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Confession time: I\u2019ve had the Sleep Awake<\/em> Steam page<\/a> open in a tab for about a month (hey, we all organize our thoughts in unique and beautiful ways), just so I don\u2019t forget about it. The past year has been stacked with fabulous original games across a wide range of genres, including horror, and this is one I didn\u2019t want to miss. Now, I can close the tab and put a firm release date on the calendar, as Sleep Awake<\/em> is officially due to hit PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X\/S on December 2. Happy holidays, indeed.<\/p>\n Sleep Awake <\/em>is a first-person, narrative-heavy, psychedelic horror game set in the last known city on an Earth that\u2019s been ravaged by The HUSH, a mysterious force that disappears anyone who falls asleep. Katja must stay alert and survive the city as its citizens experiment on themselves in increasingly extreme ways, attempting to achieve permanent wakefulness and outmaneuver The HUSH. Needless to say, things get weird.<\/p>\n Sleep Awake<\/em> comes from Eyes Out, the studio founded by Spec Ops: The Line<\/em> director Cory Davis and Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck, and it\u2019s published by Blumhouse Games. Finck is responsible for the trippy audio stylings of Sleep Awake<\/em>, of course. This is the studio\u2019s debut title and something they\u2019ve been working on for four years. Back in 2021<\/a>, Davis and Finck told Engadget they were focused on building an ultra-immersive, audio-driven horror experience with a nightmarish bent.<\/p>\n \u201cThe type of horror that we’re building has a lot to do with the horrors of the universe and the horrors that you kind of go to sleep with at night, the ones that are just around the corner and outside of our purview, but exist,\u201d Davis said. \u201cAnd the technology for building those types of soundscapes, the localized audio and reverb and the realism behind that, coming from VR before, I had a lot of opportunity to work with that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n Finck added the following: \u201cI’m really excited about the nuance and the subtlety of coming from silence, like a really impactful silence, and beginning to emerge from that silence towards an impactful embellishment of some sort, however great or greater. And that play between the diegetic soundscape of the world within the tangible, physical space inside the game, and where it blurs with the score, the music of the game, can be really challenging and inspiring.\u201d<\/p>\n Blumhouse Games published its first horror project<\/a>, Fear the Spotlight<\/em>, in October 2024 and on top of Sleep Awake<\/em>, it has a steady stream of additional terrors in store. The co-op gothic-horror game Eyes of Hellfire<\/em><\/a> landed in August from developer Gambrinous, and titles including Grave Seasons<\/em> and Crisol: Theater of Idols<\/em><\/a> are due to drop soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n