Title: Psychedelic Horror Game Sleep Awake Gets December Release Date Confession time: I have had the Steam page for Sleep Awake open in a browser tab for a month, just so I would not forget about it. With so many great games releasing, this was one horror title I did not want to miss. Now I can finally close that tab, as Sleep Awake has an official release date. It is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S on December 2. Sleep Awake is a first-person, narrative-driven psychedelic horror game. It is set in the last remaining city on an Earth devastated by a mysterious force known as The HUSH. This entity causes anyone who falls asleep to vanish. Players take on the role of Katja, who must fight to stay alert and survive in a city where the desperate citizens are performing increasingly extreme experiments on themselves in a bid to achieve permanent wakefulness and escape The HUSH. As you can imagine, the situation becomes very strange. The game comes from Eyes Out, a studio founded by Cory Davis, the director of Spec Ops: The Line, and Robin Finck, the guitarist for Nine Inch Nails. The publisher is Blumhouse Games. Finck is naturally handling the trippy audio design for the project. This marks the debut title for Eyes Out, and the team has been working on it for four years. Back in 2021, the developers shared their vision for an ultra-immersive, audio-driven horror experience with a nightmarish quality. Davis explained that their brand of horror deals with the terrors of the universe and the existential fears that linger in the mind. He emphasized the importance of advanced audio technology, including localized sound and realistic reverb, to build these unsettling soundscapes, drawing from his prior experience in VR development. Finck added his excitement for the nuanced audio, describing the dynamic between impactful silence and the emergence of sound. He talked about the inspiring challenge of blurring the lines between the diegetic sounds of the game world and the musical score. Blumhouse Games, which published its first video game project, Fear the Spotlight, in October 2024, has a full pipeline of horror games. This includes the co-op gothic horror title Eyes of Hellfire, which released in August, and upcoming games like Grave Seasons and Crisol: Theater of Idols. Sleep Awake is a key part of their expanding roster of interactive scares.
