Among The Sleep

[Adm-™]

 

A concept like Among The Sleep's is immediately terrifying on a basic human level: It’s the middle of the night, your mother has been abducted, and you're a defenseless infant. Fortunately, you’re a precocious little tyke, able to escape from your nursery and set off on a quest to find her. Among The Sleep is a distinctive experience, and while it doesn’t fully explore how playing as a child really changes the way you interact with the world, it more than succeeds in creating a wonderfully eerie atmosphere full of childlike anxiety, and along the way tackles a serious subject in a darkly poignant manner. The journey ahead winds through an increasingly surreal and sinister environments, which is actually a big part of what Among The Sleep is trying to achieve. Wardrobes become never-ending labyrinths in which to hide; playgrounds stretch into vast wildernesses with a gnarled playground. At first I thought it was just a night terror, but it’s really a psychological landscape. It mani[CENSORED]tes perspective in clever ways and transforms everyday locations into hellish mindscapes that, in some way, reflect the terrible events that once took place there. It’s part psychological horror, but more interestingly it’s also part therapy – a walking cure, of sorts. You’re only two years old and haven’t yet mastered language (in fact, one of Among the Sleep’s nice touches is that all in-game text is written in an alien script). You’re ill-equipped to cope with what’s going on around you.

 

 

I read the entire game as a way of working through past trauma, mastering the world and working back to the source of this pain. It’s a great idea, with more introspection than your typical first-person horror adventure, though the environments lack sufficient detail to make them deeply impactful. Despite being set amid chaotic architecture and disorientating landscapes, the underlying structure is fairly simple and straightforward. In order to be reunited with your mother, you must retrieve four precious memories of her; they have been scattered across weird environments, including a dark cabin beside a murky lake and a violently distorted version of your own home. The puzzle solving also remains simple throughout – retrieving objects, finding keys, pressing switches – yet I still found it sufficiently engaging due to its unique perspective. As a toddler, the world towers above you and slowly transforms: doors become obstacles, people shift into giants, and a chest of drawers turns into a makeshift staircases simply by pulling out the drawers. It never really progresses beyond this, but its short playtime – around three hours – stops just short of it becoming tedious. So many recent horror games have instilled fear by making you feel helpless – Amnesia, Outlast, Daylight – either stripping away your powers or denying you the ability to fight back entirely. Among The Sleep takes a similar approach, but the mechanics it establishes early on are never fully explored. You can hide in small spaces, sneak under tables and beds, and crawl much faster than you can walk or run (though this, of course, takes away the ability to use your hands).

 

 

There’s definitely potential there, but Among The Sleep lacks the variety or imagination to really use them effectively. In the end, their main contribution is to provide a novel perspective on a familiar type of experience.