Having such an open platform in the PC market has facilitated the arrival of an era where even a single person’s vision can come to complete and total fruition. Indie horror games like this and Neverending Nightmares are as reflective of their makers as they are explorations of the concept of mental illness and how to deal with it.
And despite the fact that psychological torment has always been a ripe topic for horror games, the approach has changed over the years. Rather than being a general catch-all for all things weird and creepy, the subject of mental health has become something more personal, more meaningful, and more altogether unsettling. It is no longer the obstacle or the mere set dressing but very often the through-line of the game itself.
Created by a 25 year old Finnish man named Jesse Makkonen, Silence of the Sleep is a perfect example of how to create an Expressionist vision of a person’s jumbled and broken mental makeup.
The game takes place in a nether realm of a nightmarish (and largely symbolic) world to solve the mystery of the main character’s struggle with himself. Despite some strange hiccups in tone, Silence of the Sleep is a worthy indie descendent of creepy psychological games like Silent Hill.
Silence of the Sleep begins with the end. Specifically, the main character’s end. Jacob Reeves stands on the edge of a cliff, obviously contemplating eternity, and then he lets go, falling into a darkness that is not quite death.
He awakens in a near-reality but can’t remember the details of his life or what might have driven him to suicide. He’s trapped in a hotel that is eerily reminiscent of The Shining — complete with an advice-giving sage bartender — and his goal is to uncover not just his identity but the circumstances surrounding his suicide.
Silence of the Sleep’s psychological adventure game setup will take players through several macabre levels, each with its own set of challenges and narrative threads. However, since it is exists in the more traditional adventure game vein, combat is completely and utterly nonexistent. The game consists of basic mechanics — a flashlight, “use” — and wandering around to solve puzzles.
Most of the puzzles themselves are quite old school in terms of function, and most involve finding some item to affect some other, usually locked portion of the game. In other words, you will be hunting for keys, number combinations, and other various hard-to-see items hiding in the environment for hours upon end.
As the game progresses, the difficulty of the puzzles varies wildly. Some of them are easy, some of them are justifiably difficult, and some are so vague that they’ll require a stroke of luck or insight in order to be solved.
As someone who suffered through this particular brand of frustration in the 90s, I found some of the more baffling puzzles amusing but still grew tired of meandering from room to room, trying to unlock the interior logic of the individual puzzle. Your enjoyment of this aspect of the game will depend largely on whether or not you manage to make the connections the developer intends.
However, the art style, though somewhat rudimentary, is something quite interesting to behold. The silhouetted character designs are a nice touch, which contrast nicely with the busily grim backgrounds. Not only that, but the game’s mechanics often affect not just how the player interacts with the world but the physical makeup of the environments themselves.
More specifically, the game uses color and darkness as means for introducing interesting gameplay elements. Players who need to avoid the shadowy monsters in the game may hide behind cardboard boxes, which produces a twofold effect: it both renders the player mostly invisible and also slows time to a crawl, changing the color and often the auditory aspects of the world. This element complements the psychological nature of the game, not to mention the fact that it’s a really neat effect.
All of it combined makes for a quite disturbing gaming experience. Sadly, the enemies are not intelligent whatsoever, but since you cannot fight back, any appearance of the shadow monsters will render you panicky. Land in the eyeline of one of the monsters, and you’re a goner. The game does a great job of using audio to warn players of an appearing monster, giving them time to scramble for a hiding place.
To go a step further regarding audio, it should be noted that the score highlights all that is great about Silence of the Sleep. The range of music provides the game with a depth that it might not have otherwise have had. It is at times melodic and entrancing and at others atonal and disconcerting, mirroring the psychologically-tilted mood within the game itself. Your pulse will definitely quicken at the sound of a monster’s sudden appearance, but you’ll also relish the acoustic music breaks during narratively focused portions of the game.
Which is why it is so unfortunate how unpredictable the game’s tone actually is. It veers from a gloomy, dark world to almost an air of comedy at certain points, and some of the puzzle minigames are completely irrelevant to the game’s progression that they dilute the power of the great ones. Not only that, but most of the time they are without instructions, so you’ll have to randomly figure out how to beat them.
To wit, there is an unlocking minigame that might just be the worst unlocking minigame in the history of unlocking minigames, and that is certainly saying something. I don’t know if the were meant to add layers to the game, but for me they were a distracting presence.
The biggest problem with Silence of the Sleep is that it can be boring if you have trouble solving the puzzles; or, in the case of the asylum, if there is just too much uneventful wandering around. You might have better luck with some of the puzzles than I did, but if you don’t, then you’ll spend a great deal of time searching every nook for something to help your journey along.
It isn’t frustrating, but it becomes monotonous, and unfortunately that ruins some of the weird, interesting vibe the game manages to build for itself.
The Final Word: Silence of the Sleep does some things with art style, story, and music that haven’t been seen all year. Despite some of its design flaws, it’s a game worth checking out, and you’ll definitely get a few scares out of playing it.
Silence of the Sleep is available on Steam for $16.99 for Windows platforms.
