It’s tough being a kid. As adults, we get to lie back in a giant bed, often snuggled up next to someone else, and drift off into sleep with little concern. That is not the case for smaller humans. Left for dead in a tiny little bed, in the dark, all alone, they’re easy prey for monsters. They’re targeted and discriminated against by all kinds of savage creatures who feed on imagination.
Kids need to think fast and act faster if they’re going to survive any given night.
Knowing this, Maxx Burman first dreamt up the idea for Sleep Tight ten years ago. His concept couldn’t be more relatable. In the dead of night, you – a child – must build a fort out of pillows and furniture and protect it with well-placed turrets. As monsters swarm in from the shadows, you use your trusty nerf gun to send them all straight back to hell.
Ten Years in the Making
Burman is the cofounder and director of developer We Are Fuzzy, based out of Los Angeles, and he has a history working on the art for games (League of Legends, Call of Duty, Far Cry, Destiny) and TV (Westworld, Game of Thrones). But it took a decade to get together the team of equally experienced developers he needed to finally step out and bring his baby to life.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about the game’s long gestation is that ten years ago, experiences like Sleep Tight weren’t commonplace. The idea of mashing together disparate genres, and putting “building” at the forefront of the fun, is a far more recent phenomenon. Yet this is what Sleep Tight offers.
Sleep Tight is part twin-stick shooter and part tower defence game, with a splash of base building thrown into the mix. The play space is a bedroom, with a large rug in the centre that stays lit up. At each corner of the rug is a station that serves a different purpose; one masters health and ammo, another defensive structures and items, a third ammo and weapons and the fourth your research trees.
Each night you survive earns you eight sun points, and a star for each kill. These can be spent at the four stations. As soon as all your suns are spent, a new night begins and the same play space becomes your battlefield. The peripheral regions fall into shadow, and monsters swarm in. Depending on how you have built out your fort during the day, you swiftly move about the play space, luring monsters into choke points, firing bullets, and collecting dropped stars.
Stunning in its Simplicity
This simple loop is executed with near genius perfection thanks to an ultra-smart user interface. Not only does it keep the pace of the game aligned with the player’s own style and approach, but having everything – research, ammo, health, defence, weapons – all tied into the one economy makes even simple decisions intimately tied to your overall strategy.
Balancing what you can and can’t afford or repair with your available budget every in-game day directly impacts how you can handle the next wave. So even though the play space and the core systems don’t change, how you use them shifts constantly.
The way the game opens up is also well conceived. You unlock new characters who provide slightly different play styles and difficulty, but also better items from the off. You enter “runs” with each character, trying to last as long as possible and achieve high scores. The system scales you into the game smoothly.
That doesn’t mean the difficulty doesn’t scale sharply, too. You have to get better in the way you progress your strategy and the way you think about each wave or you’ll die quickly. When do you save up your stars in pursuit of a larger research prize? When do you go light on ammo and rely on your turrets so you can replenish your health and rebuild your defences? You’re constantly thinking.
Setting the Mood
Burman’s experience as an artist shines through every crack in the closet door. Sleep Tight’s tone and atmosphere tie wonderfully into the premise of a child’s imagination on overdrive. Sound effects are sharp and punchy, colours are bold and big, and the voiceovers feel like they were pulled straight out of Rugrats.
With a simple top-down view, the world doesn’t leap out of your screen with precisely modelled 3D assets and intricately animated characters. However, it’s certainly not bereft of detail, with each element of the game an identifiable piece to be placed within your fort. The way light is used is especially nice, with the central space basked in moonlight, and shadows shifting into monstrous shapes as enemies swarm in.
We do feel more could have been done with the monsters themselves. The best survival games do more than just throw bigger or faster enemies at you. They have varied attack patterns, requiring you to combine and switch between multiple strategies on the fly. More depth here, and even a change in sound effect to warn of a bigger threat in the room, could have done a lot to increase player immersion.
Great Start, More to Come?
Sleep Tight is the perfect example of keeping one central idea free from fat and well executed. Despite the clashing of genres, and potentially challenging Pixar-like setting, within minutes of play you’ll grasp all the core ideas and understand where the game is taking you. You can then set your mind to climbing the unlock tree and experimenting with different combinations of items to reach a higher score.
There is certainly a tonne of room for growth. Larger and more complex and varied bedrooms, enemies and forts, mid-wave objectives and sidequests, and co-operative play, seem like natural next steps. Yet it’s hard to criticise We Are Fuzzy for not biting off more than it can chew. In this regard it reminds us of Overcooked. There is a great little game here with plenty to offer, and huge potential for a sequel to ratchet it all up to another level.
But don’t wait for a sequel; Sleep Tight is certainly worth playing today… perhaps, just before bedtime?
