Speaking as a veteran insomniac who routinely has to operate across time zones, let me share a few of my top tips for staying awake when you really want to sleep. Firstly, fill your eyes with as much light as possible – moonlight, fridgelight, phonelight, flamingoilbarrelight – and your lungs with as much bracing external air as they can take. Secondly, enlist a similarly restless friend for some mutual tickling. Thirdly, remember your failures. All of them. Fourthly, consume a carefully calibrated mixture of fresh fruit and coffee, then look up dad jokes on Reddit.
It doesn’t feel like any of these proven strategies will work in Sleep Awake, the new first-person “psychedelic” horror game from former Spec Ops: The Line director and designer Cory Davis and his team at Eyes Out. Nobody wants to tickle you here, going by the trailer. Nobody has any dad jokes to share. They just want to beat you to a bloody sludge with pipes.
Sleep Awake takes place in a city called the Crush, the last known city on Earth. Humanity faces extinction thanks to a mysterious force that disappears people when they fall asleep. Such civilisation as remains consists largely of addled cultists, would-be messiahs and assorted lairy randos, all battling desperately to keep their eyes open.
The game’s levels are strewn with various means of prolonging wakefulness, from that old classic the bed of nails, to dubious brain-modifying technology that resembles the Pilot’s throne in Alien. You will creep around, corner to corner, solving puzzles and straying into a parallel dimensions that may or may not be hallucinations. There’s music from Robin Finck of Nine Inch Nails. They’re pretty loud, aren’t they? Good choice of rock pedigree for this setup. Imagine if they’d hired Simon & Garfunkel. There’d be no humans left after 30 minutes.
Sleep Awake now has a release date – December 2nd. Perfect. A decent remove from the Xmas hols, but still close enough to cast a shadow over Santa’s strained, unblinking face. You can find a demo on Steam. Or you can read Oisin’s slightly mixed impressions of that demo.
