Electric Sleep is certainly one of the more interesting and unique games I have played in recent memory. It is a visual novel in the senseElectric Sleep is certainly one of the more interesting and unique games I have played in recent memory. It is a visual novel in the sense that you make choices that branch the story but those choices are not dialogue choices but choices in what actions you will perform. Where you will go and what you will do. Where most visual novels take their inspiration from choose your own adventure novels Electric Sleep literally is a video game version of one of those.
You play someone who wakes up in a pod of some kind with others still asleep and a facility that has been abandoned. You then go on a journey that will shed light on who you are, what this place was and why it appears to be empty. Each playthrough lasts maybe 10-15 minutes but there are several play throughs that all shed different light on the overall story. Each playthrough attaches different emotions to you such as anger; joy; sadness; and fear. Once you finish the playthrough for each emotion the game then starts combining them in sets of two. The emotions change the tone of the story and of the choices you get to make. My one issue, and it was a big one, was this all felt pretty repetative. Yes small changes were made but overall you’re playing through the same story multiple times each time getting a small slice more of the big picture. It just felt like a grind after a bit. The soundtrack is well done and the backgrounds have a nostalgic feel to them. The story itself is also very well written. Not only were there no spelling errors that I noticed but the story itself really did have a different feel during the different emotions.
I played Electric Sheep on Linux. It did freeze on me once but other than that I had zero issues with it. There are no graphics options at all. The game is an 8 bit game so I’m not sure what difference having any would have made. There is no manual save option. The game saves after each page of text so it happens very often. There is no menu option at all though in fullscreen mode. If I want to quit the game I have to click in the top left to go to windowed mode where I can click the “X” in the top right. There is also no option to start a new game so if I want to clear my progress and start fresh there is no easy way to do so. The game ran just fine on my system and doesn’t require a lot of horsepower. Only 2.8GB of system RAM and 4% of my CPU were used while playing the game. I played my copy of Electric Sleep from Itch.io.
I started off loving Electric Sleep. For about the first 45 minutes that is. After the 45 minute mark is when I felt like it was a grind and the slight variations of the story were too similar and I was just happy to be done. I finished the game in about 2 hours. I paid $6.21 CAD for the game and feel that is a fine price for the content you get. It is certainly a unique game and has a great concept and good overall story. It just has a little too much filler content that felt like it was padding the time.
My score: 6.5/10
My system:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.1.4 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Mate 1.22.1 | Kernel 5.2.8-1-MANJARO… Expand
