So, played and beat Among the Sleep yesterday, here's some of those impressions of mine.
Among the Sleep is a first-person horror game where you play as a Toddler. The game is a bit more of an experience game, or if you will, a 'Crawling Simulator', though there are a few physics-based puzzles, and a few occasional sections where you get stalked by a monster.
It's your second birthday, and your mom has given you a teddy bear for this special occasion. However, when left on your own in your playpen, the bear begins to move and talk on its own devices. Soon it tells you it wants to show you something, but you need to be in the dark...
As a toddler, you can crawl, walk, and run a bit (though running for a while will make you trip). Crawling is faster than walking, and you can fit under tight spaces, but walking let's you seem more and interact with higher-things. There are a variety of objects to interact with and pick-up in your environment, and the physics of objects are all pretty well handled. You can also climb up onto objects that are waist-high for you.
With these mechanics, you are let off to explore and interact with things to progress. The first half of the game is more of a straight-up 'Crawling Simulator' type of game, as while there are some small puzzles and some good atmosphere, nothing really comes to hunt you... That is, until the second half of the game.
Sound design is top-notch. The music is appropriately odd and somewhat mystical, but what really needs to be mentioned is environment sounds. As a 2-year old, the world is still a foreign and strange place, and sounds we as adults find familiar take on strange properties through the imagination of a child. The sound design is legitimately unnerving and creepy, and is honestly one of the first horror games in a long while that I've been this impressed with how it handled its sound design. It leans perfectly on the thin line between the familiar and the strange and terrifying.
Graphics and art direction also deserve mention. The game looks good, with a sort of unique creepy cartoony-fantasy look that really fits the tone of the game. The art direction is also extremely well handled, especially in the later locations, and contain a lot of imagination and visual imagery that is easy to stick with you. The game gets more surreal as it goes on, and gets more twisted, and the imaginative art direction makes quite a few visual splendors to behold.
Scariness is subjective, but while the game could of maybe been scarier with a few more tricks, I would say it did manage to unnerve me, surprise me, and tense me up on a few occasions. The sound design made me not want to continue every now and again, and the few encounters with monsters were appropriately tense and scary.
But the monster encounters are very few, which is both in my eyes a good thing and a bad thing. On one hand, the two different monsters the game has never became overly familiar due to how infrequent they were, and both managed to really tense things-up whenever they did appear, and provided interesting challenges and context to situations. But on the other hand, there were many sections, especially in the middle part of the game, where I felt a little too safe.
The game maybe could of dared to be a little scarier and explore a few of the possibilities it raises with it's fantastic atmosphere and a few implied danger scenarios that don't actually lead into anything, but arguably its infrequent quality is what helps the game stay tense.
The story was interesting, while not entirely too surprising, I would say that it was handled rather well. Some nice use of symbolism throughout.
But it's one flaw is that it's rather short, being about 2-4 hours long. Those two to four hours are rather well-done, but it did leave me wanting more at it's conclusion, and some may not want to pay $20 for a 2-4 hour experience.
But Among the Sleep is a good little horror game that will likely stick with you some after completing it. It doesn't rely overly on jump scares, and unnerves with atmosphere, fantastic sound design, strange moments, and a few infrequent monster encounters. It's short and sweet, and will likely be appreciated by fans of 'Walking Simulator Experience' type of games with a little more gameplay, and horror fan who especially appreciate atmosphere.