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Of course it's raining on my way to play Sleep Awake, the upcoming first-person horror game from Spec Ops: The Line designer Cory Davis and Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck at their new studio Eyes Out. Set to be published by scary movie sanctuary Blumhouse, Sleep Awake offers the kind of subtle psychological horror that's only accentuated by something like the irregular tapping of raindrops.
When I first previewed the game at the Tribeca Festival 2025 – the demo I saw then is now available to download on Steam – I was particularly unsettled by the bleary FMV sequences Sleep Awake uses to explain its world where no one can sleep, unless they want to get sick with something worse than Freddy Krueger. But the new gameplay I experience on this gray day in New York teaches me Sleep Awake's intimidating visuals are only rivaled by its heart-pounding action.
In the only city left alive, it's up to soft-spoken protagonist Katja to stay awake and protect her loved ones from what's called the Hush, some kind of disease making people disappear while they sleep – turning gentle snores and deep breaths into unnatural screams in the distance. It's always loud in my city, too, but Finck and lead game designer Clay Westing sit me down in front of the computer with a big pair of headphones, dimming the lights. The room turns storm cloud black.
I blink and open my eyes again as Katja, who's instead stuck inside a rotting green room. All of Sleep Awake's environments are decaying – with everyone so exhausted, they've given up on maintaining boring "society." It's too sedative.
So staircases crumble. They've been replaced by wooden pirate planks just a few seconds from snapping. Electricity flickers in the wrong places, so I crash a cart into a circuit breaker box that isn't mine. Katja navigates environmental puzzles like this – hurried along by the waving branches of sleep deprivation – while tiptoeing around masked members of the DTM death cult. If she wants to keep Amma, who she loves, alive, she has to.
I'm on my way to deliver Amma her little glowing vial of stay-awake serum – though the DTM would clearly prefer that I didn't. They're patrolling this neighborhood like federal agents, and, I soon find out, they won't hesitate to break my skull open like a wasp's nest with those long steel pipes they're carrying.
I'm unarmed. I get the sense that Katja is more sleepy brains than brawn.
"We were interested in knowing her voice," Finck tells me when I ask, as I tend to, why choose a female protagonist. Sleep Awake began as a music project around the idea that everyone in it – protagonists, antagonists – is experiencing a biological need to go to bed, and a natural fear of death keeping them from it.
After establishing the industrial groan of Sleep Awake's music – which now follows the movement of my gameplay like a shadow on a burning car tire – Eyes Out made its way through other audio, then through visuals, until finally starting to work on game development.
Katja "showed up very early on" in this process, Finck says. "She was the first character. And we wanted to pursue a world through the eyes of a female."
Katja's first-person perspective makes my crouching against walls to hide from DTM members – who make it obvious they've seen me by turning an overhead light red and whacking me with those aforementioned pipes – horrifying. I find myself uselessly informing Sleep Awake's devs that "I'm scared" as I'm reminded of creeping around in Alien: Isolation or Outlast, which feature some of the nastiest stealth sections in horror gaming. Though, Westing says he counts Bloodborne and Silent Hill as two of Sleep Awake's direct inspirations, particularly in their expression of Lovecraftian terror and possibly unreliable narrators.
But unlike those games, Katja has no use for swords or guns because "we were very much interested in pursuing her without a weapon," says Finck. "We wanted to see how many interesting places, narratively, and gameplay-wise that we could push that protagonist character."
Ultimately, adds Westing, the devs look forward to players experiencing the psychedelic "FMV video transitions from one very different place, to different place, to another different place."
This aspect of Sleep Awake is "something that's very unique that I'm excited for people to know," Westing says, "and to see if they'll even know what's happening."
Even the death screen in Sleep Awake feels surreal; the devs call it a "death closet," and I'm made to walk out of its dark toward a blurry rectangle of light in order to return to my last autosave.
Beyond Sleep Awake, here in New York surrounded by police sirens and claustrophobic subway stations, I'm running on little sleep, as my insomnia often necessitates. I feel connected to Katja while she forces herself through her own dystopia. For us, sleep, not sleeping, death, not dying all sound like the same thing.
