Die Awake: Sleep Study is a choose-your-own-adventure horror game for android, iOS, and desktop, and the first entry in the Die Awake series. it’s set in a post-capitalist alternate reality where every service-sector experience is recorded and fed to AI for automation.
you’re a QA tester. a recording lands on your desk flagged as unusual: a subject signed up for a self-administered overnight sleep study, arrived at the assigned tract home, and followed the AI onboarding to the letter. shortly after, things in the recording stop behaving, object displacement, emotional unrest, events that shouldn’t be possible. your job is to stress-test the recording through guided interaction and decide whether it gets fed into the model or discarded as an anomaly.
the house is 666 appleton dr., identical to every other one on the street. a wellness company runs the study, and the subject’s in-app sleep companion, Sleepy Steve, walks them through it one message at a time.
you don’t just watch the recording, you make meaningful choices that branch it. guided interaction lets you stress-test what you’re seeing: push on it, follow it where it isn’t supposed to go, decide how far you want to look. it’s a horror game, and the further you push, the more it has to show you. how you test it decides what surfaces and what you finally rule the recording to be. it can resolve more than one way, and most of them are bad for everyone involved.
the shape of it
the recording runs across the subject’s nights in the house, arrival through the end of the study.
the look is analog and psx-era: cold fluorescent interiors and a wholesome suburban surface that won’t stop being slightly wrong. it’s less like a haunted house and more like an interactive broadcast you weren’t supposed to catch. every scene carries its own video loop, ambient bed, and sound design, all made in-house. everything is beige. everything is fine. the flowers are dead but that’s seasonal.
it’s built in flutter, with rive handling the interactive bits and a twine/twee pipeline behind the branching. the scenes themselves are made in unreal engine and blender.
where it’s at
right now it’s a playable vertical slice: all game features are working, with the full skeleton of the recording drafted end to end. the back half and most of the video and audio are still in active development.
sleep study is the first Die Awake. the plan is to finish it, ship it across android, iOS, and desktop, and build the rest of the series out from there (spoiler alert - the next title is mid-evilmedieval).