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how do you fuck up a gameplay premise this simple
It's like FNAF 4 but worse
If Midnight Evil didn’t do it for you due to the Urklings, Shut Eye is pretty similar with different terrors waiting for you to let your guard down. Midnight Evil involved less shadows and environmental tone, but Shut Eye does have those two things going for it although the overall personality is non-existent.
In Shut Eye, you play as a kid who wakes up in the middle of the night to find a handful of things coming to get you. One moment it may be a garden gnome, the next may be a mechanical crab with a baby head ala Toy Story‘s Sid’s creation. Using a battery-dwindling flashlight to lower your anxiety and a music box to calm the nightmares, you must survive night after night with them growing increasingly more eager to kill you.
Each new day moves the time required to survive up by one hour with the ending time remaining the same at 7am. As the time to survive grows, the amount of time for the creatures to get close shortens with each day. Managing both the flashlight to reduce anxiety and music box to push back the monsters at the risk of increased anxiety becomes a chore, especially when waiting for batteries to respawn.
Much like Midnight Evil though, it’s extremely repetitious. Each night is the same thing, except here, there’s no real life behind any of it. There’s no story being told and nobody speaking to you. It’s just the act of keeping the enemies at bay over and over again for no real reason. Even the smallest of narrative could do something for Shut Eye. Instead, it boils down to playing until you get bored, which doesn’t take long to achieve.
Shut Eye could have been something cool. Framing it around a child fearing the night is a simple fix and adding in more things to torment the kid would have helped too. Sadly it does so little, and in a genre ripe with games just like this, there’s no real reason to keep an eye on this one.
In Shut Eye, you play as a kid who wakes up in the middle of the night to find a handful of things coming to get you. One moment it may be a garden gnome, the next may be a mechanical crab with a baby head ala Toy Story‘s Sid’s creation. Using a battery-dwindling flashlight to lower your anxiety and a music box to calm the nightmares, you must survive night after night with them growing increasingly more eager to kill you.
Each new day moves the time required to survive up by one hour with the ending time remaining the same at 7am. As the time to survive grows, the amount of time for the creatures to get close shortens with each day. Managing both the flashlight to reduce anxiety and music box to push back the monsters at the risk of increased anxiety becomes a chore, especially when waiting for batteries to respawn.
Much like Midnight Evil though, it’s extremely repetitious. Each night is the same thing, except here, there’s no real life behind any of it. There’s no story being told and nobody speaking to you. It’s just the act of keeping the enemies at bay over and over again for no real reason. Even the smallest of narrative could do something for Shut Eye. Instead, it boils down to playing until you get bored, which doesn’t take long to achieve.
Shut Eye could have been something cool. Framing it around a child fearing the night is a simple fix and adding in more things to torment the kid would have helped too. Sadly it does so little, and in a genre ripe with games just like this, there’s no real reason to keep an eye on this one.