Sleepless Review (PC)

Sleepless tells it how it is, without the jargon, and more importantly, without the useless filler that, quite frankly, brings little to no value to the table itself. If it does anything at all, it highlights the fact that horrors don’t always need a fascinating hook or a tantalizingly complex plot to be compelling poster children for the genre. No, Sleepless makes a conscious decision to build its walls with a rather simple elixir—a bread-and-butter extract that consists of primal gameplay elements, like scavenging, exploring, and engaging in frequent cat-and-mouse-like chases with prowling foes. It doesn’t do anything special, but it does relish in its simplicity as a by-the-numbers psychological thriller. And honestly, maybe that’s enough.

A collect-a-thon a heart, Sleepless centers its world around the simple act of foraging for evidence in a decrepit bunker—a trail that just so happens to take its inspiration from The Russian Sleep Experiment—and working to evade an ominous threat that looms in the darkness. Granted, it doesn’t spend all that long filling your head with details, much less laying the groundwork for an eventual trajectory of eye-opening events. Rather, Sleepless presents you with a simple objective: explore the depths of a bunker, and gather evidence to help shed light on past experiments and the true origin of its deepest, darkest secrets.

Suffice it to say that, conceptually, Sleepless more or less takes a similar route as Amnesia: The Bunker. As a much smaller game, however, it turns a blind eye to thought-provoking puzzles and bottomless lore, and chooses to retain the chase sequences and the nail-biting close encounters, the claustrophobic escapades and the all-round harrowing atmosphere that you would naturally expect to find in a B-list indie horror. Admittedly, it doesn’t get everything right, though it does make for a fitting extension for the independent horror scene.

Sleepless Nights

Say what you will about textbook collect-a-thons, but the fact is, a lack of storytelling and finesse doesn’t necessarily equate to a bad experience. In the case of Sleepless, such a simple concept works, mostly due to the fact that it centers its expedition in a liminal space where details aren’t required to create an atmosphere. It’s a little on the basic side of the spectrum, and it still leaves a fair amount to be desired. Nevertheless, Sleepless taps into a timeless and, above all, incredibly pulpy blueprint that has been trialed and illustrated by numerous award-winning horrors. And you know, in spite of all its shortcomings, it actually hits the nail on the head on most fronts.

Gameplay-wise, Sleepless isn’t in possession of anything we haven’t already seen a hundred times over. Like a lot of corridor-roaming horrors, it mostly consists of tiptoeing through a series of honeycomb-like tunnels, unearthing evidence to bring back to a mantle, and utilizing various gas chambers and pipes to manipulate a bunker and unlock new quarters. At the heart of all of this idles a blind foe—an antagonist who spends its time actively searching for you whilst you connect the dots and build your evidence.

Take Slender: The Eight Pages, for example. If you recall, the more pages you found in the woodland, the more aggressive the antagonist would become. Turns out, Sleepless follows a similar pattern, by which I mean the more evidence you gather, the more devoted the creature becomes to the prospect of finding you. Again, it’s a simple idea, but it’s also one that works, more so with a bunker for a setting, unsurprisingly.

Back to the Basics

Sadly, Sleepless isn’t made entirely of sunshine and rainbows. Regrettably, the game itself does contain a lot of technical flaws and teething issues. The co-op, for example, doesn’t work. And I don’t mean that it struggles to work, but that it flat out does not work — like, at all. It isn’t billed as a strict co-op game, and so certain things can be avoided. That said, its lack of finesse and fluidity do make for bad habits that sadly carry over to its base game, too. And that’s a crying shame, because frankly, Sleepless has some good bones that could make for a great indie thriller.

The world itself is rather bland, and it certainly lacks the intricate details of a well-rounded universe. Of course, it grasps a relatively solid atmosphere, and it brings a ton of unnerving surprises to the table, too. Having said that, Sleepless does fall short in several crucial areas, which, when combined, translate to an experience that’s often dull and tedious to romp through. Don’t get me wrong, it has some great ideas, but the general execution and all-round composition is a tough pill to swallow. And frankly, it’s twice as difficult to digest the technical aspects, too. That’s a whole other ball game that, sadly, could also do with some additional TLC.

Verdict

Sleepless dabbles in a similar stomping ground as the universally acclaimed Amnesia: The Bunker, with its fixation on seemingly vacant underground tunnels serving as a clear indicator for the game’s inspiration. Much like Amnesia, it utilizes a lot of the same basic stepping stones—elusive evidence, manipulative environments, and powerful enemies that have natural tendencies to sneak up on you when you least expect it. Yet, Sleepless manages to come into its own with a surprisingly strong gameplay experience that keeps you awake and alert for the long haul.

The bad news is that, while there are several good bones there to flesh out a potential sleeper hit, the game itself still has a lot of shoddy design flaws and incompetent fixtures—its co-op mode, being the nail in the coffin for an otherwise sturdy casket. With that, it seems that a bit of extra time in the oven would help this world from collapsing into a shutterbug mess, for as it stands, Sleepless harbors one too many problems to be considered a genuine fright fest. Small things, maybe — but issues nonetheless.

Although there are still several screws that could do with a little extra tightening before Sleepless emerges as a solid horror, I’d say that it’s still worth keeping on your radar, if not for its co-op prospects, then for the sheer fact that it harbors some decent features and quality scares beneath its downfalls. Here’s hoping that, with any luck, it’ll be something that’ll be worth sleeping in for in the coming months.