Sleep Awake is a walking-sim that takes place in the last city on Earth, surrounded by a desolate wasteland known as “The Fringe”. A strange force known as “The Hush” is an eerie, unexplained energy that takes anyone who falls asleep, causing them to vanish without a trace and leaving behind glowing outlines, referred to as Void Shadows.
Survivors resort to extreme, body-altering tactics: drugs, herbal eye drops, self-inflicted pain, electrocution, and other reckless tricks to keep themselves awake. Society has splintered into battling death cults and factions, each fiercely pushing their own methods for staying conscious forever, patrolling the crumbling streets while enforcing their beliefs in a haze of hallucinations and decay.
This far-out premise draws inspiration from the works of Gaspar Noé, with elements of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Amnesia: The Dark Descent added for good measure. How does this odyssey of altered states fare? Find out in our Sleep Awake review!
SLEEP AWAKE
Developer: EYES OUT, LLC.
Publisher: Blumhouse Games
Platforms: Windows, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 (reviewed)
Release Date: December 2, 2025
Price: $29.99
Sleep Awake is a first-person psychological horror that throws you into eerie, crumbling dreamscapes while solving environmental puzzles by interacting with strange, esoteric remnants and navigating shifting architecture. Stealth is key since there’s no combat, just tense moments of hiding, crawling through vents, and escaping gas-masked cultists and sex perverts.
Live-action full-motion video sequences add to the disorienting ambiance, packing a surreal punch into a tight four-to-five-hour experience often compared to a walking simulator with Amnesia.
The story dives into the fear of sleep as total erasure through The Hush, grief over missing family, humanity’s desperate body experiments to avoid sleep, and the blurred line between consciousness, hallucination, reality, and surrender.
For the most part, don’t expect to understand most of Sleep Awake. The story is harder to follow than Inland Empire. Most of the story’s narrative beats feel shaky because of its dreamlike, hallucinatory themes. The plot starts with Katja, a young loss-stricken woman brewing eye drops from plants grown in her apartment to resist the pull of sleep, enduring strange hallucinations as a side effect.
Her father, once a sleep scientist, abandoned the family chasing a cure, while her brother Bo fell to the Hush. She cares for Amma, an elderly family friend worn down by grief and age, delivering crucial doses through dangerous city crossings. The story drops into the action in Katja’s apartment, where a fresh batch sends her on a risky journey through shifting dreamscapes and crumbling ruins.
The bulk of the gameplay is focused on evading gas-masked cultists, singing to Void Shadows for glimpses of final moments, and uncovering fragments of the past in microfiches and scraps. It always feels like you’re barely scratching the surface of what’s out there and that the game withholds everything.
You aren’t going to know what the hell is going on until you know what the hell is going on. The story is told through vague dreams and recollections. Therefore, all narrative beats feel unreliable, and you are left in a constant state of questioning everything. It does a good job of creating a sense of uncertainty and dreamlike atmosphere, but after a while of not knowing what’s tangible, it’s hard to create real stakes.
The extensive use of FMV footage does a great job of blurring the lines of reality and looks awesome. Whoever shot these has an awesome eye for visuals and lurid imagery.
It gets very avant-garde and twists space in ways that defy the laws of physics, which look incredible. Sleep Awake looks amazing for the most part, and you could easily mistake it for being AAA if the simplistic gameplay didn’t clue you in.
Yes, it’s true. Sleep Awake is a fairly standard walking-sim adventure game with pretty easy puzzles and a few stealth sequences. This isn’t anything you haven’t seen before in other similar games, except for the sleek, dazzling polish of the visuals. The only problem is that the controls feel stiff and jerky.
Walking around in a walking sim is the one gameplay mechanic in Sleep Awake, and it kind of bungles it with its movement feeling unoptimized for smooth and fluent analog controls.
It’s a huge shame because everything else in the game looks really nice, but your character is constantly snapping her neck as she looks around, and starting and stopping very suddenly. The movement needs some fine-tuning to feel fluid, especially in such a languidly paced game such as this.
Most gamers won’t get much out of Sleep Awake after one play-through. Sadly, this is a one-and-done kind of deal, but the initial impression is a memorable enough experience that stuck with me.
For the price, it feels a bit steep, and you don’t really get a lot out of it since it runs about five to six hours and has very thin gameplay, while leaning hard on the surrealist horror imagery.
Sleep Awake was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a code provided by Blumhouse Games. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Sleep Awake is now available for Windows PC (via Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
