Don't go to sleep

Hellooo!
It's sunday night but I'm here to review another game instead of sleeping. And this is appropriately a game about sleeping, or better about dreams!

"Don't go to sleep" (ok I'm doing that right now!) it's a short mystery/horror/sci-fi visual novel made by manolo24 (author also of Live Again) with RPG Maker VX for the the Spooktober 4th Annual Visual Novel Jam event. So yes, this is a visual novel, where we have little control on the story. It took me 35 minutes to get the true ending, and it will take even less to ged one of the three bad ones, anyway you will be invited to save after each meaningful part of the game (you have seven moments in which you can save, but only four save slots).

"Don't go to sleep" is the story of Jimmy, a normal guy that is living a normal life until he makes some bizarre dreams that start haunting him. But is the reality of his life real or it's also part of a dream? Soon he also finds a monster that he has to face in order to make his nightmares disappear... if these are not reality! Well, get ready for an amazing adventure that will first confuse and then surprise you!


This game has battles. Easy, but still battles! And they are quicktime events as you can see in this screenshot!

In this game we have no control of the character, it's a visual novel where we watch several cutscenes and play some segments between them. There are a couple of choices and a pair of combat encoounters. The choices are easy, I mean you have just to select your option between two and see if this leads to a bad ending or to a continuation of the adventure.

Combat is a bit more complex: we get three attacks that are unleashed playing a simple quicktime event, but you have to remember to rest every three attacks otherwise you will be hit. Fail a quicktime event and you will be it too, but these are very easy. Really. It's a simple custom system that it's pretty easy and if you fail it's because you wanted to, winning is easy. For the rest there isn't much to say: the game is linear, and besides two combat encounters and two choices you have just to read and see what happens!

Graphically the game mainly uses the cute assets from BilouMaster's resources made for the game "Almost Heroic" and Ocean Nostalgia from Oceans Dream. The result is a cute and colorful setting with some special effects that makes the dream parts distinct from the parts set in the real world... even if after a while things will get messed up, and see that it's not so easy to distinguish dreams from reality...
Mapping is pretty good, simple abut not too bad, there are some typos (Marco is sometimes called Marcos, there is one "Jimy" and some other mispelled words, but that's all the error/imprecisions I found).


OW! Being considered less important than a chicken hurts. A lot!

Foinal Verdict
"Don't go to sleep" is a linear little story with little gameplay. I really wished it was possible to actually control the character, but it's ok. On the other hand there's a custom system, combat, that while being extremely easy, it's still an unusual feature. In this game you will read a lot and interact rarely, so I guess it's not a game for everyone even if I enjoyed a lot the story since it has also some funny moments and other scenes that are pretty much WTF events. Typos aside, writing is ok, I mean it comvinced me to play until the end, even if I got a bad ending due to a bad choice... but yes, sometimes it's fun also seeying what is the epilogue of a bad choice, of course!
In short this is an ok game, it gets a bonus due to being made for an event, anyway it's unlikely I will replay it after watching all endings. Still not bad at all!