Among the Sleep (2014)
I backed this on Kickstarter back when it was announced and pretty much completely forgot about it during its development over the last year. So imagine my surprise when I got my download key yesterday, and then my surprise when I finished the game an hour later.
Yeah... it's one of those games.
For the uninitiated, since 2012 Kickstarter has been a bastion of creativity and large promises from industry legends like Tim Schaffer, Brian Fargo, and Keiji Inafune to raise money to help them build the kind of games they want, without the corporate interference saying they need to make it an FPS with multiplayer and kill streaks and it will outsell the latest
Call of Duty game. And you know what, I'm perfectly okay with that, I would much rather spend my money on ambition rather than phoning it in, and that often seems to be the case with many big budget games these days.
Aaaanyways,
Among The Sleep is the phoned in version of an indie game, specifically
Amnesia: The Dark Descent, an amazing survival-horror game from 2010 that
Among the Sleep tries to very hard to emulate. Both games follow a similar formula, wander around level to find puzzle item, use item on puzzle, then monsters show up and chase you to the next location. It was blindingly obvious in
Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but the game was also pants-sh
itingly terrifying that you really didn't notice.
Among The Sleep follows the same formula, and manages to elicit some fear, but the fear is ultimately crippled by the game's token unique aspect, the fact that you play as 2-year old toddler.
Now obviously I don't advocate violence against children, but when your monster doesn't bother to show up till halfway through the game, and by that point if they catch you the game just goes black, there's really nothing to be afraid of other than having to redo the same fu
cking section over-and-over because the stupid
Amnesia style physics puzzles are back! It also doesn't help that the big twist is alluded to so heavily throughout the game that it just felt insulting when they came out at the end and said "well I bet you didn't see
that one coming!". Often times when people complain about games being pretentious it's because the game dared to offer a thought beyond "kill everything that isn't you", but this game really is the truest definition of the word.
And yet, despite all that it was still a pleasant experience, albeit one I wasn't expecting nor one I particularly feel like doing again. That's kind of the joy with Kickstarter though, you're putting your money on the line for someone's dream because you think you may share it, but it turns out they have a different vision than you. Sometimes that can be okay, and sometimes it stings. I don't let disappointments like this get me down off the Kickstarter bandwagon, and I hope this game does well enough for the developer to make something else because they obviously have talent and creative vision behind them.