Sleep Awake review: "An all-timer horror premise is let down by tired stealth that I feel like I'm sleepwalking through"

"What if you could never sleep again?" is the terrifying question asked by Sleep Awake. In this stealth horror game a mysterious calamity called The Hush has arrived, and now no one can even enjoy a nice little nap without something horrible happening to them. It's a great horror premise, A Nightmare on Every Street, and one that makes me want to down a strong cup of coffee just thinking about it.

But I think developer Eyes Out might want to lay off the coffee themselves, as Sleep Awake is relentless at throwing things at you in its opening hour alone. Weird visuals, live action interludes, too many proper nouns, dense world-building, and seemingly every horrific image the studio can think of. Work your way through all that and the game glueing it all together is actually a lot more conservative than its surreal aesthetic lets on.

You play as Katja, who starts the game by brewing an eyedrop narcotic for herself and someone called Amma who lives miles away. Considering Amma and Katja live in a dystopian police state full of angry men who like hitting people with big sticks, they might want to consider becoming roommates instead of their current arrangement. You'll spend most of Sleep Awake's 3-4 hour runtime navigating this brutal city, which even Silent Hill's mayor would probably think needs a spring clean.

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The City That Never Sleeps

You'll find destitute apartments, a theater where immoral anti-sleep experiments were conducted, and totalitarian posters plastered on every crumbling wall. The only problem with Sleep Awake's atmospheric horror sets is that I've seen a lot of this stuff done already. But visual novelty does occur in frequent hallucinations, as Katja's tiredness inevitably catches up with her. Filing cabinets start dancing out of the walls, as if the walls are breathing. Or, far more worryingly, a turnstile gate suddenly fills with spinning knives.

Creepy, sure, but rarely threatening enough to instill actual fear (unless you're stupid enough to try using a stabby turnstile gate). Sleep Awake's most imaginative imagery is annoyingly deployed when you're at your safest. Montages of live-action people screaming and eyeballs way-up-close are somewhat unsettling, sure. But since all you're doing is watching in these moments, you're not under any threat. It takes ages before something you have to worry about in gameplay bothers to show up.

When they do, they're the aforementioned angry men with big sticks. Oh, and they're also wearing gas masks, which I believe qualifies them for horror cliche 974. You have to stealth past them by crouching to get under gaps and through vent grilles on the walls.

Sure, tense at times, but it's far from mechanically original. Last year's outstanding Still Wakes the Deep had similar sneaking, but there you were up against an enemy that was genuinely visually unique (not to mention bloody horrifying) which helped tired stealth feel fresh. Too much of Sleep Awake lacks such novelty, feeling more nap-worthy as a result.

Snooze button

Maybe I'd have found my attention wavering less if the story was more engrossing. Katja has tragically lost her father and her brother, so I get why she's not exactly a bucket of laughs, but she still has more of a pottymouth than a personality. I'm pretty lousy company when I haven't slept too, but everyone talks about events so stoically and in proper-noun-heavy technobabble that they feel more like exposition machines than characters.

You do occasionally stumble across memories of unfortunate people who've fallen to an ill-advised snooze, but I find these little crumbs of sidestory too abstract and distant to move me. Perhaps the game's fiction makes perfect sense if you take the time to read every file and book you find. Well, good luck. I've been spoiled by the outstanding documents you'll find in Silent Hill f, because the ones I picked up in Sleep Awake just felt too dry and overlong – flavor text missing enough crucial flavor.

But it's not quite a bleary-eyed disaster. Sleep Awake gets stronger in its second half, when the surreal imagery and routine stealth stop living in separate silos. One late-game enemy, with a clever don't-look-at-it mechanic and wonderfully nasty sound design suddenly jolted me awake. But where the hell were these nightmares earlier? And why are they such a brief part of the game?

Another late-game monster, while not quite as successful, still innovates in ways that the gas mask chaps who make up the bulk of the stealth don't. I left Sleep Awake on something of a high, then, but also with a sense of frustration for what could have been. Sleep Awake is a far too sporadically scary game from a studio who clearly have massive horror potential. I just wish I hadn't felt like I was sleepwalking through most of it.

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