The Sandman is very sort of a sequel to The Crooked Man. It’s is pretty solid in story terms. There’s some stuff in the initial setup that seems clumsy, but it actually pays off very nicely in the second half. It rerminded me of The Witch’s House in that there actually was a reason for seemingly incongruous stuff like putting the frog in the slot.

Designwise, eh, random RPGmaker style flaws. There’s cutscenes where actual gameplay stuff is accomplished and “gameplay” that is figuring out what part of what room she needs to stand in her house to get the next thing to happen. Also one of the puzzles requires numbers and you’re supposed to look at your phone and use the time despite that having nothing to do with anything as far as I can tell, they just share letters involved.

But wow, the story was really worth it.

(If you play, make an extra save right before showing the pink gem, that’s one of the two decision points for the endings.)

So our protagonist is an insomniac, and we can see that also miscelaneous other stuff is going on to stress her out, like bullying in school and an absent father. She finally manages to get to sleep for a bit only to wake up and find all the clocks stopped at midnight and everyone asleep and impossible to wake. There’s what seems like a connection here, that she’s an insomniac, but the other people she eventually finds don’t bear that theory out.

(A minor niggle here – she calls 911, but it doesn’t occur to her to try to call out to see if she can get help from someone in another town. Having her try and the call not go through would make more sense.)

She finds David, of last game, and I found that intriguing because it makes you wonder when this is taking place. It seems like he’s still in pilot school, so this takes place before the first game, but you’d think he’d have remembered this… For contrived reasons she’ll insist they split up each time.

In each location, she finds someone she knows in trouble, even though everyone else remains asleep. And the situations are kind of off. First she finds her friend being tormented by shadow girls calling her a liar, and I was waiting for a reveal that she was secretly supporting the bullies or something else…but they just shout at her a lot without saying anything the main character doesn’t already know. At the end, the girl just gets upset and runs away. Then when she goes to just check out a building at random, it turns out the bully is there and mysterious army men have decided to kill her. She rescues the bully only for the kid to insist she wants to just stay there and wait for her mom to save her rather than even consider leaving, and has to be convinced despite how obviously suicidal this is. She manages to get the bully out only for the girl to get lost or something while they’re running, and that’s even weirder. Finally, she goes to look for her dad and yup, he’s awake too somehow and they get chased by a fire-breathing dragon only for her to lose him right at the door and then it all vanishes.

And it’s weird – we have an obvious reason for her to be immune to whatever made everyone sleep, because insomnia, but the idea everyone she knows also just happened to be immune seems pretty contrived, as does how they’re all in trouble and how she can’t ever get any of them out. Also odd is that she faithfully reports this to David each time and he seems to find it perfectly believable.

Because it’s not actually David, and none of what she saw was real. What’s really happening is the guy in charge of sleep has decided to put everyone to sleep forever. He’s an agent of the sandman trying to make her happy so she’ll fall asleep already and decided to do this by hurting people she’s upset at.

And the fact she’s messed up enough to want that is telegraphed well. Her flashback with the bully shows the other kid crying when they were in kindergarten because her parents fight all the time, and her response isn’t anything actually reassuring, just that well, her mom is outright dead but she never cries because it’s bad to cry. And it seems like it’s just some warped aesop until we see that like any kindergartener, she was just regurgitating what adults told her – her father got sick from overwork and she was told she had to be good because it was her fault he was stressed. And this then recontexualizes a lot of other scenes where she takes things calmly and doesn’t fight back. She really isn’t half as accepting of it as she seems, she’s just repressing everything and now we know why.

It’s at this point she decides to go to whatever fairyland the sandman lives in to stop the whole eternal sleep business, and the fact she’s cracking up becomes pretty important in the ending. As she explores his place, there’s suggestion after suggestion that the sandman isn’t malicious and furthermore that as a fairy, it’s impossible for him to just decide he’s sick of his job. Finally, we find his journal where he says he wants to stop time and put everyone to sleep so he can get sleep, but that the eternal sleep isn’t actually going to be eternal – the pretty obvious reading is that he stopped time as well as putting everyone to sleep because he intends to take a nap then wake them up and restart the clocks without anyone noticing. Admittedly, something to double-check before going along with it, but by this point we can read his writing so we could write a question for him. Our protagonist, however, may just start screaming about how selfish he’s being, much like baby her telling the other girl to suck it up already. (It depends on this soul thing, which admittedly makes little sense.)

Mind, the actual endings are a mess as usual. I kept my soulgem, my choice of endings led to either her deciding to stay with imaginary boyfriend despite the fact she’d shortly die (possibly by starvation, given we’re told she can’t eat the fairy’s food) or her heading back home to be surprised by the fact everyone’s still asleep and now she’s all alone forever except maybe for the boogieman in her closet. Giving up her soul (???) allows her to feel sympathy for the sandman’s desire to sleep, but that means that if she kills him, she has a breakdown over her guilt, then rationalizes it as not her fault and how everything is really everyone else’s fault, then she asks imaginary boyfriend to fulfill all her wishes and she becomes evil fairy queen of the night somehow and will live forever. It’s very similar to the problem of Mermaid Swamp, where each ending is pretty interesting but they don’t make sense with each other.