When it came out over 10 years ago, Spec Ops: The Line was one of those games that got people talking, inspiring essays, books, research papers, and more, thanks to a storytelling approach that subverted the jingoistic tropes found in most military shooters. And now, that game’s director, Cory Davis, is co-directing a new project, a psychological horror experience called Sleep Awake. It’s being developed by Eyes Out, a studio Davis co-founded with Nine Inch Nails guitarist (and video game composer) Robin Finck, and published by Blumhouse’s nascent gaming brand.
And at least based on the demo that recently launched on Steam, it lives up to the promise of that artistic collaboration, delivering an assault on the senses that jolts us between sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations and the unpleasant details of a post-apocalyptic world. While the game is a bit lacking when it comes to the act of actually playing it, so far, it has strong imagery and some degree of vision.
As for what it is, put simply, this is a first-person narrative-focused experience that calls to mind games like Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch—what I mean by this is that the gameplay mostly consists of walking. You play as Katja, a young woman looking for her loved ones in a world where sleep means death: if you lose consciousness, there’s a chance you’ll blink out of existence and never come back. This mysterious affliction, called The Hush, has completely destroyed human society, resulting in a pandemic of self-induced insomnia as cults with varying interpretations and solutions to this problem vie for power.
The premise taps into sleep-related fears, and anyone who has struggled with insomnia or any number of sleep-related conditions will likely relate to the stop-and-start pull of tiredness as Kat fights back severe exhaustion to concoct the elixir she needs to stay up. The process of finding what she needs to brew this potion is mostly an excuse to get the player to explore Kat’s apartment, a messy collection of cables, grow operations, and haphazard messages carved into walls that capture the lived-in qualities of this space. Inscriptions like “NO SLEEP” are found in every room, and while at first it comes across as an overly on-the-nose bit of environmental storytelling in that Dead Space-ish “Cut Off Their Limbs” sort of way, the specific details of these surroundings help ground the story’s psychodrama framing.
Another interesting element is that while Kat is living in a hell nightmare world where everyone is suffering from some degree of sleep deprivation-induced psychosis, her narration and the specifics of her home help these elements avoid beating you over the head with how “messed up” she is. For starters, like her family, she’s more or less a scientist, and while her handwritten notes hint at her severe lack of rest, there’s the clear mark of scientific rigor in her diagrams and jottings. In the opening, we get narration of her dad describing how he’s looking for a medical cure to this whole situation, with this family’s more rational view of the world contrasting against the various cult-factions you discover when you’re eventually forced to leave the safety of your home.
However, more than just more or less copying Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch’s schtick of having you work through a dense home with lots of history, the most unique aspect of the experience is the nightmare imagery that kicks in as Kat begins to drift off. Here, there’s a sudden cut to live-action footage of a writhing, wet eyeball and paranoid, out-of-focus faces against a flush of red, this jarring montage coming across like someone spliced it in from an Ingmar Bergman film.
Once at least partially submerged in dreams, we get truly hallucinatory sights, not just delivering strange surrealist images, like a boat in a sea of dunes, but also bending, refracting, and overlapping them with double exposure and optical illusions. Some of the most fascinating things that the game is doing are around its editing, with it cutting between in-game graphics and sudden bursts of FMV, as one scene bleeds into the next.
It’s trippy (and the game does reference psychedelics quite a bit), but less in the standard kaleidoscopic, neon tie-die sort of way, and more like an uncomfortable mixture of raw human, tactile details, and nonsense dream logic. In these moments, it starts to resemble a different “walking game”-style experience: an art exhibition. Specifically, it calls to mind Radiohead’s interactive album, the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, which feels fitting since both projects were created under the guidance of famous musicians, and mix audioscapes with odd sights to provoke a reaction.
However, while these segments had me quite interested to see more of these daydreams, I was a little less enthused when I was forced to explore the rusted remains of human society in the back half of the demo. Frankly, this is where some of the game’s limitations began to creep up, and between the “puzzles,” if you can call them that, and a very uninteresting attempt at stealth, this stretch was a lot weaker because it tried to be a more traditional game in some sense and largely failed at it. Even something like What Remains of Edith Finch’s limited, but novel gameplay bits would have been much more interesting than what’s here, which largely lacks the eye-popping visuals that make this game stand out.
Still, even though there’s not much going on with Sleep Awake mechanically, it brings enough to the table in terms of its audiovisual oddities to make me quite interested in how the full experience turns out: there just aren’t very many games that will deliver a disturbing scene of a Tetsuo: The Iron Man-looking self-flagellator before switching to unhinged live-action footage of someone running panicked through a desert as if they’re being chased by something horrible just out of sight. Only time will tell if this all shrinks into the equivalent of a first-year film student’s weirdo art project or something truly memorable, but thankfully, what I’ve seen leans further towards the latter.
Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.
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