Falling Asleep on the Job | Sleep Awake Review
I must not fall asleep
WACO, Texas (KWTX) -
From a game publisher named after the film studio that has released some of the most non-horror horror films of all time, comes a game that feels mostly like you’re watching a movie in lieu of playing a game. Sleep Awake is a game that was written by Cory Davis who helped write Spec Ops: The Line and with music composed by Robin Finck who collaborates with Trent Reznor on Nine Inch Nails projects as his guitarist. The developer of the game is a studio called Eyes Out, and they deliver a stylish psychedelic romp through a psychological horror narrative. The game offers an interesting premise through the story alone, but can it deliver?
The first thing I want to speak about is the aforementioned narrative. This game is about a young woman named Katja who lives in a version of the world that has been enveloped in some sort of energy called the Hush that causes people to vanish from existence when they sleep. The remainder of humanity has all cloistered together in one final city called the Crush. People will do anything to stay awake. Some people have turned to pharmaceuticals; others have turned to pain, even electrifying themselves to stave off sleep. What is left of humanity are exhausted, delusional husks. Katja has turned to homeopathy to keep herself from sleeping. She concocts her own eyedrops from plants that she grows in her apartment.
Katja’s scientist father (convenient, I know) has recently disappeared. The rest of her family gone not too long before that. The only family member she has left is her grandmother, Amma. Katja travels across the city to take care of her grandmother and keep her supplied with some of those eyedrops frequently. Today is another day when she needs to deliver the eyedrops. This is the objective of the game, stay awake, take care of Amma. Sounds interesting, yes?
The strongest part of Sleep Awake is it’s use of mixed medium visuals. It’s highly stylized world is accented by dystopian and metaphysicial layouts that don’t make traditional sense and add to the idea of a world taken by an otherworldly force. The environmental graphics look amazing, with a lot of story telling happening in the backgrounds. The lighting and shadow effects are good, even though the game largely takes place in the shadiest places you can imagine. Like it’s a very dark game, I had to actually turn up the brightness a little to find my way around in many of the interior settings. The character design is satisfactory, and the characters are slightly stylized.
The game follows the Alan Wake 2 approach, and they blend video game graphics with live action elements to form riveting visuals. There is loads of strange trippy imagery that comes flying at you throughout the game. You will be cussing Katja every time you see this imagery though as it typically accompanies you getting moved deeper into trouble as she either falls asleep or uses her eyedrops.
The voice acting in the game is atrocious. It’s kind of like the studio didn’t even hold auditions. I noticed that a family seems to voice the three most prominent characters in the game. They have very few acting credits between them, and you can definitely tell.
Sleep Awake rail roads you into falling asleep and waking up further away from the safety of her flat. Like it happens automatically because the story demands it. I would have liked a way to fight against falling asleep like using the eyedrops on your own as needed, or maybe some sort of way of hurting yourself to stay awake. It would have made the idea play a lot better. Here it just feels a little like watching a movie and isn’t as interactive as I would have hoped it would have been.
Sleep Awake doesn’t have much going on from a gameplay perspective, containing a few very poorly conceived stealth sections. Like all terrible forced stealth, if you get caught, you’re pretty much cooked. Sneaking gives you agency and the lack of HUD or even proper stealth indicators make it feel like an after thought. You’ll also find Katja to be no fighter, as she has no means of defending herself against the clambering slow, gas mask wearing foes that look to capture her. There’s not really any redeeming qualities of the stealth mechanics, but I understand that there must be some sort of obstacle to overcome so that you can legally call this a video game, otherwise it would just be a music video for Robin Finck’s music.
Speaking of the music, it felt more like it belonged in the background of a Metal Gear game. It didn’t really evoke the feeling of being a scared young woman navigating her way through some sort of strange apocalypse. Instead, it felt like I should be judo chopping enemies and stealing state secrets to bring back to my country. It’s so tone deaf that I can just imagine that when Robin presents a Nine Inch Nails guitar riff to Trent that Trent probably says something along the lines of, “Great job Robin. Let’s just put this here in this special spot on the fridge where everyone can enjoy it.” Then he just creates his own riff that actually fits the emotion he’s trying to convey in his song.
I’m just joking; there are several moments in the game where the score is fitting and adds a lot of energy to the scene. Robin Finck is a very talented musician and his collaboration with this game made it strange and memorable.
Sleep Awake has a lot of character, and though some of the execution was a bit of a miss, the game is an interesting piece of art. It has sensational visuals and awesome music. The gameplay could use some improvements as it isn’t nearly interactive enough. There is a deeper, poignant meaning to be unraveled from the narrative, but I know on the surface that the moral of the story is to always boil your water before consuming it. For Hardwired, I’ve been Levi Barner. Who would have thought that all of this would spring from someone taking that Billie Eilish song way too seriously?
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