Sleep Awake Review – Gary Numan stars in a very graphic horror film about sleep deprivation | games

VIdeological Games provided a feast of unique and wondrous spectacles in 2025: environmental fantasies teeming with magical beasts; Amazing, historically obsessive recreation of feudal Japan. But here’s an end-of-year surprise: psychological horror game Sleep Awake serves us synth-rock pioneer Gary Numan as he steps into what may be the most bizarre role of his life — a giant floating head named Hypnos.

This late appearance isn’t exactly indicative of the game as a whole; The few hours before Naaman’s arrival were more sad than crazy. Mostly, you explore the dilapidated and dilapidated streets of what is believed to be the last city on Earth. This setting is a wonderful work of imagination. You see it through the eyes of a young woman named Katia, moving along the rooftops, peering into a barren, lifeless hinterland, down labyrinthine streets whose darkness and ambiguous logic recall the evocative subterranean engravings of the Italian artist Piranesi.

How did the planet become so inhospitable, and life completely wiped out? This never becomes clear. Instead, Katya must wrestle with a more pressing worry: if she sleeps, our hero risks disappearing into a strange, inaccessible world due to a disease referred to as silence. Like everyone else who’s always exhausted here, Katja puts a few drops of the stay-awake serum in her eyes. Suddenly, she saw psychedelic visions and kaleidoscopic refractions of space. Katya seems to be losing the plot. Everyone certainly has. What remained of society has collapsed into the paranoia and sleep deprivation of rival gangs.

Initially driven by a desire to care for an elderly relative, you guide Katja in first-person perspective through the game’s many decaying spaces. At one point, you’re on the floor of a gas-masked cult, so you try to sneak past them, crouching against walls and under tables to avoid detection. However, there is hardly any tension: enemies follow routine patrol routes; Their field of vision is unreasonably generous. This is a boring and easy game of hide and seek.

Sleep Awake reveals a further lack of gaming imagination. You are invited to short-circuit circuit breakers by rolling carts into them; You have to open the doors by finding clearly placed key cards. Slowly, the city’s luster also begins to fade: it becomes clear that you’re progressing along a stately, art-guided tunnel – in fact, just a slightly interactive and not particularly scary fairground ghost train.

This is a shame because Sleep Awake is visually bold. Exploratory action is intercut with bleak and beautiful FMV sequences: the eerie silhouettes of trees against a blood-red sky; Bubbling liquids are shown in extreme close-up. Sometimes these disturbing images are superimposed on actual 3D space for a weird and wonderful artistic effect. This surrealism extends to the death screen: if you get hit on the head by one of your stupid enemies, you must emerge from the darkness into a stunning light-filled door; As you do this, the space changes in real-time hallucinations, knocking you out on your last autosave.

Screen of Death is a rare moment in which Sleep Awake invokes something between dream logic and the strangely blurry moments between sleep states that can appear to be dreaming. The rest of the time, this psychedelic nightmare merely wears its psychedelic aesthetics — including a floating Nauman — without interactively interrogating them. It’s very clear, very readable, and actually not inconsequential enough when it matters. You might want to sleep on this.