This is going to be a soft recommend. This is definitely not for everyone, it might not have been for me. Playing it sometimes I felt like "wow this is cool" and sometimes like "well, this is kind of tiring", which I feel is a good way to summarize how I feel about the game. Somethings are great, somethings are okay, and somethings are bad.
Great stuff:
- This is definitely a labor of love, almost entirely made by a single developer. That means 3D modeling, programming, story, sounds, level design, obviously music, and mostly everything else. That's A LOT! I'm a game developer as well and have never tried working on everything on a single game, but I can tell from experience by doing like 50% of each game I made, making 100% is A LOT. It feels great playing a game that has received so much love in its development
- The setting is extremely unique. This whole "sleeping" theme, about dreams and nightmares. The whole town and different area settings, the characters, how the gameplay ties itself. I've played tons of indies and can tell that there's nothing like it
- It's one of the rare cases where a game doesn't allow its influences to dictate itself entirely. This game references A LOT of games. The menu sound effects reminds me of Zelda. The combat reminds me of A Hat in Time. The sandbox platforming exploration reminds me of Super Mario 64. Some music remind me of Banjo Kazooie. There's a tree that's DEFINITELY Deku Tree from Ocarina of Time. The game even references Seinfeld in a tiny joke. What I mean is, by playing the game you might see a bunch of references and obvious influences it had, but the game never stops feeling unique
Okay stuff:
- The platforming. It's okay, not great (otherwise it would be on "Great stuff" haha). It's waaaay too 10% or 100%. You either jump 10% height or 100% height. You're either at 10% speed or 100% speed. For example, your character has a set maximum speed, but you can jump and perform a slide that propels you WAY too intensely forward without being cancelable. You don't have "in-betweens" in your movement, every move goes way too hard. But it has some good stuff, you have a good variety of vertical and horizontal movements
- The stamina system. I just don't think it has a place in this game, it just makes it less fun. Imagine Mario in Super Mario 64 lost 30% of a bar of stamina whenever he long jumped. It just adds unecessary waiting and makes it feel worse to combo moves that cost stamina, which are many
- The camera. At random points it gets very buggy and even inverted for some reason, but otherwise it works well
- The story. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but it didn't make much sense to me. It was one of those cases where when you think something will FINALLY make sense, it starts making even less sense. I'm okay with these types of lore heavy stories that require you to really use your brain to interpret it, look for stuff you missed online or even discuss with other people. But I think these types of stories are better suited for games that have shorter cutscenes, like Hollow Knight for example. It just doesn't feel good to watch a cutscene for several minutes and just not understanding it
Bad stuff:
- The dialogue system. When you're in a dialogue, the game gives you two options: Press A to skip text, or hold B to skip the entire cutscene. The problem is, the dialogue bubbles display text with a very slow typewriter effect (an effect many games use where letters appear one at a time), but when you press A instead of showing the whole current text, it skips to the next one! Which means you are forced to wait for the typewriter effect. This makes 'some' sense if the dialogue is voiced, but even when it's not voiced you can't press A to show the whole text! In my opinion even when it's voiced you should have that option. Also some cutscenes are not skippable with B for some reason, which is kind of annoying in a game that wants you to replay stuff from time to time
- And my final point and biggest issue I have with Mr Sleepy Man: the game structure itself. Maaaan it's confusing. The game is a sandbox, which means you can go literally anywhere. But it's not a Mario 64 type of sandbox where there are many levels and each level is a mini sandbox. It's more of a real open world style of sandbox, think something like maybe Goat Simulator, you start in one point and from there you can go anywhere. My biggest problem with how it's done in this game is because you don't have to interact with the open world at all, and I only realized this by the end of my playtime. You see, it took me 9 hours to beat the game, but in the middle of my playthrough I was realizing I was doing stuff that didn't seem to progress the main plot. I was exploring the world, feeling like I was doing some sort of progress, without realizing I could already have beaten the game MANY hours ago. That's when I was realizing how weird and flawed the structure of the game was
If you haven't played TLOZ: Breath of the Wild you probably have already watched or read something about it. That game has an area called The Great Plateau, it's where you start in the game and after that there's a whole world to explore. In that game, you can leave this starter area and beat it at once! Go straight to the end in Hyrule Castle, fight the final boss and everything. But the thing is, that's EXTREMELY hard with your character stats all down, and 99% of the players won't do that. In Mr. Sleepy Man the opposite happens. You can finish the game in The Great Plateau, you kind of don't even need to leave it. And most players did just that.
I realized it because, as I was exploring the game's sandbox, I was doing very basic missions and was getting golden achievements for that. Achievements on Steam that have been completed by less than 10% of players. And when I finally got to finish the game, many many more people have done that. Because the means to finish the game are right there in the starting area. There's a small detour to fight a boss in another area, but it's so close to the starting area that it doesn't count for much.
This game has a big open world that's begging you to not explore it. The whole world outside of the starting area serves only for you to collect stuff you don't even need. You can collect shiny things which are entirely optional except for a single one, I believe, and cloud coins which increase your maximum health that gets way too big allowing you to tank everything. You actually use the shiny things to allow you to kind of "fast travel" through the game, but you don't need that because you can just beat it already in the starting area.
Realizing it, it felt bad. The game has 100% content, but you only need to interact with around 20% of it. You can beat it without meeting tons of characters, without visiting many many areas. And I'm not talking about end game stuff, I realize some games have optional areas, but in here it feels like the entire game is optional. Usually it's like, 20% of the content is optional stuff, in this game it's 80%.
Conclusion:
Having said all that, the game is worth a shot! It's definitely a labor of love, the developer clearly dedicated a lot of time and hard work on it. Even though it seems I have more negative then positive to say about this game, I don't regret having experienced it and do still recommend for all platformer and wacky stuff enjoyers out there! It has a very unique comedy/horror style which makes it worth trying
