Mother is always God in the eyes of a child.
Krillbite Studios, a Norwegian based company, had an idea: to take the survival-horror genre and give it a new twist. And twist it they did. Among the Sleep, an indie game for PC and Mac, was crafted out of their own thoughts and our own nightmares. A first-person horror game, Among the Sleep arms you with a talking teddy bear and puts you in the onesie booties of a two year old child. You will move, interact and see everything from a toddler’s perspective, running from the monsters and looking for your mommy.
After gaining successful funding from the Norwegian government though, Krillbite Studios found that it still wasn’t enough to help them finish the game. So they went to Kickstarter in Spring of 2013 with their idea, and within 24 hours of their campaign launching, they were already a quarter of a way to their $200,000 goal. They had goals, and plans, and even wanted to create the game with Oculus Rift support. And, slowly but surely, they reached their goal. Finally, and have successfully launched the final product.
Among the Sleep had quite a few alpha stages that were playable by a lucky few. We took a look at it early on, and were thoroughly impressed by the detail and the that the game successfully managed to make you feel as though you were walking around as a two year old child. But now that the game is complete and out for the fans on Steam, does the finished game live up to its early promise?
The short answer is yes. Among the Sleep manages to be gripping from start to finish, with some wonderful environmental design and imaginative puzzles.
That isn’t to say that Among the Sleep doesn’t have it’s flaws; but Krillbite Studios has performed a fantastic job at putting a diverse and intricate story in to 3 – 4 hours of gameplay, something that other games
take 50-60 hours to do. It all starts simply enough. You’re in a playpen in your bedroom, and to teach you the controls of the game, you need to do what every other two year old child on earth does – find a way to climb out. Once you’ve found your way on top of some toys and over the wall of the playpen, you land on a pillow that’s on the other side and you’re free to wander your room, giving you a chance to get a bearing on how the controls work. You can walk, crawl, and run – though if you run for too long, you will fall on all fours and start crawling. A few minutes into searching through the bedroom, though, and you find your best friend.
Your trusted teddy bear is your best friend throughout all of Among the Sleep. He seems to have a life of his own, acting as an imaginary friend in a way. Upon finding him, he teaches you how to use the menu in a clever game of hide and seek – making you cover your eyes while he hides one of your toys. The two of you then go through your room, looking at certain toys that your teddy, who you learn was a present you received for your birthday that same day, is curious about. Following the commands of teddy, he takes you into the closet, which upon the closing of the doors becomes a large maze of hanging jackets and creepy boxes. Who would have thought that teddy was also your light source for when you got scared? Taking your trust friend off of your back and hugging him to you causes him to create a light around you, illuminating your path. But the fun stops abruptly when Mommy finds you, and tells you that it’s time for bed. Don’t try to whine, like we did, that it’s still daytime either; she doesn’t listen.
While you sleep, your teddy is taken and your crib is dragged across the room by some unseen force and toppled over. And thus you begin your adventure through the worlds and acts of Among the Sleep. Teddy wants to help you find your mommy, and that’s just what you set out to do - solving puzzles and hiding from the shadowy creatures that every two year old would be afraid of.
The storyline seems simple enough and pretty straightforward, or so it wants you to believe. We made a few jokes among ourselves while we were playing about certain things we found in drawers and cabinets, and some of the numerous drawings that our little two year old drew at one point or another that were just laying around, but we weren’t expecting the story to take such a dark turn at the end. We won’t say anything more about it than that, but you will want to learn what’s going on in this child’s world, and the ending realization is more realistic than anything that we were prepared for. Krillbite Studios took our breath away with something that seemed like a normal, surival-horror game and really left us thinking at the end. All in all, Among the Sleep has a strong, solid storyline. The voice acting is acceptable, if never quite mind-blowing, but it doesn’t take away from the ingenuity of the game itself.
The controls in Among the Sleep are smooth and easy to use. You can move stools and chairs to climb on so that you can reach door handles, for example. Drawers can be pulled out so that you can climb up to higher places such as tables and counters, and all of this plays a large part in the advancement of the story and the solving of the puzzles that have been strategically placed throughout the game. You can also grab items such as balls and building blocks, and throw them a reasonable distance to knock things off of shelves – seriously, this kid needs to look into becoming a pitcher when he gets older. Crawling is significantly faster than the alternative methods of movement, and also allows you to get under tables and bookshelves - both good places to hide when you feel like you’re being pursued. You need to use every ability you have through the levels to run from the shadow monsters and collect the four memories you need to put in your playhouse to find your Mommy.
The puzzles aren’t too bad, either. In our preview of the game, we expressed our concern that the game might run out of ideas early on; thankfully though, that isn’t the case. Too often do we find ourselves getting tired of repeated puzzles or annoyed with their structure, but we found ourselves really feeling like a two year old child while we searched for three jigsaw pieces to complete a puzzle. The puzzles in Among the Sleep are simple but fun to solve, all of them involving finding the right pieces to complete things like a nest of toy owls, or one of those infamous toys where you have to put the right shape in to the matching hole. The fun comes with getting the pieces, and not getting caught by the terrors that are stalking around trying to grab you.
There are four levels in all, each one a different setting – like the creepy park with ambient sounds of children playing and crying. Each has its own terror that you’re trying to escape from, and Krillbite Studios has managed to inject a lot of suspense into the experience. We were quite terrified by the one in the last area, who was alerted by any sounds that you made. The level proved difficult, what with all the stacked boxes with bottles everywhere. But there were always ample amounts of small places to hide if needed. Similar to other games in the genre, we found that if we didn’t look at the monsters, our poor little toddler wouldn’t get too scared - and our screens wouldn’t become fuzzy and disrupted.
The sound work in Among the Sleep is simple. There isn’t much in the way of music, but the effects and the ambiance that is heard through the game helps immensely towards ensuring that the setting and your environments feel cohesive and believable, even when they take a turn for the surreal. At times you will hear Mommy humming the song from your favorite music box, signaling that you’re getting closer to a memory. The shades have distinct sounds as well, helping to aid you on if one may be lurking around the corner or if they have spotted you. But the sound goes deeper than that, allowing players to hear everything from dripping or running water to floorboards creaking as if someone is walking around them. The only real music within Among the Sleep is the tension music, which is perfectly placed to play only when you know you are already in trouble.
The graphics meanwhile are well-done for the most part, though Mommy looks a little out of place, as though she has been rescued from the cutting room floor of a Pixar movie. But the environments are well-rendered and full of minor details which help to make it feel as though you are inhabiting an authentic, believable world.
But as we stated earlier, Among the Sleep isn’t without flaws, and there’s one in particular that we just couldn’t get over. Though the game runs smoothly and quite beautifully for the majority of the game, the last level feels, dare we say it, rushed. There was one area that we walked into where there was supposed to be a long drawer that extended over a very large gap, a crate blocking it from reaching an opening that it needed to go through so that we could advance. But when we got there, the drawer was off center and the crate was glitching terribly, meaning we couldn’t move it, and the drawer refused to move into its opening. It took us reloading the game to the last checkpoint before the issue fixed itself, but we took the time to play with the glitch, and found it pretty comical that when baby stood on the drawer, the bug made him jump as high as a building.
Other glitches are scattered throughout the game. There were areas where if we came close enough to a wall or the back of a bookshelf, we could see through it to the other side and use it to our advantage - making sure nothing was over there waiting to jump out at us. Another part in the last level we found was when we were supposed to climb onto a box. We stood there from every angle hitting the button to climb on to it, but our poor little baby just wouldn’t go. But when the control was handed off out of frustration, another press of that same button next to the same box resulted in that baby climbing up on to the box flawlessly. But aside from the minor graphical glitches and one or two controller glitches, the game runs smoothly, even on the highest visual settings and modest hardware - and it’s possible that many of the glitches we encountered will be fixed via a patch or two in the coming weeks.
Despite these issues though, Among the Sleep, is quite the pleasurable experience. With a few jumpscares, a few places where our adrenaline rushed, and a dark and surreal storyline, it is definitely a game that should be getting a longer look this summer. It’s short game, easily completed in one sitting, but the experience is enjoyable while it lasts. Krillbite’s debut is a wonderfully imaginative and eerie title with plenty of surprises, and it comes highly recommended.
Heather Williams
@Olaris_Rhea
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