One of my most memorable experiences with a game in recent years was playing 2015’s Toren, by Brazilian indie developer Swordtales. Toren is a PS4 game with barely PS2-standard 3D graphics, some awful camera handling, battles lifted directly from Ico, and numerous functional bugs. I found many of its dream-like sequences magical despite all that, and its story and imagery – a girl in a tower reborn again and again, making slow progress and climbing over statues that were the dead former versions of herself – was so powerful that mere technical deficiencies could barely diminish it. Even when points where you had to lose to then be able to succeed by using the literal manifestation of your failure weren’t perfectly carried out, I still got goosebumps as the realisation of what was happening and all of the force of the conceptual implications crept up on me.
I didn’t get goosebumps at any point in Sleepwalker, but it reminded me of Toren in the way its concept is strong and unique enough to be a delight in itself, even as it is imperfectly conveyed. You play as a dog, Ralph, whose owner, Lee, is the sleepwalker of the title. At night Lee goes unknowingly walking along, over rooftops and assorted other dangers. Your task is to keep him safe in any way you can, from holding him back to forming a bridge over gaps to getting into fights to cause distractions. There is an echo of Lemmings in Lee’s mindless walk from left to right, though he is more helplessly oblivious still, with the player having to take control of someone else to do the saving.
Ralph – the much more put-upon Gromit to Lee’s Wallace; the Tails to his Sonic – doesn’t ever die permanently. Only Lee can do that and get you to game over. Instead Ralph just takes all of the suffering that the universe and the player can heap upon him – the beatings, the toxic waste – and carries on going, like the cartoon dog in a cartoon world that he is. The tale of Sleepwalker is one of total, supernatural self-sacrifice, and while it gets funny, it is never as funny as the old cartoons it takes as its inspiration. It’s too startling of a concept for that. The fact that as the player you have to take the actions to consign Ralph to these terrible fates, observed by no one, brings out the darkness that is already present. If anything, if there was more searching out absurd ways to die it would be better still. Certainly it would improve on the bits where you have to give Lee a leg-up and launch him to higher platforms, which are irredeemably fiddly.
The way that the humour is darkened is particularly interesting in the context of the circumstances of Sleepwalker’s success and release. Somewhere along the line of its production it got signed up as the official game of the biannual charity event Red Nose Day, for Comic Relief, which has had plenty of tie-in pop singles reach #1 but only this one computer game to date. Comic Relief began in response to the same famine as Band Aid and Soft Aid. Unlike that charity compilation, which had a starving child on the cover but no link whatsoever to the event in the games included, Sleepwalker makes a point of its relation to its charity event, if not to the cause. Lenny Henry and Harry Enfield lend their voices to its intro. It means that the sense of presenting itself as throwaway comedy is intensified, which is a strong part of Sleepwalker’s failure to follow through fully on its concept. The strength of the concept still gives it an appeal to compete with better executed but less imaginary contemporaries.
Gallup Amiga chart, Amiga Action, May 1993