Developer: We Are Fuzzy
Publisher: We Are Fuzzy
Platform(s): PC, Switch
Review code provided
When I was young, I read a book about Dracula with illustrations that scared me so much that I slept underneath my bed so he couldn’t hide there and bite me in the night. Perhaps if I’d been a bit more like the kid protagonists of Sleep Tight, I would have been able to confront my fears and given him a gleeful barrage of death instead.
Sleep Tight takes the childhood nightmares we all went through and brings them to life in the form of a wave-based tower defense twin-stick shooter. It’s a mouthful to categorise We Are Fuzzy’s charming hybrid as it’s such an amalgamation of different ideas that shouldn’t really work. Even if it may take you some time to warm to it, Sleep Tight will eventually have you beckoning the night like a bloodthirsty raver.
The premise is simple: survive the night. Sleep Tight promotes experimentation by allowing you to find a playstyle that suits, whether that’s as a straight run and gunner or as a cackling creator of enough turrets to recreate the end of The Last Samurai. Though its gunplay is surprisingly tight and the array of unlockable weapons is varied, Sleep Tight’s biggest hook comes from how you set up your forts.
Things start off small and somewhat underwhelming with just a light turret and light wall to protect you against the incoming swarms of monsters, who’ll make light work of both if you aren’t careful. Eventually, however, you can upgrade these basic tools to their heavy counterparts, which means serious artillery fire backed up by an almost impenetrable wall. You can sit back in relative comfort and watch as the monsters throw themselves at your defences like lambs to the slaughter and channel your inner Sun Tzu. I spent an entire week’s worth of in-game nights just watching on without a controller in hand as my defences did their job.
It was a rough ride getting to that point, however. Sleep Tight, even on its easiest difficulties, isn’t a simple proposition as it’s always slowly but surely cranking up the difficulty. The first night and the twentieth couldn’t be further apart, meaning that you will need to smartly buy your upgrades early on and have a backup plan for everything. Despite its cutesy looks, Sleep Tight is totally unforgiving.
To help your kid survive the night, you are awarded suns for surviving to each morning and stars for every monster you kill. Suns are the meat and potatoes of Sleep Tight with you starting off with a meagre eight before eventually upgrading to unlock more. Stars, meanwhile, can be used in combination with suns to unlock new powerups and weapons. It’s an interesting approach that’s somewhat confusing to begin with, as well as it taking more than a while to grind towards the most illustrious unlocks.
This creates some frustration when you die after being fairly deep into survival. Having to start the grind all over and the humdrum of the early nights dissuaded me from jumping straight back in after my (many) failures to try to see one more night than before. The ability to permanently upgrade some powerups and skills for subsequent runs would have made the game more inviting for me, but it’s clear that We Are Fuzzy are going for something that players will battle each other on the leaderboards over for a long time.
Once you find a rhythm and the right unlocks for your playstyle, Sleep Tight really does threaten to become something special, however. As mentioned, I depended on my defences for a lot of my fifteen hours with Sleep Tight, but the game rewards experimentation and won’t let you sit on one approach for too long. The monsters eventually rampaged through my fort after I had run out of suns to repair the damage from a previous night, meaning that it was Rambo time.
Playing with a controller is advised for Sleep Tight — it’s a twin-stick shooter after all. The game starts off simple with its “guns”, which are really just souped-up toys. Eventually, your kid is able to unlock all manners of firearms, including a gatling gun and a shotgun to really mow down the things that go bump in the night. If it’s a more heads-on playstyle you want, you can allocate your suns on a regenerating shield and a tonne of ammo to cut through the monsters like a warm knife through butter.
It’s a shame, then, that the monsters really don’t stand out as much as they should. Their designs are fine, but quickly wear when you’ve seen the hundredth in quick succession. The art and promotional material for Sleep Tight paints it as a Pixar-esque delight, though that never really comes through. If anything, Sleep Tight suffers from a lack of personality as there’s no intro cinematic or moments inbetween the waves to pull you into its world. The kids do have their (really peaky and shrill) lines that they will spout occasionally, but apart from that, Sleep Tight squanders one of its biggest selling points.
Still, if it’s an entertaining tower defense you want, Sleep Tight certainly delivers. Arriving at the point where you feel like you could take on anything the game throws at you (before quickly realising that you are wrong) is empowering and deeply satisfying, especially when you consider the long road you’ve taken to get there. I only managed to survive a month’s worth of nights in a single run, but it’s easy to see how some players could continue to push it until they’ve unlocked the many different characters.
Despite some drawbacks, Sleep Tight is an addictive and often endearing hybrid of genres that’s more like a dream than a nightmare. Featuring a tonne of unlocks and ways to play, Sleep Tight is bound to give you many sleepless nights but for all the right reasons.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
