When I sat down to play Among the Sleep for my Power Hour review, I intended to just play through the first hour and write the blog post. Five hours later, it was midnight, and I had an early morning, so I had to stop. I had been excited about the game since I first read about it, but Among the Sleep turned out to be so much more terrifying and engaging than I was expecting. I went to sleep that night expecting to have nightmares about the game; instead, I dreamed about how excited I was that I would get to continue playing it the next day. (Although, I wouldn’t get to play it for too long because I was almost finished with the story.) Even though I did complete the game, I will attempt here to describe only the first hour without too many spoilers, but I feel I have to mention this game should come with a big trigger warning. If you don’t like games with heavy subject matter, maybe you should pass. It’s been almost a week since I finished this game, and I’m still very disturbed.
In Among the Sleep, you play as a two-year-old. You begin the game, on your birthday, in a sunny room with your mother. For your birthday, you are given a teddy bear, and the teddy bear talks. The teddy bear is creepy. He’s supposed to help you through the game, and when you get scared, you hug the teddy bear, which causes your flashlight to come on. I thought that was cute (sort of). You are two, and your teddy bear comforts you. Except the teddy bear is creepy. He seems helpful, but I sort of felt a weird, evil vibe coming off him. Then, you go to your room and play with the teddy bear, who explains the mechanics of the game to you. Later, you wake up in the middle of the night and things go downhill from there.
I initially had some problems with the controls on this game. It’s available on Steam for Mac or PC. Because my PC was upstairs and I was feeling lazy, I started playing on my Mac, but I could never get the controls to work correctly on my Mac. And, beyond the controls, the game glitched out completely in the first scene. So, I switched to PC and everything was mostly fine. I like to play with a controller rather than a keyboard, and on the PC the Xbox controller worked. It didn’t work well, but it worked. I noticed a strong lag when using the controller vs the mouse, but I got used to it pretty quickly.
The gameplay was fun, but the puzzles weren’t too difficult. There is no combat in this game, which makes sense because a two-year-old is unlikely to win in combat. And, in many situations, you have to think like a two-year-old. Or, at least, think about what limitations a two-year-old might bring to the particular challenge, and solve the puzzles with those challenges in mind. That stumped me a little at first, but once I got past that, none of the puzzles were very challenging. Instead, Among the Sleep is about narrative and psychological terror. The game doesn’t have a whole lot of actual narrative, but what little there is drove me to complete the game. I had to know what was happening.
If you like horror games (and can deal with disturbingly heavy content), I highly, highly recommend Among the Sleep. I was skeptical, at first, that playing as a two-year-old would have any affect, but it did. My only complaint (beyond the content, which I might write about after the game has been out a while) is, as the game progresses, some of the puzzles, while not challenging for me, would be way out of the range of what a two-year-old would be capable of. I realize that staying at the level of a two-year-old would make a boring game, but I felt, at times, I was unable to suspend disbelief to that extent, and it pulled me out of the story a bit. But, overall, I was terrified, and that’s what I love about horror games.
