Back to Bed Review (macwh)
TLDR Back to Bed is a short obstacle navigation puzzle game with an interesting premise, but it feels that its potential hasn’t been fully explored.
Context Back to Bed is an action-puzzle game where you have to guide a sleepwalker NPC (Bob) back to bed by placing obstacles in his way. Unfortunately, it seems the developers didn’t care as much for gameplay and level design as they did for the visuals.
Plot There is no actual plot, only the contextualization that you are controlling Bob while he is sleepwalking.
Aesthetics The game’s action occurs inside Bob’s dreams and the setting is appropriately surreal. The concept and visuals are pretty well-made, which seem to be inspired by paintings of Dali, Escher or Magritte (and the voice-over by Twin Peaks). Unfortunately, other than providing interesting visuals, the surreal elements don’t really have any underlying meaning and are mostly used randomly.
Gameplay And that feeling of wasted potential is even stronger in the actual gameplay. Level design seems mostly arbitrary, rather than forcing the player to explore particular mechanics. And these mechanics are not properly introduced nor explored. For instance, some obstacles are only used a couple of times, and the “vertical dimension” was only part of level solving once. Even “nightmare” mode is uninspired (the same levels, but requiring the collection of keys along the way).
The controls in general are cumbersome and and lead to a lot misclicks - perspective tricks and puzzles with timed events are clearly not a good combination. Bob can “die”, but for some unexplainable reason falling leads Bob to respawn but other kinds of deaths force the level to be reset. You cannot save progress mid-level and there are no undos.
Value I completed the game in 4h. You can select previous levels from the menu. There is a single progress slot. Achievements relate to completing the game and triggering certain events in-game, do not require multiple playthroughs. There’s also a speedrun achievement but it’s easily done. With all that in mind, this is a 5€ game (that I bought even cheaper in a sale), so I’d still recommend trying it out.
PS: despite the warning, the game runs in recent macOS versions.
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