Among The Sleep

Release: 2015
Platform: PC
Genre: Horror, first person

So I think it's fair to mention that I backed this game on Kickstarter. I'm not entirely sure how this would bias my review since I would have paid for the game whether I backed it on Kickstarter or purchased it on Steam, but it's important to be forthright. I'm also a little buzzed as of writing this review, so I apologize for grammar and all that.

To start off, Among The Sleep is a game where you play as a two year old that is currently experiencing a nightmare with only the comfort of his talking teddy bear. The game opens on your second birthday and your mom bakes you a cake and puts you to bed. This is naturally when the nightmare begins...

Game play: So, I played this with the controller and I can't say that I was overly fond of it. A large mechanic in the game is moving objects, which requires grabbing them and then shifting your moving in some manner to manipulate the object. As much as I appreciate the realism of this kind of game play mechanic, it was honestly kind of frustrating at times because the direction that you would need to move to manipulate the object in the desired direction was not always clear. When looking at some drawers straight on I would need to hold the control stick left in order to pull the drawer close to me which really felt weird. This actually stumped me in one portion of the early game because I though I had to do something else first to move the drawer and I spent a few minutes searching. I did play this game with a 360 controller though, so that may have had something to do with the confusion.

Sound: The sound design effects and everything in this game were excellent! There was a lot going on around you to kind of make you feel paranoid and scared like a child would likely feel during a bad dream. There were sounds all around you and when there were "enemies", they made sufficiently unsettling, high-pitched noises to perturb the player. The music throughout the rest of the game was very atmospheric when it was present which was very nice.

Visuals: I think that this was honestly my biggest disappointment with the game. In the first chapter after the tutorial you get to see some bit of reality distort into something creepy, albeit for only a second. This really piqued my interest and set my expectations probably higher than they should have been for what was to come. Not that the game looks bad by any means, but I think there was a lot of missed potential. The game did glitch out a bit when you are climbing up objects (another big game mechanic) so that your vision would travel through objects that would normally have collision. This just involved seeing into objects that are normally opaque, but I wasn't too pleased about it. It kind of ruined the immersion of the game. I was so drawn in by the visuals normally that this stuck out like a sore thumb. Also of note, there were some parts of the game that the sounds led me to believe that something important or threatening was happening, but I think I was looking in the wrong direction and was not able to see what suspenseful thing was happening. I hate it when games stop the character to look at a thing happening, so I'm not sure what to say about that.

Plot: Something I forgot in my previous review! I didn't really think there was going to be a plot to this game until the very end. After the creepy parts of the game have played out for the most part there is actually plot development. And it is damn good! It was a little spoon-fed, but overall I liked it a great deal. I don't think I'll forget about the plot of this game for a long while if at all. That being said, there isn't really any character development to speak of, but as the player grows to understand what has happened previously in the game world it successfully evokes emotion.

Overall I would say that I greatly enjoyed this game. I'm happy with how I summed it up in my steam review, "Short but sweet. It scratches the exact itch that the elevator pitch evokes without overstaying its welcome." This game normally retails for $20 (on sale for $8 at the time of writing) which I think may be a bit much for how long this game takes to beat. Steam says I spent ~2.5 hours which was enough to fully complete the game. I want to support the studio, because the game really is good! But I'd wait for a sale unless you make enough that the extra money doesn't matter.