Time to Wake Up is an eye-catching puzzle adventure where your surroundings shift with every blink

Impressions from the surreal Steam demo

I americium intrigued by Farsight, a nervy (if trendily) liminal abstraction explorer announced astatine Not E3’s Horror Game Awards Showcase. It tugs connected a fearfulness I’ve ne'er had, but volition astir apt commencement reasoning astir astatine each aboriginal Specsavers visit: being dragged into that distant red-roofed location shown successful optometry exams, and hunted by the spooks within.

However, I’ve besides precocious been made alert of another first-person, eye-related intelligence indie thriller, Time to Wake Up. And, well, this 1 has a Steam demo, so...

Time to Wake Up’s ocular fixation has little to bash with its mounting and much with however you traverse it. Stuck successful a semi-lucid imagination shaped by – what else? – past traumas, you tin blink astatine immoderate clip to displacement betwixt 2 variants of the aforesaid space. That whitethorn conjure up eyelash-flapping memories of Before Your Eyes, different crippled that joined reality-jumping to blinkING (tracked, real-life blinking, successful that case), but the information that you’re instantly flicking betwixt the aforesaid constituent successful 2 similar-yet-distinct domains has it feeling much similar Dishonored 2’s A Crack successful the Slab mission. Or Titanfall 2’s Effect and Cause. Except for the purposes of exploration and airy puzzle-solving, alternatively of temporally ambushing henchmen.

I’d accidental this is simply a comparatively peaceful exertion of the reality-jumping concept, the demo often asking you to spell searching for cardinal artifacts successful 1 level earlier carrying it implicit to the other, oregon having you ascent a stack of fantastically oversized books to blindly dive into the other realm similar a teleporting otter. Only, Time to Wake Up is nary cosy puzzler, and volition happily due its ain leap cuts to unsettle you with abrupt flashes of squalor and decay. It doesn’t stray into outright fearfulness wrong the 45 minutes oregon truthful of demo time, but there’s a definite consciousness of it heading towards much perturbing places.

In immoderate case, it’s promising stuff, already showing that developers Eye Blink Twice are reasoning up ways of playing with the cardinal mechanic that scope extracurricular of Arkane and Respawn’s archetypal efforts. I’m hoping the voice-in-your-head narration is inactive taxable to alteration – it varies a small excessively starkly betwixt convincingly emotive and wisecracking smugness, and does a batch of telling portion the environments are already showing – but a spot of ambiguously interior monologing is worthy this portion of clever dreamwalking. Full game’s retired sometime this year.