Sleep Tight — [PC] Review
Defending your bedroom from the things that go bump in the night.
Visuals: 9/10 They’re adorable and smooth, but for all the work put into character images, you only ever see the top of your character’s head during gameplay. The top-down angle can make seeing structure health bars difficult, too.
Audio: 9/10 The music is a great tell for how long you have left in the current wave, but can easily be overpowered by sound effects. Some of the character dialogue is jarring coming from kids.
Controls/Movement: 7/10 The controls themselves are great, but the currency systems and amount of things to manage can be too much.
Difficulty: 5/10 The game is deceptively challenging, but the difficulty of the levels ramps up disproportionately to how much you’re able to do each day, making the game frustratingly hard about halfway through a run.
Replayability: 10/10 The game keeps you coming back, to beat your personal best high score, to unlock more characters, and to see how far you can go with different strategies.
Overall: 8/10
“Every parents tells their child that the monsters aren’t real. But how come every kid has the same story?”
The premise of Sleep Tight was what pulled me in, paired with the charming visuals and animations. Fighting off monsters from my bedroom, strategizing in order to last longer and survive more and more waves of enemies? It sounded very Monsters, Inc.-esque, and I was all over that. I loaded up the game, and was greeted with cute music, nice little profiles of the kids (or, kid, as I only had the default character unlocked), and a full, complete explanation of the UI elements and controls. I felt I was ready to take on an entire army of monsters!
From there, though, my excitement sort of plateaued. Sleep Tight has a lot of things to manage. In between stages (during the “day”), you have 8 “Suns” to spend on building defenses, getting power-ups, researching new technology, and ammo. Yes, you have a limited amount of bullets, and running out, especially in the later stages, almost certainly means imminent death.
You have a second currency to worry about, too: Stars, which monsters drop when they die. You have to go around your room and pick these up before they disappear, so it keeps you from standing still in one place all night. Stars are used only at the Research Table in conjunction with Suns. This double-currency for the research, combined with the fact that after researching something, you often don’t have the Suns needed to actually construct it, meant that I was actually doing very little research, trying to get by with as little as possible. I would rather see some or all of the research purchased with just Stars, instead of needing Suns too.
The static amount of Suns granted every day means there are limited tasks you can accomplish before the night falls and the next wave of monsters comes, introducing the strategy aspect of the game. Do I build a wall, or buy a powerup? Will I have enough Suns left over to stock up on ammo for my gun? A Sleep Tight strategy can feel almost like a Civilization strategy, and that’s not always a good thing. Many times I had to choose between researching a new technology that would help me out later but cut my run short, or building defenses that would help me survive the coming night but make my run difficult later on. “That’s just strategy!” some might say, but it felt more like a risky gamble.
The Research currency problem also meant that the game’s difficulty spiked sharply about midway through my runs, with nothing that I could really do about it. I’m all for each wave of enemies being more challenging than the last, but the difficulty should ramp up proportionately with the amount of reactions available to the player. With Suns hard-limiting you to a certain number of tasks every day (sometimes as little as two!), that was simply not the case.
The enemies themselves feel lackluster as well. New monsters were introduced as I continued surviving longer and longer, but there was no real indication as to how they’re different, and none of them seem to have weaknesses or resistances to certain weapons. Plants vs. Zombies had a varied array of enemies with unique ways to deal with them, and I’d like to see Sleep Tight do something similar. In particular, if there are differences between the enemies (other than health pool and appearance), they need to be highlighted more. As it is, I can get through a Sleep Tight run with just the starter gun and not face any real repercussions for doing so, making my weapon choice and weapon research feel meaningless.
The character choice, however, feels great. You start with Joe, who has an optional tutorial mode you can activate when you play him for the first time, and you unlock additional characters as you complete certain challenges. Brooke is easily unlocked by surviving ten nights, and showcases how unique your experience can feel just by trying with a different character. Each kid has strengths and weaknesses, changing the difficulty of your survival run. The voices are adorable, too, with each kid having a little gimmick and a bunch of cute one-liners to throw out, like Joe’s “Bangarang!” or Brooke’s “Pew-pew-pew! Gotcha!”
Altogether, I felt good playing Sleep Tight; it was fun, it felt challenging, I wanted to come back and try different strategies to get my score higher and unlock more characters. The issues with the currency and research system were not enough for me to immediately put it down, but they do make the game arbitrarily difficult, rather than having the difficulty of the game lie purely in the defensive strategies and reactions to different enemies coming out. It is a solid all-ages experience, and folks can enjoy playing through a fantasy we all had as a kid — defending your bedroom from the monsters!
Sleep Tight was provided to me by GirlStreamers, Inc. for the purposes of review.
