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:

Full Review: The Plan (PC)

The Plan, a "game" of sorts developed by Krillbite Studio, the same people who are developing the first person survival horroresque game where you play as a two year old, probably does not require it's own full article, but you know what, it's going to happen because I enjoyed it that much.  I've played through three times and I think I enjoyed it more the second and third times around.

Krillbite describes the game as an "atmospheric videogame, exploring the issues of death and meaning."  I feel that The Plan, while it does allow the player to explore those issues, I feel that they happen after the game has finished.  And by finished, I mean that it will take you between 5 - 10 minutes to complete.  And believe it or not, the game comes with it's own achievement that is really more of an Easter egg than anything else.

So what exactly then is The Plan?  You begin the game as a fly with the camera very close up on you, almost uncomfortably close, especially if you are not personally fond of flies.  You then progress through the game/stage and slowly the camera pulls back and back, all the while the music in the background (from 19th century Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg) becomes more-and-more pronounced and powerful, but not obnoxiously so.

The game is very simplistic and very calming for the most part, considering that you are controlling something that most people tend to kill on site and cats for some reason like to eat.  I would say that it would be better to go into this game without any expectations although I did tell The Kid that she would "either like it or think it's absolute shit."  And really, that is all I feel you need to tell people, that the game is a small file (~120MB) that takes less than 10 minutes to play and if you don't like it, then you only lost maybe 20 minutes tops.

I just find that The Plan is a nifty little experiment from a video game studio that, from what I have seen from them, is true to their development philosophy, not to put words in their brains.  I highly recommend downloading this free game if for no other reason than to give your opinion about it and what defines a "video game" in todays market.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Concealment of Joyful Laughter

First Impressions: Among the Sleep: Pre-Alpha (PC)

No, thank you for letting me play!

With Krillbite Studio's Kickstarter (which has less than 24 hours remaining) for Among the Sleep fully funded, the public now has access to a pre-alpha release of their game.

I just played the extent of what was released on Wednesday, May 15th.

It. Is. Awesome.

I can't really say much about the storyline for the game other than you're a toddler, a two year old I believe, your crib topples over.  Oh, and your teddy bear seems to be sentient.

In the beginning, you're just wandering around your house.  Keep in mind you're a two year old, so you're visual perspective is from that of a child who both crawls and walks.  And, and, AND!, you can see yourself:

Yes, at anytime you can look down, see your little bebby belly getting a good scratch.  This looking down perspective comes pretty handing though when walking across platforms, which I won't talk about aside from here so that I don't give anything (much else anyway) away.  This looking down and seeing yourself is one of many little things that was included, that didn't have to be included, that make this game amazing.  

What's that?  You can't make out what that writing says?  Of course you can't, you're two years old.  You can't read.  Yes, you can make out individual letters on the blocks (as in the above picture), but those are individual letters, not words, which your brain probably can't even comprehend yet.

Another thing, when you press Esc/pause, you cover your face with your hands.  Fucking_Brilliant.

Onto other things now.  How does the game handle?  It handles just fine.  I didn't have any problems with the controls.  I did change the mouse to inverted controls and the only other thing that doing that might have affected was which way you had to move the mouse in order to open up doors, drawers and cabinets.  For instance, to pull open a drawer, I had to click the drawer and push the mouse forward.  After figuring this out on the first time, I was perfectly fine.

And remember, you're playing as a toddler.  You can't reach that door knob, so you have to find something to pull over to that door, climb up on said object and then open the door.  This type of perspective was one of the major draws to the game for me.  I play a lot of horror games, but playing one from a toddler's perspective, seeing the world through their eyes, albeit with an adult's mind and how to interact with the world, it's like seeing things as brand new all over again.  I don't remember the first time I ever saw a washing machine and I can almost guarantee that my little brain couldn't process what that big white thing did.  It might've even frightened me somewhat.  That's what Among the Sleep did to me.  It made me wary of a washing machine that was running at night.  That's something.

The music, what little there was that wasn't there for atmospheric purposes was very nice, but the sound editing was great.  A lot of the ambient night time noises that you'd hear around a house in the middle of the night seemed amplified, especially the ticking of that damned ominous clock.  The lullaby too, that the mother sings to you as you're falling asleep, reminded me of the lullaby from Pan's Labyrinth: beautiful and motherly with a very slight undertone of foreboding.

The playable pre-release demo-esque of Among the Sleep played for about 20-25 minutes on my initial playthrough, but a lot of that time was spent just looking at my surroundings and seeing what I could interact with.  On subsequent playthoughs, when I was going around getting pictures, but trying to also see how fast I could finish, it took me, maybe 10 minutes.  You and all your friends with a computer should really go to the Kickstarter page and download the pre-alpha demo-game-thing and play it.  Then, play it again.  I'm really looking forward to sometime around December when the full game is released.

Lastly, I'd like to leave you with this little nugget from the game, when shit began to get weird:

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
A Long, Long Time Ago. . .