Mr. Sleepy Man

This game evokes nostalgia, playfulness, and grief in ways I couldn't have anticipated when purchasing it. Most games don't elicit any emotional response from me, but this one does so gently that I actually want to know the developer.

Mr. Sleepy Man is a great love letter to games from the N64-Gamecube era. Its world and characters are wholly its own, but the inspirations are clear, from Mario Sunshine and Majora's Mask to Klasky-Csupo's weird aesthetic. Devin's soundtrack also fits the game perfectly, but is just a great album in its own right. While it seems like primarily a platformer at first, it's actually just as much about exploration, solving puzzles and meeting weird little guys. This game surprised me several times with its story and some absolutely amazing sequences that will stay with me for a long time. If any of that sounds at all appealing, I'd suggest going in as blind as possible and just discovering it all for yourself.

A game for the creamed corn in a can enthusiast

For the game itself, it's nearly perfect. The only thing I disliked were the wonky controls, but since this isn't a hard game, it's really only a minor annoyance, and even then, the fact that a 3D platformer was made by one person at all is extremely impressive, even if the movement is unpolished. What I really want to use this review to do is to write out my thoughts on the story of this game. I don't know if I'm interpreting this right, but I don't see any other reviews putting it like this: I feel like this game perfectly encapsulates the sadness that comes with growing up in the golden age of gaming, then living in a dead, broken world with a dead, broken video game industry to match, where the only thing you can think to do is "play in the past too long" because there's "nowhere I belong". However, as Teefy put it: "This world is broken, and the more we try to play with the pieces, the more broken they become." (Meaning that these games lose their wonder the more you play them, and even though it was impossible to imagine as a child, you very much can play every older game worth playing to death. It might take 10-15 years, but you can do it.) While it might seem childish to mourn the death of video games to this extent, the reality is that Teefy was mourning the death of the world, and placed so much importance on video games because that's literally all he had left... It was never about some person named "Dinosaur Jones" who was merely a cereal mascot that served as a metaphor for childhood joy. They try to tell us the world isn't dead. When we ask why the streets are empty except for pockets of drug zombies, they tell us it's because everyone is a NEET who spends all day on the internet. When we ask why the internet is nothing but AI, they tell us that's because everyone went back outside. When we ask about this contradiction, they tell us we're crazy. I really have no idea what's going on anymore, but I'm at least happy to hear any fellow human voices in the void. While I will continue to play whatever few good indie games that come out no matter how much slop I have to dig through to find them, if there were ever someone who feels the way I do, and is considering quitting playing video games, I would suggest Mr. Sleepy Man as the final game they should play, since it's the perfect "final scene" for a gamer.