I kind of planned my playthrough of Deeper Sleep just perfectly to line up with the release of the third and final game in the trilogy, The Deepest Sleep, which came out last week. Alas, my weekend was busy full of party planning, party partying, and party recovering, so I only just got around to returning to the darkness last night. The sad truth is that all three of these games are small, quick adventures, ones you can burn through each of them in under 10 to 15 minutes if you really put your heart in it, and so I did my best to make this last as long as possible, and thanks to a game-stopping glitch, it definitely stretched my playtime.
Right. So, at the end of Deeper Sleep, you go down a dark well and find a terrifying “To Be Continued” screen. In this one, it starts with you trapped in a bed, then finding a flashlight, and then in some cult-like building with a bunch of seemingly random rooms to explore. Hmm, all right. Granted, you can always brush aside anything in dreams since reality-based reasoning has no place there. The Deepest Sleep feels both like a continuation in the series and its own unique thing, especially when you come across the newer mechanics not found in the previous two adventures.
I think you could die in Deeper Sleep, but I never did. Yeah, you’re impressed over my pointing and clicking skills, calm down. That said, I perished in my dreams at least four or five times in The Deepest Sleep, and these unfortunate failings stem from the fact that there is a time-based puzzle and stealth-themed bosses to avoid. Wait, is it true that if you die in your dreams…you die for realsies? Uh oh. Let’s not contemplate how I’m typing this blog post any further. Anyways, there’s one puzzle where you have to escape a grouping of three rooms swiftly or succumb to the Bottom Feeders, demons that thrive on darkness; naturally, I didn’t even realize this was happening until the YOU DIED screen popped up. Then you’ll come across a crazy-looking worm boss that can sense quick reflexes, so you have to tip-toe around it or get devoured, and these scenarios are tense and fantastic.
One of the final puzzles in the game revolves around collecting four chunks of stones with markings on them and placing them in a thing on the wall which, when put in the right order, will open a hatch and reveal a ladder. The order placement of the stones is determined by a drawing you find earlier, which is randomly generated, and I put the stones in the right place, but the hatch refused to answer. I even watched an online walkthrough where someone got the same pattern that I had, so I couldn’t figure out how to get past it. Granted, shortly before this stone puzzle, my Adobe Flash plug-in crapped out and I had to refresh the browser, so maybe that had something to do with it hiccupping.
The Deepest Sleep does some interesting things with its story to bring it full circle, but leaves a lot of room open for questions. Alas, they won’t ever get answered, unless scriptwelder decides to go back for more with The Deepest Sleep That Ever Deeply Slept.
Grinding Down 