This is a really good game, and I really liked how the story is set up to fit with the mechanics standard to this whole genre (of course you’re clumsy, you’re a baby!), but I feel dissatisfied with the ending. Well worth a look, though.

So, in Among the Sleep, you’re a toddler. You can move around by crawling or toddling, have to climb up on things to reach desktops or doorknobs, and are basically helpless against your surroundings. A late-game puzzle challenge is simply to move between things without banging into them. And when you get outside the known areas of your house, reality expands in a dreamy, repeating mess of familiar things – we see early on how a dark, scary closet can seem to go on forever, and each new area seems to follow the same principles. And that’s your first big clue as to what’s going on with the monster stalking him. Everything is a baby’s perception of events. The role of notes is even replaced by scribbled, barely comprehensible pictures showing things like a monster and a baby under the table.

The story is generally very subtly done, and difficult to work out in a way that mimics the baby’s own difficulties…until the end.

At the very end of the game, it’s morning, and you come out of the closet and crawl down to find your mom in the kitchen. But right before that, you’re attacked by the monster, fall down a pit, then see your ordinary mom standing in various spots of light, all saying increasingly abusive things, in complete defiance of the perception setup of the rest of the game. So, you know exactly what you’ll find in the kitchen. The monster is the alcoholic, abusive mom, who has torn your toy and is sobbing on the floor. She then responds to her kid’s appearance by shoving you away and continuing to sob. Then you crawl away to the door, where your dad is there to take you away from it all, sharing the voice of your loving teddy bear who’s previously said such things as, “No child should have to go through this,” and other Good Parent comments.

And it ends up undermining how the game is set up, the idea that the baby sees Daytime Good Mom as one person and Nightime Drunk Mom as another, with only a faint understanding there’s a connection.

The spotlight sections suggest she’s often at the end of her rope with you, but what we see from her during the day seems genuinely good – you drop your glass to the floor and she doesn’t get mad, she’s made a cake just for you, your room is filled with toys… And this makes perfect sense with the dichotomy idea, that she’s trying to keep it together for you, but gets drunk at times like after she puts you to bed, which, given kids don’t sleep through the night all that well, means there’s a good chunk of time when you want her and she’s not there. Instead, she’s just secretly abusive in general, and evilly keeping you from your loving dad out of spite. (A number of people thought this was Child Protective Services, which is definitely a much better option but is obviously not what’s going on.)

I think this is largely to make it have a decisive ending. You can’t have the kid fixing things through the dreamlogic challenge of finding memories of when his mom was good, because the whole problem is that she behaves in two different ways, and being good sometimes doesn’t change that she’s bad other times. And having him come down to find his mom still drunk but moving back into Good Mom mode the way she presumably does each morning wouldn’t resolve things neatly – he’s still in this bad situation, and it means the players don’t actually fix or change anything by completing the challenges of the game. But it seems more honest and fitting the whole storyline than that Mom is all-around terrible, somehow got sole custody of the kid and is pettily trying to keep the dad from ever seeing his son even as she cracks under the strain of being sole caregiver, then Dad shows up in the nick of time anyway to save him.

The whole thing becomes more of a mess with the DLC prologue, where in a more overtly magical setup you crawl around freeing your toys from icy prisons by closing the windows and then playing music to make more happy/warm, but then one falls out the window and when you go into the snow to get it your mom somehow picks you up but misses the toy you’re an inch away from so it’s left to die in the snow – seriously, what parent isn’t used to scooping up a kid and their toys? Meanwhile, she’s leaving the dad because he hit her. It really doesn’t add any nuance to the story when there are all of two camps online:

1) Ugh the one time we didn’t do the standard dad=abusive it’s still back to that in the end.
2) Just because he hit her once doesn’t make him abusive, it was probably because she was the real abuser since we know she’s abusive because she shoves the baby once.