Among the Sleep Review

On your very own birthsday you, a toddler, is celebrating with your mother. Two years old now, the celebration is interrupted by a visitor. We can hardly hear whom it is, but we hear our mother yelling, telling the person he cannot see his child. When mother returns, she brings a gift but is not saying who it is from. We are then carried to our bedroom where mother checks what is in the gift, clearly unimpressed. She closes the gift, and heads toward the ringing phone. Then, a teddybear crawls out of the gift package, introducing himself as Teddy. Proceeding, is Teddy and the toddler playing together with various toys within his bedroom. In the end we venture into the darkness of the closet, feeling something is amiss until mother opens the closet and pulls us out, in time for sleep.

In the middle of the night we wake up to find Teddy taken away from us by someone. We head out of our crib in search for him only to find him inside the washing machine. Teddy thinks something is not quite right, and that we should find mother. Here we encounter our first monster, Harald. A black silhouette, Harald is a representation of his mother when she goes out at night in order to buy beer. We escape Harald, and end up going through multiple strange environments – an underground playground, a beat-down mansion/marsh forest mixup and weird corridors made of a large number of closets.

Teddy instructs us to find four memories he has of his mother in order to find her. These memories exists as objects – a pendant, a music box, a story book and a pink elephant.  Whilst collecting said memories we are haunted by a troll looking monster called the Hydra and a monster with big glowing eyes called Heap, who has a coat for his body. When we finally find the last memory we head back to our ‘real world’, but Heap grabs on to Teddy before completing the last memory. Hanging on to dear life on Teddy’s arm, hanging over a great nothingness, the arm is ripped and we fall down into the darkness, a place lit by some floodlights.

We follow the sound of our mother, only to find her drinking from a bottle whilst transforming into different monsters before she disappears. We finally find our way back, and uses the last memory together with Teddy’s arm to open the portal back home, coming out through the closet. Going downstairs, we find our mother sobbing in the kitchen with the rest of Teddy in one hand and an empty wine bottle in the other. We try to get Teddy back, only to be met with mother yelling at us to leave her alone whilst pushing us to the ground. She immediatly apologizes to us. There is a knock on the door, which mother does not answer, crying instead. We go to the door instead, opening it to see a glowing white light. We hear our father speaking, telling us that he can fix Teddy’s arm, ending the game.

Whilst the game on the surface seems like your standard horror-game where the player has to run and hide from the monsters, the story is quite deeper. What you get is a story of childhood neglect, abuse and trauma. The toddler of the story endures her mother’s alcohol abuse, turning her into a monster, of which the toddler experiences as the different monsters of whom we are hiding and running from. It is a sad tale, really, but with a happy ending with the father coming to claim custody of the child.

The game plays like most typical horror games of where you have no power to fight back. You hide from the monsters, you stealth through the shadows to evade and avoid them meanwhile collecting objects to progress the story (or collectibles, here in the form of drawings). It is not groundbreaking, but it works. The atmosphere of the game is great, chiming in with it’s harrowing musical score adding to the creepiness. The graphics are fine, although the mother looks kind of weird. The monsters, however, are creepy – and distorted, adding to the theme of them being embodiments of the mother’s bad habits. Summarizing, the game is an interesting play – a story you see very little of in todays world of video games, that of childhood neglect and abuse. It’s a haunting theme, and a sad one, but makes for a change of pace inbetween all the other horror titles that exists. Definatly worth a play, if you are a fan of horror, and want to experience something a bit different.