Sleep Awake review – Gary Numan cameos in an overly straightforward sleep-deprivation horror

Video games have delivered a feast of singular and wondrous sights in 2025: ecological fantasias teeming with magical beasts; stunning, historically obsessive recreations of feudal Japan. But here is an end-of-year curio: psychological horror game Sleep Awake serves us synth-rock pioneer Gary Numan stepping into what is perhaps the schlockiest role of his life – a gigantic floating head named Hypnos.

This late-stage cameo is not quite indicative of the game as a whole; the handful of hours prior to Numan’s arrival are more mournful than madcap. Mostly, you explore the dilapidated, tumbledown streets of what is thought to be the last city on Earth. This setting is a magnificent work of imagination. You see it through the eyes of a young woman named Katja, who moves along rooftops, gazing out upon a barren, lifeless hinterland, into labyrinthine streets whose darkness and arcane logic recall the stirring subterranean etchings of Italian artist Piranesi.

How has the planet become so inhospitable, so thoroughly wiped of life? That never really becomes clear. Rather, Katja must wrestle with a more pressing concern: should she fall asleep, our hero risks disappearing into a strange, inaccessible realm caused by a disease referred to as the Hush. Like every other perpetually exhausted person here, Katja plops a few drops of stay-awake serum into her eyes. Suddenly, she sees psychedelic visions and kaleidoscopic refractions of space. Katja seems to be losing the plot; everyone else certainly has. What remains of society has crumbled into the sleep-deprived paranoia of rival gangs.

Driven initially by a desire to care for an elderly relative, you direct Katja in first-person through the game’s many grotty, decaying spaces. At one point you’re on the turf of a gas-masked cult, so you try to sneak past them, crouching against walls and under tables to avoid detection. Yet there is hardly any tension: the enemies follow rote patrol paths; their field of vision is preposterously generous. This is a rather dull, easy game of hide and seek.

Sleep Awake betrays a further lack of gameplay imagination. You’re called on to short-circuit electricity breakers by rolling carts into them; you have to open doors by finding obviously placed keycards. Slowly, the lustre of the city also begins to dull: it becomes clear you are advancing along a lavishly art-directed tunnel – really, only a lightly interactive and not especially scary fairground ghost train.

This is a shame because Sleep Awake is visually daring. The exploratory action is intercut with bleary yet beautiful FMV sequences: the eerie silhouette of trees against a blood-red sky; bubbling liquids shown in extreme closeup. Sometimes these unsettling images are layered over the actual 3D space to gorgeously odd, arthouse effect. This surrealism extends to the death screen: should you get clubbed on the head by one of your dimwitted foes, you must walk out of the dark towards a spectacular light-filled door; as you do, the space mutates in hallucinatory real-time, spitting you out at your last autosave.

The death screen is a rare moment when Sleep Awake summons something between dream logic and the strange hazy moments between sleep states that can feel like dreaming. The rest of the time, this narcoleptic nightmare merely wears its psychedelic aesthetics – floating Numan included – without interrogating them interactively. It’s too straightforward, too legible, and not actually illogical enough where it matters. You may want to sleep on this one.