Sleep Awake review: Delaying the inevitable

Blumhouse Games' latest is a surreal fight against a basic human necessity.

I know what it feels like to desperately want to sleep. A medication mishap left me unable to sleep for three or four days. I laid in bed each night trying to make it happen, then drifted through the following days struggling to focus on things like work. It started being painful after a couple days, and by the end of it I was scared to take those meds again. Sleep Awake, a horror-themed narrative adventure from Eyes Out and Blumhouse Games, showed me a situation in which that painful experience, stretched out and compounded over days, months, or even years, would be aligned with survival. In this scenario, sleep, something your mind and body will beg and scream for after only days of neglect, is explicitly deadly. With a premise so horrible, who needs monsters? Well, Sleep Awake also has monsters. They’re less scary.

The Story about The Scary Thing

Sleep Awake is one of those apocalyptic, sci-fi, psychologically-driven horror experiences that unabashedly loves proper nouns that start with “The.” Protagonist Katja lives in The Crush, one of the last remaining human cities after most of civilization has been wiped out by The Hush, a supernatural phenomenon that is killing people when they reach a certain phase of their sleep cycle. The Swell, a similarly destructive downpour of acid rain, has rendered the remains of human civilization corroded and rotten, making living conditions pretty gnarly on top of the whole no sleeping thing. Katja often finds herself visiting The Fathom, a space between life and death in which a lot of crazy stuff happens. These elements combine to form The Video Game, which is largely about pushing through narrativized paths and occasionally surviving some stealth rooms.

In ways that struck me as both deeply silly and eerily realistic in our “post-COVID” world, Sleep Awake’s major world-building hook is showing us different ways humans have tried to adapt and survive. You see the remnants of shoddy corporate gimmicks, pharmaceutical infrastructure, desperate government overreach, and finally bizarre cult-like activity, layered atop each other in varying states of decay and failure. And conflict, of course, for those still standing. You have cops in hazmat suits demanding compliance, people in surgically-grafted self-flagellation gear leaning on pain and pleasure, and shrines built to worship electricity (and the remains of those who built them). A “Thoughts and Prayers” vending machine containing an ineffectual jostling device was a standout gag. The point that stood out to me here is that, rather than figuring out what The Hush is or how to stop it, the human solution was to accept that as the new normal, fight sleep itself, and politicize methodology.

Awake, but out of your mind

Katja and her family went another route, local chemistry. Part homeopathic treatment, part underground science, Katja’s father developed an infusion from plants and specific sound vibration patterns taking the form of glowing eyedrops that fend off sleep. The problem is these eyedrops have serious side effects, such as terrifying hallucinations and “drifting,” during which the user can lose their sense of time and place entirely, waking up somewhere completely different from where they were at the time of use. Katja, forced to rely on recreating this recipe after losing everyone, has to barrel through her crumbling sense of reality while traveling across The Crush to bring doses to her grandmother (I think; this isn’t super clear) who refuses to leave her own apartment.

While I don’t take the label “walking simulator” seriously as a critic, that’s more or less what’s happening for most of Sleep Awake’s runtime. You simply strap in and go for the ride, moving through each environment and doing some light puzzle-solving, usually just clicking on some things in the right order, gathering ingredients, maybe flipping a switch or two. When stuff goes wild around you, you’re simply meant to let the vibes and raw energy of Katja’s hallucinations wash over you, and it’s definitely a trip. Between distorted visuals, harshly lit red and purple lights, and feverishly cut FMV footage straight out of a montage from an early 2000s horror flick, Sleep Awake does everything it can to overwhelm your senses and make you think about what it must feel like to fight against your own body to such an extreme level. It’s appropriately intense.

Stealth and lore, the banes of horror games

When “gameplay” does kick in, it’s often in the form of stealth rooms in which you have to sneak around cops or… creatures. Sleep Awake does find ways to change the rules for these sections depending on what you’re trying to avoid, and one section in particular is so unreal and over the top that it actually activated a flight response for me. The other ones were just annoying, as simple stealth segments in games like this tend to lead to repetition (harshing the vibes) and video game language accidentally breaking the fourth wall (harshing the vibes again). Momentum is important for narrative-driven horror games, and Sleep Awake is all gas, until it asks you to sneak around some dudes marching on set pathways like you’re sneaking into Hyrule Castle in Ocarina of Time.

Sleep Awake is at its best when it’s assaulting your senses, banging on all its instruments, and confronting you with the human side of its nightmarish scenario. It falters when it tries to do Big Lore, the final hour or so grasping to unmask The Hush, make Katja the hero of the everything, tie everything together, and work in a video game-ass boss fight that feels like a hallucination in a derogatory way rather than an effective horror kind of way. It’s like the game itself starts rushing to its own conclusion, and is much less confident in its answers compared to how it presented the questions. The ending is cool, though, in an unsurprising but cathartic sequence that does feel like a genuine payoff for the ordeal.

My favorite thing about Sleep Awake is how it plays with its form as a video game to portray a conflict that isn’t a bad guy or a monster. You can’t just hit “falling asleep will kill you” with a pipe and move on to the next slobbering, gory metaphor for crimes you’ve committed, or zombie, or whatever. This is an internal fight for most of the story, and one that has no visible end. You and Katja start the game fully prepared to just kick the can down the road as long as possible, until the runway’s out and there’s nothing else you can do. That’s no way to live, but at the same time, what can you do in that scenario but live? The death cults are silly, but at the same time, ruminations on how humanity’s self-perceived resilience could work against it. That’s where Sleep Awake really hits. When the monsters do show up it stumbles, and feels more like a normal video game the longer it wades into the Whys and Hows. Not bad for a five-hour rollercoaster.

Sleep Awake is available on December 2, 2025 for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Review for
Sleep Awake
8
Pros

• Effective premise grounds the surreal scares to make an effective visual horror experience
• World-building is interesting and thoughtful despite the corny Proper Nouns

Cons

• Stealth sections are annoying
• Lore and video game tropes get in the way of storytelling towards the end