14 DAY TRIAL // 
Among the Sleep presents an interesting premise, setting out to explore a horror adventure through the eyes of a toddler. The original setup and unusual way in which the scary story is handled make for a very interesting premise, especially since childhood trauma is such a hazy subject matter.
The game kicks off with you exploring a dark and creaky house, trying to find your mother, crawling through the hallways and dragging stools so that you can reach doorknobs and using chests of drawers as makeshift staircases in order to crawl your way through the mansion.
Things escalate pretty quickly, and you go down the rabbit hole to find yourself thrown in some eerie locations that have a distinctly creepy vibe. Then a flash of lightning offers a cursory look at your antagonist, a real monster, the kind that you always feared you would find in a dark wardrobe.
Your mother apparently gets kidnapped by Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, and you embark on a journey that transforms everyday environments into nightmarish landscapes that you tread in order to collect your memories of her and bring her back.
A cute talking bear that is not at all creepy joins your adventure, and you can even hug him for comfort when you get scared, but unfortunately it never amounts to anything more than a fuzzy lantern.
The scares are mostly superficial and the puzzles a little dull, but the overall result is better than the sum of its parts. It does have its good moments, but it ultimately ends up as shallow and disappointing, which is really unfortunate.
What is supposed to be the most tense section of the entire game becomes a disjointed crawling section where you have to dodge the monster’s patrol route for a bit, before crawling to safety without a hitch, making use of the ample choices for circumventing the horror.
This pretty much sums up the entire experience, which feels like it does not hold enough weight, like everything started as a good idea that failed to materialize in the actual game in a satisfying manner.
On the mechanical level, closing doors and turning cranks is not always as reliable as you’d like, and sometimes you have to struggle to convince the game it should let you climb an obstacle that you know you should be able to.
Although the vertical element of the navigation makes sense, as you have to employ various means to gain altitude, such as dragging chairs and boxes to key locations, it is never utilized to its fullest extent.
The environments don’t have much depth, they’re just backgrounds with useless props. The interactivity of the environment is very limited, and there are some elements that point out to the fact that the game might have been initially a much longer project, but had to be cut short.
One such example is finding keys that are irrelevant and feel tacked on, and having to backtrack once you find some clues in order to make the game seem longer. Speaking of length, the game has almost none, as it is disappointingly short.
It looks pretty good, everything is dimly lit and spooky, there’s a lot of fog, the surroundings give a very haunting vibe at times, but it’s not building up any kind of tension and it’s not capitalizing on its premise in a meaningful way, apart from a couple of mechanics that don’t have any impact on the game, such as covering your eyes when opening the menu or hugging your teddy bear.
It would have been nicer to be able to explore the skewed perspective on reality that a two-year old has and explore the internal conventions that the young mind attempts to force on reality, but in the end it all feels just a little lackluster.
The fact that you never know what’s going on mares the experience, detracting from the strange and frightening scenery, from the fantastic lands where colors melt into each other, where your home feels safe through the use of a palette of warm hues, but come nighttime everything changes and blacks and blues begin to dominate the landscape.
There is an eclectic mix of velvet chairs and glowing mushrooms, of foggy bog and derelict mansions, and the gameplay feels like going through a haunted house amusement ride, only with a much heavier general atmosphere.
The Good
- Unique perspective
- Disturbing atmosphere
- Imaginative
- Visually interesting
- Talking teddy bear
The Bad
- Short
- Shallow story
- Feels lackluster
- Has the potential for something much better but fails to get there
Conclusion
Unfortunately, the story ends up feeling a bit shallow, with not much of a conclusion except for the pretense of a clever plot device. The way it relies on subjective perspective to transform everyday locations into nightmarish environments is something more along the lines of a classic insane asylum trope, but the integration of some toddler-specific gameplay elements redeems it in quite some measure.
It is remarkable at least for the fact that although its monsters end up a bit underwhelming, it’s not entirely sold on them, and it delivers somewhat satisfactorily on its premise.
It would have been much nicer though to see it play on what the rational mind dismisses as pure fantasy when you’re an adult, the same things that used to keep you awake at night, a looming shade, a faintly audible noise that stirred your imagination and created horrors where there were none, in a much more meaningful manner.
