Can you imagine how outlandish the world must feel to a toddler? The volume of information new human beings must absorb and cope with – not to mention the natural progression of brain development and basic motor functions – seems like a staggering effort. Everything is magic, and each day must feel like a contest to make sense out of each mystery.
What if an exterior influence poisons that reality? How does a toddler’s mind reconcile intense physical or mental trauma? Krillbite Studio tries to answer these questions through their debut game, Among the Sleep. Kickstarted to completion last summer, Among The Sleep puts the player behind the eyes of a two-year old and tasks them with surviving a series of wildly traumatizing scenarios. Careful hands and compassionate minds push Among the Sleep’s delicate subject matter away from abject immorality, however, not with enough guidance to pivot an honest story into a capable game.
Among the Sleep opens with an endearing backdrop and a complimentary set of mechanics. It’s your second birthday, and your mother presents a teddy bear as a gift. The situation is briefly damaged by aggressive yelling at the front door, but quietly defused when mom takes you up to your room and leaves you in the playpen. From there the player learns of the two-year old’s ability to pick things up, walk, and crawl. Best of all, you find that your new teddy bear has apparently come to life, offering comfort for the child and direction for the player.
The strength of a child’s imagination fuels most of Among the Sleep’s bag of tricks. The teddy bear probably isn’t actually talking, but in the mind of whimsical youth, it can do practically anything it wants. Likewise, everything from a clash of lightning to the uncompromising fear of the dark is subject to enormous level of exaggeration. Without a proper frame of reference, it’s difficult to pinpoint the nature of the obscene noises going bump in the night. Thankfully, the child’s own mental defense mechanisms are equipped to deal with adverse situations like these. Teddy, for example, glows and lights up the player’s path when hugged by the child.
The portrayal of the two-year old’s mannerisms, whether they’re plausible in the real world or not, are beyond cute and constantly adorable. Krillbite nailed some of the finer details of playing an eccentric toddler through a series of intangible additions. When you pause Among the Sleep, the child covers his or her eyes. If you walk too far too quickly, you’ll fall down. Walking on its own is subject to the wobbly insecurity of unsteady legs. Occasional faults in animation prowess, like trying to climb up to a higher surface or the lack of feedback upon picking anything up, disturb the illusion, but not enough to break it completely. You really feel like you’re playing as a little kid.
When it comes to being a game, Among the Sleep doesn’t perform with the competence and dexterity suggested by its rich presentation. The mother disappears, leading the child and Teddy on a supernatural quest to rescue her. Contextually, the child has to will him or herself across surreal playgrounds, scary forests, and haunting relics of their crashed home – all the while avoiding contact with a threatening presence. Mechanically, Among the Sleep resigns itself to rote exploration and brief, utterly mundane stealth sequences. You proceed from set-piece to set piece completing the simplest of task while sometimes getting out of the way of the big bad.
Early on, Among The Sleep’s lack of interactive ambition doesn’t seem to get in the way. The tension and atmosphere of a dark and stormy night, not to mention some intense imagery, is enough to fuel the player through a decent chunk of the game. Somewhere around the half way point, with tension waning and mortality all but guaranteed, it becomes a plodding march to the conclusion rather than a race to the finish. There’s plenty to absorb along the way, but nothing that challenges the player any differently than it did in the first half of the game. It’s clear where Among the Sleep is going, but it lacks the resolve to properly challenge the player on the way there.
Among the Sleep feels stuck between exploratory games like Gone Home and Dear Esther and straight horror like Outlast and Amnesia. It has neither the confidence to be purely exploratory nor the competence to introduce any obstacle of reasonable challenge. Gone Home didn’t try to be anything more than a relatable teenage experience, for example, but you get the feeling that Among the Sleep’s reach goes further than its grasp. It meanders on the path to drive its message home, and while it eventually makes it, it can’t help but get lost on the way there.
It’s the ending that pushes Among the Sleep from a spirited experiment into an adequate experience. The game isn’t necessarily subtle about the events that are troubling the child’s young mind, but the ultimate conclusion honestly took my by surprise. Everything from Teddy’s presence to the crude chalk art occupying the child’s nightmares fit neatly into the final few minutes, leaving the ending feeling earned, if not slightly economical. Among the Sleep’s ambition is kept in check by a relatively mundane game, but should be considered worthwhile by its endearing take on a troubled child’s early life.
