990s without anybody noticing. From the fantastic music to the setting, there’s just a cool rock energy running through this entire game.

After an absolutely wild introduction that is simultaneously compelling and baffling, Sleep Awake ends up falling into a far more conventional stealth horror game. There are a number of sections where you’ll need to sneak past death cultists and hide in the shadows for safety. There’s no combat in Sleep Awake, so, whatever you do, DON’T GET CAUGHT! Run, duck and, well, run and duck, because those are the only moves Katja can perform.

When you’re not hiding from cultists, you’ll need to explore the surroundings and solve simple puzzles. There are fetch quests, but they are so simple that I’m not even sure they are worth bringing up. For example, you’ll occasionally run into a door that needs a keycard. Oh no! But don’t worry, because that keycard is usually no more than a few feet away. Often in the same room as the locked door. This is true no matter what you need. There’s never a bit where you’re going to have to backtrack and you’ll never be confused over what you’re supposed to be doing.

This extends to the level designs, which are excessively linear. Sure, there are a few sections where you can choose between multiple paths, but those are mostly the bits where you’re trying to avoid the guards. When you’re just exploring, the path is extremely simple, to the point where there’s only one way to go. This is one of those games where, as luck would have it, the one clear path just so happens to be the direct route to where you need to go. Every time.

I would argue that Sleep Awake is at its best when it’s bucking conventions and just taking us on a trippy, brain-scrambling roller coaster ride. It loses some of its charm every time it veers into trying to be a more traditional game. If they were going to add puzzles, then I wish they would have been more elaborate and weirder. This is a character who is having a hard time recognizing what’s real and what’s not, so it would have been fun if some of the puzzles played with the unreliable narrator trope. For a game this trippy, it’s a shame the puzzles are so straight-forward.

It's easy to be a little disappointed that the more traditional “game” elements aren’t more unconventional, but none of this is going to be what you remember about Sleep Awake. The bits you’re going to be talking about will have nothing to do with boneheaded puzzles or linear level designs, but rather it will be the twisted story, the crazy visuals, the unique storytelling and how you interpreted the ending. This is one of those games where the experience outshines everything else. There’s so much art and style thrown into this game that it almost doesn’t matter that the stealthy bits feel out of place.

That’s something the horror genre does well, no matter the medium. Like so many of the movies Blumhouse makes, this is a horror experience that doesn’t need a sequel or to be part of an expanded universe. It just needs to be creepy and atmospheric. A cool ride through a post-apocalyptic dystopian world with trippy visuals and an energy that feels like a 1990s music video. And that is exactly what Sleep Awake delivers. I have a hunch that this is one of those games that is going to stick with me for a long time to come.