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I hate when well-meaning people tell me that "sleep is so important," because I'm reminded of the fact that I'm not very good at doing it. So, in the same way that meeting someone who likes the same music as you is reassuring, I feel calm while playing the sleep deprivation sim Sleep Awake at this year's Tribeca Festival.
"Sim" might be a strong word – on its face, Sleep Awake is the latest game publisher Blumhouse announced as part of its upcoming horror lineup, and its developer, Eyes Out, is made up of Spec Ops: The Line director Cory Davis and Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck; enveloping the AA gleam of Sleep Awake's graphics is a scratchy industrial soundtrack that prickles my skin like faulty air conditioning.
In the game, I've become a woman, Katja, who's constantly pinching herself awake so that she won't become victim to the strange phenomenon called The Hush, which has obliterated the last few humans on Earth while they slept. The premise is a bit like the Whitman poem, The Sleepers: "I wander all night in my vision, / Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, / Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers, / Wandering and confused, lost to myself."
In first-person, as Katja, I urge myself to stay awake so that I can grind stimulants in my kitchen for my only friend left in the world. But, sounding as clear as a mourning dove somewhere behind my head, my little brother speaks to me in a memory – he was lost to The Hush a while ago – and asks me to let him try, let him shred the herbs, light the burner.
I feel that surreal moments like this are meant to be eerie. We're playing a horror game, worrying about horrifying things, avoiding sleepy vulnerability like the teenagers in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Still, I am inclined to once again call Sleep Awake a sim.
On the worst day of my life, I hadn't slept at all. This was after a week of barely sleeping – sometimes, when I had run out of energy to cry over how exhausted I was, I'd managed to collapse into an agitated rest for an hour or three. Like the disembodied voices that encourage Katja to stay awake in Sleep Awake, the doctors I spoke to sounded to me like they were speaking to me from underneath my mattress – muffled and removed. I saw the sun rise and set, and the humid summer days starting looking like one blur of white and orange in my eyes.
Oh, and my eyes – as they turned red, I could feel them pulsing in their sockets. My eyelids felt like paper hospital gowns scraping their surface.
So whenever Katja is suddenly besieged by splotchy FMV images that remind me of the more hallucinatory sections of Alan Wake 2, I think I understand her. The same goes for when the camera suddenly zooms in on her squirming, bloodshot eyeball, or when she starts speaking with gluey slowness, but she tells herself to stay awake and dodge The Hush – whatever it is, exactly.
I've felt a version of that before. I see the most twitchy, moonlit part of myself in her and in Sleep Awake.
There'd come a time in dealing with my insomnia when I'd wanted to be asleep so badly, I began to fear sleep and how desperate it made me. If I did fall asleep, like I'd prayed for, what if it took all night? What if I woke up early? What if I had lost the ability to sleep entirely, and now, not only was I less human, but also, I was embarrassing myself by holding onto this dream for… more dreams?
You know, I was so tired, I'd have even been happy to have a world record nightmare, as long as I could sleep quickly and deeply. Similarly, Katja lives in hell. At one point while playing the Sleep Awake demo, I sneak past a masochist wearing spikes on a leather thong – this section makes me think of The Outlast Trials.
"Every wound" is "a barrier" to sleep, he proclaims while inserting himself onto a dangling meat hook. He's sick. But, in having been so desperate myself, I listen to his instructions carefully.
Sleep Awake brings this sense of raw, needy pain to its cerebral demo, so I look forward to the game's release date announcement. I've already survived the worst day of my life – why not relive it?
