Among The Sleep Free On Epic

Monday, Alexx rounded up the Animal Crossing: New Horizons direct, and David covered a new indie game that came to Kickstarter this week. Tuesday, I had to return to Dark Souls to feel something after Elden Ring was delayed, and Valve shared more details on the Steam Deck. Wednesday, Alexx discussed Hometopia‘s Steam Next Fest stats. Thursday of War began as Kratos began the trek to your PC with his kid in tow, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus‘ new trailer is a little creepy.

Onto this week’s free game on the Epic Games Store, Among The Sleep. It was originally released back in 2014 with a darker theme, or at least the classic version felt a bit rougher and uglier in all the way an indie horror game does. Meanwhile, the 2017 enhanced edition, (currently available on Epic) feels like it is applying to be accepted by a wider audience. You play as David and on David’s second birthday, you have to go around a creepy big house with your animated anthropomorphic teddy bear, Teddy. Being an indie horror game, you can guess that the subtext pretty blatant.

I’m sure I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it until I’m being choked by a man in a leather outfit and I’m blue in the face, horror games aren’t the most appealing to me. Either they are scary and I don’t like them, or I am so bored and unscared I could sneeze loud enough and have a potted plant shaking in its soil. All that said, I like the concept of Among The Sleep. I think there is something there to be discussed. I love games where you are not the biggest and more powerful thing in the world, and there is part of that in Among The Sleep.

However, in all that, I know there is no stake because no game in its right mind is going to brutally murder a toddler for a horror game. Furthermore, what little scares there are will be jump scares or things going bump in the night, as evident in the title. Yes, the story does provide an interesting perspective on marital disputes and how a child sees those through muffled arguments in the next room. Honestly, though, I’m left half-hearted by it. I’d argue more could be done in another genre, but this was the easiest one to display it as simply terrifying for a child.

All this week, you can pick up Among The Sleep – Enhanced Edition on the Epic Games Store, ending on the morning of the 28th of October. Next week, you’d expect the big hitters to be announced for Halloween and for all those people I’ve buried in woods to finally shut up about “spooky season.” Nonetheless, we have another indie game aspiration to jump into the land of horror with DARQ. A game about a bald kid (the less I say here, the better) crawling through some lucid nightmares of him walking up the walls and solving puzzles. I believe I’ll be putting DARQ in my BYN (bin) when I am DUN (done). Yeah, two of us can play that game.