Among the Sleep review: sweet dreams

I have a nine-month-old child myself, and when he wakes up in the middle of the night sobbing and shaken, I cannot help but wonder what it is that could be torturing the dreams of someone so young. Among the Sleep posits an answer by letting players journey through its two-year-old protagonist's darkest nightmares.

Those scary dreams aren't always the smoothest. Among the Sleep is riddled with bugs and small problems. But the novelty of playing as a two-year-old and the game's powerful atmosphere overcome those issues.

Among the Sleep opens with the unnamed main character's mother offering them a slice of cake for their second birthday. The celebration is interrupted by a rough knock on the door. I got to witness all of this from first-person view, trapped in a high chair. I craned my virtual neck to look toward the hallway where the mother was answering the door; I tried to hear the angry raised voices as the child's head filled with static. The mother returned looking frazzled, but she was carrying a present: a teddy bear, about to become my best friend in the journey ahead.

From there, the mother placed me in a bedroom, where I experimented and learned the game's controls. The toddler's abilities are as limited as you might imagine from their age. They can walk very slowly and clumsily. They can crawl slightly faster. They can climb on top of open dressers and small ledges. They can grab items in the environment to drag, carry or throw.

And that's pretty much it. With this small set of tools, the main character is put to bed, only to wake up into a nightmare, crib overturned, door to the room open, unspeakable horrors lurking in the shadows outside.

I mentioned a handful of encounters with monsters, but most of Among the Sleep is spent alone, and that works to the benefit of the atmosphere the game builds. It allowed me to really spend time taking in even the creepiest environments rather than rushing through to avoid an unbeatable enemy.

Like the guarded life of a two-year-old, this is a world where most of the dangers are imagined, most the bumps and scares aren't going to do any lasting damage. And the things that actually hurt — the true source of the toddler's nightmares — are all the darker for their lack of physicality. The main character is haunted by problems much greater than monsters, and there are no easy fixes.

One foe in the game did cause me some problems: its legion of small bugs and technical flaws. Among the Sleep's level designs are compelling and strange, but they also led me to a number of noteworthy bugs, such as getting trapped behind bits of furniture or, at one point, falling through the world. The framerate also dropped dramatically from time to time, which really dragged down the pace added on top of the main character's slow movement speed.