In the last city on earth, the only known inhabitants are terrified to go to sleep. The HUSH will come, leaving behind nothing but an echo of their pain. This city, The Crush, is ruled by a malevolent group hellbent on rooting out all whom they call heretics. You are Katja, the last member of your family, desperately trying to survive by using concoctions you brew to stave off sleep. Everyone must sleep, eventually. Over the course of four hours in SLEEP AWAKE, Katja will fight to survive, uncover the truth, and boy, do things get f*cked up along the way.
The Crush
The game begins with Katja reminiscing about her lost father and brother, as you’ll solve basic puzzles to create a tincture that keeps you awake. You’ll fix the water pipes, snip the various plants around your home, and hit your first taste of the supernatural.
With resonating frequencies and the sound of your voice, Katja will purify water in an alchemical miracle. The supernatural permeates through the creative director Cory Davis’ title. Mr. Davis is most famous for his infamous mindf*ck, Spec Ops: The Line.
SLEEP AWAKE is no different, with mind-altering states mixed with the fantastic to never let you know exactly what is real and what is not. A stellar job by the voice cast is helped along by Nine Inch Nails touring musician Robin Finck’s soundtrack. Mr. Finck is also credited as a Creative Director, and his music blends the real and surreal alike together in a hypnotic dance of insanity, deceit, and understanding.
I felt like I had taken an acid trip by the time credits rolled. The game’s graphics are full of stunning vistas and mediocre animations. You see the talent despite the flaws in how characters move. Camera direction and art style carry this title above many of its predecessors. The arthouse, sci-fi horror movie chops of Blumhouse are easy to see.
Walk, Run, and Click
While the game is coming to both consoles and PC, I was only able to play the Steam version of the game before launch. It ran well on my computer when I put the internal resolution down to 80% at 4K Ultra. This one is lean on options, with no difficulty sliders to be seen.
There are subtitles for those hard or incapable of hearing, but that was about it on the accessibility front. The game played well on both controller and mouse & keyboard. SLEEP AWAKE’s gameplay primarily consists of walking, ducking down, and light puzzle work. There is no combat to speak of, with a handful of stealth sections mixed in to spice things up.
You’re never forced to figure out puzzles while being chased, with the stealth and chase sequences being their own, short, bespoke areas. The game works on a checkpoint system, and they were plentiful. If you do fail a sequence and die, you’ll respawn into an endless void. Walking forward reshapes reality around you until you walk through a door, at which point you’re thrust back into the world of the living.
I doubt it has any in-game meaning, but damned was it a cool effect the handful of times I saw it. The game does a great job of mixing up puzzle types, stealth, chase, and exposition sequences. I never felt like I was repeating any of them too quickly. The AI was decently generous in the stealth sections, with any darkened area showing a small icon at the bottom of the screen to let you know that you were invisible to your foes.
HUSH now
The gameplay is okay – it’s the story where SLEEP AWAKE shines. Katja’s voice actress does a wonderful job of bringing this teenager’s inner monologue to life, without it ever sounding forced. There are plenty of times you’ll hear her younger brother or her father’s voice via memories. Everyone in the cast does a damned good job of making some occasionally weird-assed lines sound perfectly natural.
I always do my best to avoid spoilers. If this were a spoiler review, know that I could go on for a few thousand words about the world SLEEP AWAKE has created and where the story goes. This is the type of journey best enjoyed with as little foreknowledge as possible. Take a night or two and dive through this title with your best headset on, in the dark, and occasionally it’s going to scare the bejeesus out of you.
I have no idea how this game will perform on console. Make sure to check online and see if anyone has the Xbox or PlayStation versions up as Let’s Plays. Check out the beginning section to keep spoilers down. If you have a decent PC, then the only setting you’ll need to lower is the internal resolution, once you trick the game into running above 1080p (it took me 30 minutes to finally get it to 4k!).
The game mixes in a decent amount of live action during cutscenes. It occasionally pulled me out of things a bit when compared to the decent but not incredible-looking character models. The constant use of kaleidoscope effects may give some out there a bit of a headache as well.
Wrapping Things Up
SLEEP AWAKE is a game I saw in my email, having never heard of it. I redeemed the key on a whim, and dear lord, am I happy that I did. The four hours I spent in The Crawl as Katja were full of intrigue, some genuine scares, and a hell of a lot of enjoyment.
SLEEP AWAKE
Played on
PC
PROS
- Intriguing premise
- Great looking backdrops
- Solid voice acting
- Great soundtrack
CONS
- Live action vs. character models was iffy
- Some visual effects were a bit barfy
