As much as I might like winter, it's hell for commuting. The buses are crowded, the darkness has sapped the colour from the air. Each day feels like it begins after the journey out and ends before the trip back home. The perfect time, then, for Krillbite Studios to release Mosaic - their eerie corporate follow-up to 2015's Among The Sleep. After a four year ride to work, Mosaic is clocking into PC stores in one month's time.
]]>When I first heard about Krillbite's Among the Sleep, I was instantly intrigued. A first-person horror game from the perspective of a two-year-old toddler? Where and when can I play it? You see, I'm not usually very good with horror games. Matthew and I screamed ourselves silly when playing P.T, and I generally get quite stressed out when things are chasing me down dark hallways. But I figured if the main character was only two years old, nothing that bad could happen to them, right? RIGHT?
]]>Whereas Among the Sleep explored the terrors of the world through the lens of a child, it seems Krillbite Studio's next venture, Mosaic [official site], aims to tackle themes of adulthood desperation and alienation by way of the 9-5 rat race. I say this with a degree of uncertainty as the Norwegian developers have kept pretty schtum with regards to exactly what their next project entails, however they have now revealed a short teaser trailer.
]]>You can hardly step foot in the RPS Treehouse nowadays without crushing a rusk or slipping on a vomity bib. Everywhere you look: babies and their detritus. As the least parental and perhaps most monstrous limb of the RPS Hivemind, it's now my responsibility to handle games about babies, lest a more delicate person burst into tears. So here I am, explaining that Among the Sleep, the horror game about how foolish babies are, received a free prologue chapter last week. I'd missed it because the RPS letter pile was stuck together with what I do hope was puréed swede.
]]>Furniture seems to snarl and rear in the shadows, shifting uncannily. The hum of a fridge is the growl of a nightmare creature, all shadow and spite, and every door handle is farther away than even tippy-toes can reach. Among The Sleep begins with the promise of a waking nightmare, of familiar things corrupted and seen from a new perspective. It begins as a game about a frightened child in a house at night but like many childhood fears, the illusion doesn’t last. Here's wot I think.
]]>Youngsters enjoy staying up way past their bedtime, as if the world might become somehow more magical when the lights go out. That's why the adults want to keep it to themselves. They're right of course - after 9pm life is a series of bawdy music hall routines, bourbon and romantic riverboat liasons. Occasionally bedtime is a safe time though. Toddler terror simulator Among The Sleep has been hibernating beneath the blankets for quite some time but a new trailer has just arrived with a release date attached. And, as the headline suggests, that release date isn't far away at all. The game will be available on May 29th, across the three major platforms - Windows, Mac and Linux.
]]>During a recent trip to Oslo, I found two members of Krillbite working in the same office space as Red Thread Games. Before sitting down with Dreamfall Chapters, I spent a couple of hours in the company of a teddy bear, sucking my thumb in the dark. Among The Sleep is creepy, as I’d expected, but there are hints of something far darker than night terrors in its shattered domestic spaces.
]]>Among The Sleep has a great hook. Horror games often require the player to feel defenceless, unable to fight back and barely able to flee. Well, says the man at Krillbite Studios, what could be less capable of defending itself than an infant? A slug, perhaps. A slug in a salt mine. But tiny toddling humans are quite rubbish, particularly when they find themselves trapped in a surrealistic nightmare that requires them to navigate a warped version of their own home. A new in-game video shows a game of hide and seek, and makes the game look even more like a prequel to Amnesia than previous footage had indicated.
]]>Among The Sleep - aka, the scary one wot has you playing as an impressively nimble baby - has proven to be quite an intriguing prospect. Between the extreme vulnerability inherent in playing as a squishy crymachine and the wealth of themes (imagination, attachment to parents, etc) it could explore, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how far it toddles. Unfortunately, that won't be happening too terribly soon, as Among The Sleep is snoozing right past its late 2013 release date, tossing and turning in the nightmare realm of development until spring 2014 instead.
]]>Babies are the truest scions of terror. They represent the most primal, universally relevant fears we humans can have: responsibility, loss of freedom, uncontrollable fecal matter, etc. Among The Sleep, however, is not a horror game about raising an infant (although, thinking about it, that could be incredible), but rather being one. It teeters onto the scene at a good time, given that small-time survival-horror's been hit by the Slenderfication Beam and the Dead Spaces and Resident Evils of the world don't seem to understand that it's not particularly scary to be the unstoppable monster that slaughters everything. A breath of fresh (read: putrid and rotting, with a hint of squash-flavored baby food) air is much appreciated right now, and you can have a go at it this very second. So hop to it. Oh, but don't step on the cracks. As we all learned from our childhood peers on the playground, lives are at stake.
]]>Googoo gaga blurble snort gaaaaaaaaaa goooooooo Among The Sleep mama baba kitty gwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa survival-horror where you play as a two-year-old goooooooogaaaaaaaa eeeeeeeeeeeee burp now on Kickstarter waaaaaaaaaa hungry screamcry blurrrrrrbwail but is the game actually any good ooooo bottle gagagoogoo ga naptime I played an alpha demo to find out.
]]>Baby-troubling Among The Sleep is the only survival horror I'm interested in. The cute game of controlling a waddling baby through a scary house reminds me of the time when I was two and lost my teddy bear. It was pretty harrowing, but my dad found it about three feet away from where I was sitting. I survived, but the scars run deep. I could ply my therapist with more and more cash, and I could keep buying those expensive adult nappies, but I think I need to confront the horror head on. Among The Sleep will eventually help me out with that, but not before others help it out first on Kickstarter.
]]>Today I learned that it's really hard being a fly. People are always like, "Man, what I wouldn't have given to be a fly on the wall during that conversation," but they don't know. They can't even begin to fathom the maddening struggles of day-to-day... er, millisecond-to-millisecond fly life. Spider webs, errant gusts of wind, leaves detaching in a gentle dance of death, twisting and sailing to signal your doom. But, thanks to Krillbite (they of creepy crawly baby crawler Among The Sleep), you can now see the world through a fly's hideously compound eyes. Well, OK, actually you can't, because The Plan's a third-person game, but that'd be near-impossible to control anyway. There's plenty of atmosphere to make up for it, though. Oh, and booming orchestral music. We can't forget that.
]]>Krillbite are hard at work on their first-person toddler-horror Among The Sleep, but in order to keep their creative juices flowing, they've also found the time to develop a free, experimental game called The Plan. Details are (intentionally) sparse, all the better to surprise the audience when the game releases on February 10th. The website reckons that "The Plan is an experimental, self-discovery videogame exploring issues of death and meaning" and the trailer suggests it will be an attractive experience in which the player controls a fly. Soarin' Kierkegaard, perhaps, or Flyodor Dostoyevsky. That sort of thing. Take a look and perhaps read our words about Among the Sleep while you're here.
]]>Among The Sleep's main character is two-years-old. In every culture except dog, that means he's woefully under-prepared to do anything except crawl, cry, and make everything smell horrific by proxy. So then, when the game's Internet-famous trailer threw the teetering tot into a nightmarish gauntlet of hallucinatory horrors, it provoked many a raised eyebrow. And why not? It may sound crass, but recent horror-themed games have made a rather disturbing discovery: if you want attention, put a child in a high-risk (or even fatal) situation. Just ask Dead Island's infamous trailer and Limbo. Both games ultimately received mixed reactions, but they certainly didn't go unnoticed. For Among The Sleep developer Krillbite, though, it's not a matter of drawing gasps or coaxing a single tear from your eye or potentially doing both at the same time and causing you to choke hilariously. There's a reason, after all, that this one's first-person. We're stepping into a child's feet pajamas and seeing a child's world as colored in by a child's hyper-imaginative mind. Without its main character, Among The Sleep probably wouldn't even exist.
]]>What contains stealth, scares, a rather unique first-person perspective and surreal dreamscapes colliding with recognisable realities? The answer is Among the Sleep, in development at Krillbite Studio in Norway. It could be the most interesting horror game of next year. Here's why:
Among The Sleep invites you into the mind and body of a two year old child. After being put to bed one evening, mysterious things start to happen.
The trailer below, spotted at Edge, is also why.
]]>
