About three years ago Cory Davis, the creative director of Spec Ops: The Line, and Robin Fink, long-time guitarist with bands like Nine Inch Nails and Guns n’ Roses, announced their game studio Eyes Out by doing some screeching in the California desert.
Now we’ve got the impressively atmospheric trailer for Sleep Awake, a “first person psychedelic thriller that explores the realm between slumber and death.” It’s coming sometime in 2026.
“I cannot sleep, I cannot sleep, I must not sleep,” says the protagonist as we’re shown psychedelic images of some otherworldly place that alternate with grim, grimy images that take place somewhere called the “Somnological Institute,” where I’m going to go ahead and hazard a guess that some really morally questionable experiments are taking place.
“Sleep Awake is an immersive first-person psychedelic horror narrative experience that explores the realm between sleep and death,” reads the official description. “Submitted to perpetual insomnia, the denizens of the last known city on Earth are reaching a panic crisis of reckless experiments in an effort to avoid The HUSH, the inexplicable disappearance of those who sleep.
“Playing as Katja, you must survive the devotees of various depraved death cults and desperately try to stay awake. Solve the puzzles of this mysterious world while avoiding the grasp of the death cults in an attempt to shatter the horrors of the past.”
I’m especially in love with this one detail of the trailer: Many of the images that seem to take place in a psychedelic world(s) are awash in pinks and violets and scarlets, which sure as a color palette is fine—but then just before the end of the trailer we get our desperate-not-to-sleep protagonist dropping a few vivid red-pink-violet drops into their eyes. It’s a really well tied together bit of work.
That aside we’re got some real creepy dudes in masks, writhing greasy pale bodies, some torture, medical paraphernalia—nothing quite as grotesque as that ILL trailer from Summer Game Fest on Friday, but all the hallmarks of some good, old fashioned horror thills.
You can find Sleep Awake on Steam and it’ll be out sometime next year.
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