Alright, here we go. This'll be a fairly short "review" after a rough playtime of seven hours and much, much regret. First off - I did not enjoy myself, but the people I played with had a significant resistance to nonsense and wanted to see if the game is even beatable in its current condition.
In case you're wondering: Yes, it's indeed beatable. Out of the... roughly 42 games we played, we've won one. All on easy, with roughly 3 people on average total. It didn't feel like a victory though, since all it boiled down to is sheer luck.
My main gripes with the game is probably what makes it so appealing to the eyes of the developers: the time limit, the lack of guidance and the disappointment of how much more useful the chalk could be if the only option you had wasn't a simple "x". Let's quickly go through these: the time limit is absolutely ridiculous. Even on easy, the maze is big enough so that you'll never be able to "map it out" even once anyway and that's assuming you [b]don't[/b] get lost, which you will, all the time. The only person that has partial immunity to getting lost is whoever is lucky enough to get hold of the chalk at the beginning, but even so, it boils down to marking dead ends all the time which, if you're unlucky, might not even have been dead ends in the first place since the first lever you need to pull removes one of the walls in front of the exit! (What a fun idea!) There will be games where you won't even find a single lever in 10 minutes, then there are some where you start out close to one, but still don't manage to find the other - it's a ridiculous predicament. Talking about randomization for a second, this shouldn't be a thing. If you have a team that sort of "knows what it's doing", then success or failure should be fairly consistent as a result. I don't expect to win everytime, but right now, whether we even find a single lever is not up to our skill, but to a roll of the die. Similarly, the developers expect you to make choices on whether it's smarter to sneak or hide, rather than run, but in practice, there is no choice: You always make a run for it. There's simply no time to waste and most enemies can be avoided so easily by just... running, that it's pointless to do any more anyway.
Secondly, the lack of guidance is just ridiculous. Sure, it's supposed to be this gigantic maze where you just get lost and if that's the kind of thing the devs wanted to accomplish, then congratulations, it worked! It's just not fun - there is nothing you can go off, no clues, no hints, nothing. Perhaps it's easier to clarify, I'm talking about the sorts of hints that could give you slight sense of direction, perhaps there are markings on walls, or you could see faint light *above* the levers that you can see even when you're a tad farther away. Sure, it doesn't help you get there at all, but at least you know where you're attempting to go! As I've mentioned before, right now, there is absolutely no way to know which way is correct. enemies can be anywhere, the people you're looking for are camping the levers for the most part (especially fun in dead ends!) and there's nothing you can do apart from marking every single dead end and slowly making your way through maybe a third of the labyrinth before the time runs out. On easy. I'll talk about the strategies my group attempted to use a bit later on, so bear with me.
The last point I want to speak about a little bit are the items. They're god awful, but why? Two of the items serve a very specific purpose: stun a very specific monster. The stick is alright at doing its job, but mostly because the creature it protects you against is very vicious in the first place. Now if there was any point in sticking together, that'd be a cool feature, but right now, when you don't have a stick and encounter one or two after turning a corner, you're pretty much done if you haven't saved up stamina or are just plain lucky. Now for the flashlight: it's completely pointless. While you don't see much in the dark, that usually doesn't matter at all and the enemy it's supposed to protect you against is easier dealt with by just running away. It literally cannot kill you as long as you're running and it's not really giving chase either. It's just a very pointless piece of equipment to begin with. Now on over to the general-purpose tool, the infinite stone bag. It pretty much helps against every single monster appart from the ones that can only be beaten by the stick and redirects them towards the impact point of the stone for a few split seconds, if even. This is useful in a variety of situations, so not much to complain here. As for the last item, the chalk, it's ridiculous. Since you can only place "x", there's only one real function it can serve: marking dead ends. And that's about it! Why wouldn't we be able to draw arrows, or different signs, if feasible even free drawing for more useful, customised notes to potentially mark pathways we *wanted* to take, but couldn't just yet, or ones that might have a crossroad we haven't fully explored? It would make a very mediocre item that much more useful, but apart from that, it'd be neat if more than just one of the group could have it. The reason being, that literally everyone who doesn't have the chalk will get lost, eventually, while the chalk player happily creeps along at a snail's pace, but can still get lost when chased, which is fun, but rarely happens.
Before I finish this quick (...intended) nagging off with some pointers that *could* potentially be implemented, allow me to say what we did and why I arrived at the previous conclusions. Our group of 3-4, once comfortable, had just one strategy. Everyone grabbed an item, (with three people, whoever got the flashlight also had the chalk) and we made a run for it. At every crossroad, we'd split up to quickly search for dead ends that if found, could be marked down with chalk. Now while this sounds like a pretty insane strategy (just sprinting around the maze the entire time) it's currently the only feasible one. You simply don't have time for strolling about or building any sort of atmosphere, you just run. Enemies get ignored (you can run away from most of them anyway, even without a fitting item) and the only time where cooperation becomes sort of necessary is when one of the levers is in a dead-end. It sounds simple, not necessarily fun (it really wasn't, just a grind to maybe one day getting lucky, which we did once) but it lead to the result of beating it once. The ending really has no impact either, but at least it's there, so that's good.
Is Sleeping Dawn a bad game? Maybe. Is it worth buying? Not right now except for when you have a high tolerance for the kind of situation where RNG completely decides over win or loss, even with a full party of agitated rabbits, but that might change in the near future.
Here's a small list of things I feel like could quickly improve the game currently, some of it might be unfeasible, but I'd like to see it anyway. Since this is just written with very little organisation, there might be things in here that I haven't mentioned, but bear with me.
[list]
[*] For the love of god, either make the randomization less frustrating, or the time limit more generous. As it stands, each run is decided by a coin toss, not the skill of the individuals playing it.
[*] Give subtle hints at the general direction of levers if you don't intend to increase the timer. Perhaps even add the option to give more / less hints, depending on player preference or difficulty setting. These can range from the simplest markings to suble lighting above the maze you can only see from a distance or similar things and encourage communication with players.
[*] Having limited items is nice and distributing them sounded like a decent enough idea, but some of them simply have no identity or even purpose. Chalk / Flashlight could easily be improved.
[/list]
(Ran out of characters...)
