Mr. Sleepy Man

what a joyful little game. one can clearly see the early 3d era influences, in a world with its very own artstyle. the gameplay feels sometimes a little bit challenging, but not in a too frustrating way. thank you for this funny experience!

Mr. Sleepy Man is an impressive debut from solo developer Devin Santi: a colourful, absurdist send-up of 90’s collectathon platformers that revels in nostalgia with one hand and flips it off with the other. The story is a bit a bit shaggy - you play a sleepy man attempting to unpack the complex trauma of your…mentor? Friend? He’s wracked with anguish over the loss of his other friend - a prominent cereal mascot - see, they used to be real tight, just play this game-within-a-music-video-within-a-game, it’ll all make sense. What we’re really getting at here is a takedown of nostalgia, in games and in life. To sleep, to idle in dreams, is to stay static, choosing the comfort of predictable and orderly games over the fear and risk of moving forward in life. Teefy isn’t happy gazing at his pointedly-named Lonely 64 - really, he’s miserable trying to conjure up a long-gone past with Dinosaur Jones - but he’d much rather stay in a land where time literally refuses to pass than to accept that he’s chasing a dream he can no longer return to. It’s up to our indifferent sleeper - whose own dreams remain a mystery - to teach him a lesson. Where the story critiques nostalgia, the gameplay invokes it, inviting comparisons to classic Rare platformers - though the dashes of dark, absurd humour prevent the game from being regarded as pure pastiche. Mr. Sleepy Man certainly hopes you’re awake enough to notice the underlying tension in its presentation, and not sleepwalk through your playthrough and treat it only as another indie throwback. The game’s structure will prove challenging and maybe confusing to some. Sleepy is not interested in holding your hand, and while it’s not too complicated an experience, the lack of tutorializing and clear missions create an imbalance the game is excited to play with, throwing unusually shaped and arranged levels at you just to see how you respond. This gleeful sense of chaos is woven throughout; the rigid objectives of a standard collectathon are shattered and reassembled into a bizarre mosaic. To complete our objectives there are some characters we need to help, but most we need to torment. Of the core five items needed to complete the main game, some of them come from boss battles that come at the end of meaty exploration sections; others appear after relatively trivial interactions with nearby NPCs. Collectibles abound - kind of. I gathered all of the game’s 64 “shiny things”, each of which required a reasonable bit of work to earn. Additionally there are scores of other objectives available, most of which are strange, obscure, and unrewarded. It’s interesting, considering the game’s cynical approach to the genre, that many players boast uncritically their delight in thoroughly accomplishing tasks like “bother a tulpa of Jerry Seinfeld 17 times”. (Hey, I did it too - I wanted to see if anything would happen.) The lopsided approach to structure and objective is mostly a matter of taste, and how much one wishes to be in on the joke. There are some weaknesses that feel less tongue-in-cheek, chief among them the score of mechanics that are introduced (MM-style time loops, OoT-style musical spells, Sunshine-style pure platformer levels, Banjo-style move upgrades) and used less than a handful of times. These make for some exceptional moments of delight and challenge, but they feel a bit suffocated by the game’s unwillingness to pick a gameplay direction and stick with it. (It should be said for those who are picky about such things: there are some minor bugs, but not enough to really affect my playthrough. The breadth of material, the strong art direction, and the impressive sound and music design more than overcome a few technical limitations.) Overall, those looking for a classic-feeling platformer will find a lot to like in Mr. Sleepy Man, though it can feel at times like you’re playing a title you were a little too young for with a lost game manual. There’s more slumbering below the surface, though, making Mr. Sleepy Man worth a deeper consideration.

Hesitant recommend. + Nice tunes + Unique vibe + Surprisingly touching story bits + Very impressive for a solo dev * Not really for youngest in the family, due to certain themes * Short playtime (Completed the main story in 5h, although there are extra objectives) * Plenty of HP upgrades so dying is not an issue through the whole game, but completing certain optional objectives is surprisingly strict time-wise and can cause frustration - Jank - Minor bugs - Story felt a tad incomplete as it stood, left me wanting more from it Demo gives a pretty good idea about the gameplay, although it does not touch the story bits, which took me by surprise in the full game.

It's with an extremely heavy heart that I have to leave a negative review, as this game has the bones to be one of the greatest 3D platformers of ALL time. This game is NOT NEARLY polished enough for a release, in terms of gameplay OR mechanics. The camera is incredibly whacky, it glitches out frequently, shoving my line of sight into places where I don't want it to be, behind random objects or at random angles. Don't even get me started on playing with KBM (granted I understand that this is optimized for controller), but on KBM it is TRULY unplayable with the way the camera works, it's speed etc. Moving onto the character controls. They are FAR too boaty, Mr. Sleepy Man feels like he is floating all over the place and completely out of control, I feel like I can't be precise with his movements where it matters, and the input timing constantly feels lately or way off. There has been multiple instances that have required speed, but when I go fast or try to jump from platform to platform it simply doesn't even register the input at all. Now let's say that it's intended that the character is very floaty and out of control, well at that point then the game just wouldn't be for me on the basis of opinion. I personally feel that 3D platformers call for precision in order to not only make them enjoyable, but even playable, and Mr. Sleepy Man constantly feels like he is out of control, and literally on an ice rink. The game literally has a maneuver that requires a quick turn, but 7/10 times the quick turn isn't even straight back and forth, but rather a very small loop that can walk you straight off a platform in tight platforming instances. The bones of the game though are incredible, the vibe is immaculate, the audio and the music is phenomenal and the story is amazing and memorable. I find it quite fortunate that it falls this short in terms of gameplay. I'll have to change my review if things are fixed, but for now my heart is broken.

It's a fun enough game with an interesting premise, I like it although it is a bit rough around the edges. The movement is ok but a bit floaty. There aren't that many distinct characters but they are interesting. The whole thing is very vague with the gameplay structure not being immediately obvious and even the tips that you can get are often not enough which is problematic in a game that isn't that well known since there aren't proper guides for a lot of things. I had things break a few times and the object culling is a bit over aggressive in some places. This is a good game and I like seeing more personal creations like this, just be aware that it's not going to be ground breaking.

i think this game has a lot of good ideas but the execution didn't turn at as well, i've had so many small issues that made the game unfortunately not fun for me when i started the game, i selected that question block that plays a random five second second before you start playing and the first song i ended up getting was something like "you'll get cancer and die" and it immediately soured my first impressions and i was really hoping this type of humor wasn't all over the game, thankfully it wasn't that much but i still kind of don't really like the overall humor of the game mr sleepy man doesn't feel nearly as fun or satisfying to control like other 3D platformers i've played, i can't quite put my finger on why but one big reason i can tell was whenever i wanted to dash, i always would get confused between the blanket and pillow buttons, because if you're on the ground you use the blanket to dash, but in the air it's the pillow to dash, i know it's because the pillow is a weapon and the blanket is a glider so they can't both function as a dash both on ground and air, but it's very inconvenient when i think "i need to dash" and press the wrong button each time, aside from that the gameplay feels kinda fine, i do wish the game was a bit more cohesive tho, because it kinda sucks how you're thrown in with barely any explanation of the main mechanic of the game, because i got jumped between a nightmare(?) and a boss and then was in the nowhere and i wish the game at least clarified the main mechanic is basically having to restart your night, there's also no timer on screen like in majora's mask so you have to rely on finding clocks to know the time, but if you're somewhere without clocks then you have no way of knowing how much time is left until bedtime, and i assume you can't clear certain objectives past bedtime i also just am not a fan of this game's voice acting, all characters with spoken dialogue almost have very little important things to say, and then nothing important, it doesn't help that they're all irritating to listen to and reeeeeaaaaally drag on their words and sentences that it gets exhausting to sit through, it's a minor complaint but i wish they had more interesting things to say or at least gave more direction other than just one important piece of information and then nothing, if you need hints, then you need to buy them at the shop, i didn't find any other in-game way to find hints from different characters, the reason why i mention hints is because you have a blank to-do list, but no indication of what to do, you can naturally complete some of them by messing around and experimenting, but there are some stuff that you probably will need hints to figure out and you can't "unlock" objectives, you either know your objective after you finished it and crossed it out, or buy a hint also when you start the game, you're only guaranteed to get the blanket, because it's in the same room you start in, but i don't really know how the game expects you to get a pillow (your main weapon and air dash), the next objective is to go to the clock tower which would unlock the shop, but i feel like the pillow should be a prioritized objective in the beginning since there's no tutorial that leads to a guaranteed unlock of the pillow, i only managed to get it by exploring a bit before going into the clock tower, but i feel like the game should give you a linear set of objectives that make sure you get your base toolkit before letting you loose to explore freely the game didn't click with me and i unfortunately didn't like it

Скажу, что мне все понравилось кроме управления. В целом могу рекомендовать, если любите платформеры, это просто не мое

An incredibly charming game that is a ton of fun to just mess around in, but also has Plenty of stuff to do on its own terms with a large variety of... tasks, and tight platforming challenges 48 hours well spent! Probably more after I post this

This is a fun, extremely polished collectathon-like experience focused on experimentation and discovery, with insanely detailed lore, in the style of n64 games of yore, a deep message about nostalgia, an amazing soundtrack (If Dreams Remain is a total banger) and...it's all made by ONE guy? Like, tripleA games should be ashamed by what the DeSanti one-man-army accomplished, refined, and charged with feeling and emotion. Is this for everyone? maybe not unless you're into 3d platformer and adventure games. Was it fun for me? absolutely, though the nostalgia left me with a heavy heart. I can't wrap my head around why this game isn't more popular and dominating the retrogaming communities, getting interviews, and hopefully a community that will dig into the game and reveal its most hidden secrets if there's more - and I think a lot has gone undiscovered yet. I just have the feeling that there's more to the ending that nobody has find out yet.

Go to bed.