According to an interview, Hot Air — Nitrome’s first game — was allegedly inspired by Lemmings, with one of the developers getting the inspiration by using the fan tool in Lemmings 2. Sandman, their second game, takes its inspiration more directly. Your goal is to guide a bunch of sleepwalkers through fifteen levels by sprinkling sand on the ground, either to force them to change direction and stop them from killing themselves, or to change the terrain to allow them to scale walls. It’s simple, and… unlike Hot Air, mostly remains that way. While new obstacles, like instant death water, or evil sleepwalkers who will kill your sleepwalkers on touch, are added in as the game progresses, there’s no real spike in difficulty, and remains fairly basic from beginning to end. This is… more to its detriment, than anything. While there are moments of tension where you spend the entire level thinking on your feet, and levels where you have to figure out where exactly you’re meant to place your sand, the game, otherwise, is overtly willing to take it slow, trapping your sleepwalkers in one area while the player can do everything they need to beat the level. It’s fun, certainly, and there’s a decent cerebral loop in terms of figuring out what you’re meant to do, but as a whole… this is a game that really wears its particular influences on its sleeves, and while decent, doesn’t particularly stand out on its own because of it.

As a side note, as one of the (few) games so far ported out of Flash, I thought “okay, so I won’t run into anything that stops me from beating the game like in Hot Air,” I started it in HTML5 and for the most part that was true… but then I reached the end of level eight and the Sleepwalkers weren’t inclined to go through the gate, no matter what I did. I tried restarting to see if it was a one-off, and (after fighting through another glitch where your additions to the terrain stick around even after a restart) found that I couldn't actually beat the level. I was ready to call it a day and a DNF, but… then I returned to the Flash version and found that neither of those glitches were in effect there. While there did seem to be lag in how much sand you could put down, and while there seemed to be a different glitch where sometimes the Sleepwalkers would just ignore you when you did the thing that’s meant to change the direction they go in… the emulated version on flash runs better than the HTML 5 port? Maybe there are bugs only present in this particular port, but… I wouldn’t lie in that this might not bode well for the future…