Wake-up – Wake-up Test – Shall we go back to bed?

Minimal gameplay

In Awakeningwe play Walter who wakes up (!) from a nightmare with small memory problems and a headache in a house suggesting that everything is not going well with Martha, his wife, and Dorie, his daughter.

The first thing that jumps out at you is the beautiful graphic quality of the game for a development under Unity. Generally, we have much flatter renderings with this game engine than in the case of Reveil. I could have believed that we were using Unreal Engine.

About the gameplay, on the other hand, we are in the basics of the game style: finding objects with which to interact in order to open things and solve puzzles. With players having little else to do than click around in realistic environments, pressing a button brings up a magnifying glass on the level interactive elements of the decor. This does not mean that examining said element will be useful (we open a lot of drawers for nothing) but it limits the frustration of missed clicks to a few pixels.

Still within the framework of simple gameplay, there is no management of objects: if they are useful, they go into your inventory then are used automatically when you find what they are for. If a good part of the game consists of clicking in the right place, certain puzzles are more sophisticated than others, perhaps even a little too much as it creates a disconnect with the simple exploration of the game.

Likewise, in terms of gameplay, there is no combat or weapon management.

So, it’s light, isn’t it?

The ambiance package

Not really, no. Reveil is above all an atmosphere game. Very quickly, he takes the player into this search for his daughter and his wife and distills through messages or reflections from Walter questions and doubts about what we lives. It seems true, but it can't be true. But if it's a dream, it's too realistic, right?

All things considered, Reveil is eyeing the excellent film Jacob's Ladder in his management of the reality/madness border.

You can encounter enemies, but this can only be solved by stealth and/or escape and in both cases, the game is effective with a tension there, well reinforced by creepy sound effects and, it must be said , an abandoned circus (with all the attractions in addition to the big top), that's not very reassuring (but the game offers many other environments not to be outdone).

The overall atmosphere can be heavy and the game throws in some well-found jump scares and although I'm not usually a big fan of settings that change behind the players' backs and other teleportation facilities, it's used with a certain parsimony in Reveil and above all the scenario justifies this rather well.

Short and good or short but good?

To get to the end of Reveil, it takes between 2 and 3 hours. The designers tried to extend the lifespan by adding a certain number of collectible objects for each of the 5 chapters making up the game but I found that it was a bad idea, because if you really put yourself in search of these objects, we leave the atmosphere that the game knows how to set elsewhere. Personally, I paid no attention to this research.

In absolute terms, it's short, but we can credit Reveil for using this playing time well to get into its story and provide a whole bunch of answers and even alternative endings. And in the end, I find that the game lasts as long as it needs.

Something that may annoy some people is that Walter is a huge chatterbox who spends his time commenting on everything and verbalizing almost everything. Beyond certain sometimes stupid remarks, we will regret above all the tone that is sometimes a little too light in the face of what is happening.

For fans of horror games, Reveil is therefore one of the good picks this year despite its somewhat short lifespan which may encourage you to wait for a promotion.

Tested by Aragnis on PlayStation 5 with a version provided by the publisher