Sleep Awake Preview: Snooze you lose

It was only last year that production company Blumhouse, known for its focus on horror projects, announced its intention to break into the video game sector with a dedicated publishing arm. In the summer of 2024, Blumhouse Games was born and soon led to the arrival of Fear the Spotlight, a game that will be followed up by two further projects from different development studios.

One is Crisol: Theatre of Idols from Vermila Studios and the other is Sleep Awake from Eyes Out, and speaking about the latter, I recently had the chance to get a taste of the action in a demo session alongside the development team.

For those who are unaware about Sleep Awake, this is a psychological horror game where you take on the role of Katja, a woman who is tasked with surviving in the last city on Earth. As you'd expect of something with such finality attached to its premise, this last city is far from the place you'd fancy taking a vacation, as it's dark, dirty, run-down, and filled with hazards and dangers, both environmental and human. If this wasn't bad enough, citizens are steadily disappearing in their sleep. Yep, folk are inexplicably going missing and seemingly the only way to avoid this grim fate is to remain awake, a challenge that sends citizens into a psychedelic spiral.

So Katja lives a life of torment and torture in a place indistinguishable from hell. And to make matters worse, Katja has to somehow find a way to unravel the past and create a future worth staying awake for, a task that means venturing into hostile territory held by death cults or worse...

Building on this, the preview level that I had the chance to experience encapsulated the fourth chapter of the game. We find Katja trapped in a tall building that serves as a base for a death cult and the aim is to move down the various floors and eventually escape, all so that Katja can steadily make her way back to the comfort of her own home. This might sound like a massive endeavour but in practice it's rather straightforward. Sleep Awake has relatively basic mechanics to understand and master, somewhat in line with Little Nightmares and how you have to avoid threats by simply hiding in the shadows and keeping out of the gaze of dangers. You waddle around open levels, using the stealth mechanics to hide under tables and crawl through air vents, using darkness as your greatest ally. You have to learn enemy movement patterns, pay attention to the level design, and quickly move between shadows and hiding spaces as you methodically progress forwards.

And for the most part, this seems to be the majority of what Sleep Awake is asking of the player. There's no throwing objects to distract enemies or other immersive sim-like systems to have to master. It's all about sneaking, like Snake would if he lacked gadgets to help him along his way.

It should be said that Eyes Open does have some other tricks up its sleeve to evolve the gameplay, typically coming in the form of environmental puzzles. You might have to figure out how to navigate a level to turn off a power switch or pay attention to the surroundings to understand how to input a colour code to find a door that otherwise is not visible. The developer plays with psychedelic ideas in the puzzles at times and it works typically to the game's benefit, as does the resurrection system where, in a manner somewhat similar to Death Stranding, when you die you don't just return to a checkpoint but walk through an afterlife system to return to the moment before you were slain. This is useful in areas with enemies, but perhaps more so when the developers use a few naughty tricks to catch you off guard, perhaps by dropping an elevator on you during a puzzle... You live and you learn, as they say.

Matching these ideas up with a dark and unsettling atmosphere, a plot that has creepy supernatural elements, and psychedelic FMV sequences that add immersive depth, it does seem as though Eyes Open has an interesting creative vision on its hands with Sleep Awake. Time will tell if the rather fundamentally basic gameplay style is enough to support a full length story, but from the early taste I experienced, if the full project can hit somewhere between five and ten hours in duration, it should be long and short enough to remain freaky and interesting enough for fans to want to see how the story comes to a close.

As for when Sleep Awake will make its arrival, we are still awaiting a firm release date for the title.