Monday, November 17, 2014

Why I'll Never Be Able To Write A Full Review About "Among the Sleep."


Among the Sleep by Krillbite Studio is a game and a concept that I love.  I even fell for their pitch on their Kickstarter back in May of last year and I'm glad that I did because the game that I played was fun and beautiful yet haunting and fairly dark in its tone.

After I finished going through the game, which took me just over two hours, I was at a loss as to how to write a Full Review article.  I started, stopped and had to step away.  I came back a couple of days later, wrote more about the story in the game while trying to be ambiguous enough so as to not give away key plot points that I would not want to spoil for anyone else reading who had yet to play.  Then I scrapped the whole thing.  Again.  About a month later, I came back to writing a new article taking the approach I took with Dead Space and Assassin's Creed (of which I still haven't published yet) where I just talked about how I personally played the game while still giving my impressions.  This post did not even make it past a first draft.

I know exactly what it is with this game that prevents me from writing a full-on article too.  It is that I keep mentally comparing it to another games approach to a similar topic but by even mentioning which game that is will spoil the storyline.  Now, I am one of those people that does not want anything spoiled for me when I go to watch a movie, a TV show or read a book.  I do not even like it when people verbally speculate about "who did it" during anything involving a mystery/whodunnit.  I can even point out the exact day and time (after doing some research into Doogie Howser M.D. broadcast dates) that I noticed this first bothering me.  It was between 8:15 and 8:45pm on Wednesday October 31st, 1990.  I might be a little neurotic.

Perhaps this was an underlying cause for not being able to write about a game that I would love to see everyone who has ever played a video game play; unless you cannot play in the first person perspective due to motion sickness issues, which I at times experience and cannot fault anyone for.  I cannot play Doom 2 for more than 15 minutes at a time because of this issue.  The point is, I do not want to spoil anything storywise about this game.  Sure, you play the game from the perspective of a two year old, which is what first got me interested in the game.  At the time I had some money and was more than willing to throw it at Krillbite Studio to see their game come into fruition.

I cannot even say how the game affected me other than it did effect me.  I will not say how it affected me as that too would give something away that I want other people to experience first hand without outside influence.  This game should be played in a silent room.  The point is, Among the Sleep is a beautiful game (which I've already said).

Almost two weeks ago, (November 6th) Krillbite released a one chapter free DLC expansion to everyone already owning the game; and if you purchase the game after todays date, that the DLC will already be included.  There is this great independent studio way up there just north of the northern 58th parallel called Krillbite Studio and they have made this great game with some financial help from the rest of the world.  It is a beautiful thing.  All of it.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
We've Been Heading North


P.S.  If anyone needed evidence as to my claim about the beauty of this game, you have it now:

2 comments:

  1. I'm 3/4 of the way through this game, and I really enjoy it. Unfortunately, my computer's graphics processor is substantially inferior to yours. This results in some framerate issues. However, I actually don't mind so much if I have some trouble navigating - because, after all, I'm playing a toddler - this stuff shouldn't be easy!

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  2. I love that you were able to track down the moment you first realized you hate spoilers. Genius. Madness? Genius.

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