Reviews by Naarel

[untagged spoilers ahead]

I remember receiving some "Wow, that's such a refreshing take on a modern vampire! That's so rare these days!" comments under my Shufflecomp entry, oxblood, and thinking to myself: did nobody play Sleepless in the Sapphire City, or its follow-up, UNDEAD/YRSELF? Because I played them and they were quite inspiring to me, to the point where I put them both in the Special Credits section in the itch description. And Sleepless... was released in 2024! It was in the Indiepocalypse! Why is nobody talking about it?! I have to do everything all by myself in this house, etc etc.

What's the deal with Sleepless... then? We follow Evelin, a vampire, on a hunting trip, since vampires need blood to function and it isn't something you can Doordash (for obvious reasons, but also for less obvious reasons which I'll get into in a bit). That's the most basic description of what happens. All of the events, thoughts, and memories are relayed in a three-column format, in what I consider to be three different voices or viewpoints, and if you know anything about me, you know I love it when the text formatting matters in a game. So I was sold instantly, on a heavy discount at that.

Before we go on, I think I should explain what exactly is the appeal of a vampire for me. I had a long talk with one of my friends about this, and I came to a conclusion that I love my vampires as The Other, but in a very liminal way, where they are clearly inhuman, and yet stuck in the human world and forced to deal with human rules which no longer apply to them. I'm not entirely interested in the narrative of a vampire as a predator or a hunter (though it can be nice!), rather, I'm interested in seeing how the world, with its rules unchanged entirely, turns on those who lived in it without problems before they became something else. Not a vampire as an animal filled with violent urges, but rather, a vampire as a social animal, suddenly deprived of the "social" part of its life.

I quickly realized that sometimes, vampire fiction feels stale or samey to me because it overly focuses on vampirism through the lens of being a danger or an inconvenience to those around the vampire. The only types of allowed pain are the grand pain of no longer being human and the crippling anxiety coming with the urge to drink blood. Ah, how I don't want to kill, and yet I must! Oh, how tortured and unnatural I am in the perfect and just human world! I am but a blemish on the spotless face of this planet, woe is me!"

And I think that one of the points that draws me to Sleepless... is the fact that the setting isn't hostile to Evelin just because she's a vampire — the setting is hostile to everyone, but Evelin's nature as a vampire makes the hostility more pronounced. This is a capitalistic, uncaring hellscape. Brand names and logos burn like images and symbols of gods once used to do because in this reality, they are new gods. The blue light of phone screens is the artificial sunlight of the virtual world, and it burns just the same. And who needs a stake through the heart when a heartbreak is plenty? The city is full of cancerously overgrown derelict buildings, dead bodies behind shady clubs, everpresent cameras and screens. It's rotting, it's decaying, it's "dead behind the eyes". It would be wrong with or without a vampire in it.

Evelin can't go into the beating heart of the city because of all the things that could hurt her there, and she can't leave the city entirely, since there isn't that much blood out there. Therefore, she must exist in the margins of society, in places which were already sucked dry by the system and left to die. I phrase it this way because Evelin herself is (up until a certain point, which we'll get to) "completing the food chain" as a scavenger, feeding on corpses which just happen to be there (the term is, I believe, "necrophage"). And I think that's neat — in a world based on exploitation, a vampire refuses to kill, even with the burning thought that one day, it will probably be necessary for survival. For how long can you keep playing according to the rules? Is it even worth it? Should you even try, knowing it might eventually kill you? If you expect to sit a little with those questions and ponder, well, you don't get a lot of time, because not a short while after they're introduced, Evelin discovers the corpse she found isn't, in fact, a corpse, as she thought, and kills for the very first time.

An interlude to explain something I like to think about vampire fiction because this is unfortunately my review and I have you all hostage, but it'll also be relevant. Blood isn't anything taboo or gross for me because I saw (and accidentally swallowed, thanks to frequent nosebleeds) a whole lot of it ever since I was a child (because of blood tests which were regularly conducted on me, not like, anything sinister), so the gory aesthetic of it and its "forbidden nature" doesn't really land for me. I like my blood to be, unfortunately, baby's first symbolism, where blood is a stand-in for life, and the act of drinking blood is an act of partaking in someone else's life, of having someone else's life becoming a part of your life. This viewpoint is a part of why I love consensual blood drinking scenes — it's a special type of an intimate experience. But when you force yourself into someone else's life, or force them to dedicate a part of their life to you, or otherwise take a part of their life (or their entire life) with violence, it's a pretty bad thing, isn't it? Back to Sleepless... now. Remember what I said about the vampire being, to me, far more appealing as a social animal instead of just an animal?

Evelin's existence is painfully lonely. The people she loved the most, her mothers, are no longer in her life — one died, and one disappeared, and functionally it's just as good as being dead. She can't go to the clubs to meet anyone (because of the blue light there), she can't find anyone on the internet (again, blue light), every outing costs money (and why would she even have it in the first place?)... just where do you meet people when you can't enter spaces to meet people? And even if she could meet people, she still needs to watch out for her heart, so, what point even is there?

All of this talk so we can arrive at the scene which, frankly, kind of breaks me emotionally on some level. Because once Evelin finally kills someone, once she drinks that fresh and hot blood, she manages to briefly connect with someone else. She gets a brief glimpse into a different life, and through this, she briefly becomes alive again; it's no longer her blood and someone else's blood, but rather, their blood. She even kisses the remains after all is done. And I really wish I had words in either English or Polish to articulate how that scene feels but I don't. I really wish I had any words to describe what reading "I only want to discover, to understand/like the child who loved painting so much/he ate the art afterward" made me feel but it's a feeling so deep and viscerally familiar that it feels impossible at the moment.

This piece just understands a very specific type of loneliness. Some of us already live in a world which is hostile and inaccessible. Some of us live in a world where connecting with others outside is near impossible, not for the lack of trying, but for the lack of means to do so. Some of us are confined within empty spaces which are forgotten by the rest of the world. So you turn numb, feeding your need for connection on whatever scraps you can find. That's survival and it's enough until it isn't enough. What happens, then, once someone comes to you with their heart wide open? You're starving and you're afraid that they'll break your heart and leave, so you get your fill and destroy them before they can destroy you. It's a quick burst of something before another long and uncomfortable stretch of nothing.

And there are still many angles I could look at this story from. There is transness, for example (which is yet another layer of "othering"). There are also some advantages to a life lead outside of the norm. If nobody can see you on camera, you can do whatever, even in the surveillance state (as long as nobody else sees you). If your only worry is where to feed from, that already takes many more worries off of your shoulders. There's no need to care much about your appearance when you can't see yourself in the mirror.

And then there are relationships you have with your parents (mothers, in this case), and how they impact you forever. And there's loss of innocence, and if you can ever truly be fully innocent in a world which is very much not that. And there's the contrast of the city blue and blood red. And the uncomfortable fact that, if only there were more vampires, capitalism would find a way to profit off of them. And there's the lore, which I'm mildly aware of through my general consumption of other Nullaverse games. And there is this, and there is that, and there are so many angles I could still look at and dissect one by one, but this review has its fangs on my neck and I'm scared of what it'd see if it bit me.

I think that what I wrote here is still incomplete (maybe one day, I'll complete it) and I only stop here because I know I'd probably spend the entire Review-A-Thon just sitting there and making sure I wrote about absolutely everything, and I still have other games to write about. I really hope that what I wrote here makes it clear that Sleepless... is in some ways very special to me. I don't know. Just go read through it. Five stars. Get out of my head.

NOTE: this review will briefly talk about some sexual stuff (nothing explicit) and is probably not minor- or work-friendly. Also, I talk a bit about identity horror. Also, untagged spoilers I guess?

I generally have very little interest in the isekai genre. I played a couple of games where the protagonist is whisked away from their world and then placed in another, and they all kind of blended together. Many times the world was the same generic fantasy, or a protagonist was the blandest character possible and yet still was the object of everyone's oddly quickly found affections, or they were Gods' Speciallest Boy instantly upon arrival, and I guess none of that is for me.

But I still played Isekai by dott. Piergiorgio when it was first released I believe, back in 2025. Why? I can't remember. What I do remember is that it intrigued me for reasons I can't entirely articulate (I'll try to articulate them in this review; no promises though). Back then, my save file corrupted and I left the game without winning it, only having scratched the surface of available playable content. I just finished my second playthrough, which I won, so while some of my thoughts from the first playthrough had some time to mature, others are still kinda fresh. Unfortunately, for some reason I wasn't allowed to make a save or even start a transcript, as I was getting persistent errors, which I assume could be my fault somehow. I also accidentally closed the interpreter so I unfortunately won't provide you with any quotes. Please just trust me. Thank you.

So, what is Isekai all about? You play as an unnamed human man who awakens to a strange world in the body of an elf woman. Your task? Figure out who that elf is and what is this place. As time passes and your exploration progresses, you learn more about the world and the elf whose body you inhabit. Standard stuff in the "I woke up as someone else in a different world???" genre of isekai.

Some technical things before I get into other stuff. This is a "preview" version of the game and I don't know if it means it's a demo or a beta version of some kind or whatever. Either way, some parts of the game seem to be a little out of order sometimes — for example, text sometimes referred to a bodice which I already took off, or mused about whether or not the elf main character is married to the angel and demon characters long after I discovered that this is the case. I will take the most charitable route and will assume this is something which is meant to be polished in later iterations. I will also not comment on the quality of the prose because I'm sure most of this is a result of English not being the author's first language, and I don't want to pick on that, especially since the author himself requested to not do this in the past. I have to say that some descriptions are hard to follow and my eyes were glazing over them, but this could also be due to the fact that they were long and I had to play the whole game in one sitting due to saves not working. Oh well. Additionally, the narration switches often between "I" and "you", though I'm not entirely sure if it's a bug or a feature, as I'll explain later. I will also refrain from musing about whether or not this work exists to satisfy any particular fetish because if it doesn't, then I'm putting someone in a very weird position, and if it does, then it's literally not my business, good for the author.

(You CAN touch yourself in-game, literally and figuratively, which in addition to some other clearly sexually charged scenes leads me to believe that I might be doing something wrong by excluding the sexual angle, but I really don't want to dissect someone else's sexuality like this. I think it's kinda gross. The author doesn't tag it as "pornography" or anything either, which is yet another reason why I'm not touching on that angle.)

So, we wake up in the body of Etuye Alasne, an elf woman blessed with a pair of large breasts (the game doesn't let you forget about it, and it's even partially relevant at one point when we have to retrieve an amulet from between them) and two wives — an angel named Miyai and a demon called Azuj. (Their real names are much longer but let's keep it like this for the sake of clarity. I don't even mention them again anyway). The wives are out of the house for some reason, but that's fine since it gives us time to explore and find out more about our isekai'd self and the world around us.

I have to say, the world is... interesting, in several ways. This is a world of elves, angels, demons, and dragons. There are mages and warriors, and most stuff you'd expect from a fantasy world. Magic is an art similar to science, measurable and provable, which I usually like. There are some worldbuilding choices which were very fun for me, like elves having six fingers on each hand (the sixth finger being another thumb) and or being able to see temperature, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out how they came back in smaller details later (thermal paint announcing whose house we're in being warm to the sight since we're at a married throuple's house, a base-12 counting system being used instead of a base-10).

Another intriguing part is the strange dissonance happening around things which our world would consider, to one degree or another, taboo, or at least unsavory or unsightly in some way. Urination and defecation, for example, aren't something that is confined to an enclosed bathroom stall, but rather, is something done in an open room where others can watch. Adults can breastfeed each other, which is entirely non-sexual in nature (the text makes sure you know that. It's actually kind of heavy-handed about it). Nakedness is not a cause for embarrassment, just another part of life, and sexual acts are freely represented in the literature. I don't think I'd really think "Wow, they piss in front of each other? How weird and shameless!" because one: urinals exist, two: humanity's been publicly relieving itself even back in Ancient Rome in public latrines which provided no privacy whatsoever. I would also believe that nakedness isn't anything taboo, considering many indigenous cultures around the world have no problem with it. Breastfeeding, perhaps that'd raise my brow, but I could imagine a world where it's nothing but a bonding activity, an entirely asexual show of one's care for the other. But the text is adamant on reminding us at every step about how completely normal and non-sexual all of this is, in turn drawing attention to how not normal and sexual it would be in our world, creating a bit of an uncomfortable space. It's the "don't think about an elephant" phenomenon — of course you're going to think about an elephant now! If we're constantly reminded about how strange and unusual a thing is, it doesn't matter how often we reiterate it's actually fine and normal.

It made me think that this game exists in several liminal spaces. There's a space between the unnamed male protagonist and Etuye Alasne. There's a space between "our world" and the world of Railei. There's a space between shameless nakedness and a reminder that we should be ashamed of it. This is what makes Isekai so intriguing to me, and this is why I wanted to write about it for a long time. This is, also, what makes writing about Isekai hard for me. Because the problem is: how much of it is the dissonance of the author and how much of it is the dissonance of the main character?

The Nameless Man (who we'll call Sailor from now on, since that's his profession) and Etuye are, as the game reveals, the same person, separated by thousands of years. Reincarnation is real in the Materia of Railei-verse, and the Sailor is simply a far younger version of Etuye from the distant past. Over the course of the game, Sailor slowly grows into Etuye's body and mindset, so to speak, but he still starts from the perspective of someone from Earth. Of course, I could read it from the "author just writes what he thinks is hot but is afraid to commit so he says it's not sexual" angle, but I think there's another angle which makes it more interesting for me, which is identity horror, which I love. Do I think it was intended? No, but this is my review, go write your own if you don't like it.

Because think about it for a moment: you wake up in a body that isn't yours, in a world that's not yours, filled with customs which are entirely foreign to you. You are a man trapped in a woman's body, literally, and by gods, there are now two blobs of flesh and fat that jiggle on your chest as you walk, do you even know how massive breasts can seem when you're not supposed to have them, how weirdly conscious you can be of their every move? And the time passes, and you remain nameless as memories of someone else enter your head as if they were your own (because they ARE your own!), and things which you'd never think about become intuitive. Someone else looks at you from the mirror and it's their name you think about as you think about your own name. You read about yourself in a diary written in someone else's hand, with your name rendered in unsure shaky strokes, and you two are one and the same, and you two are separate, and both are true at the same time. All that is natural to Raileian Etuye is strange to Earthen Sailor, and the dissonance comes from their two mindsets melting together as Sailor slowly fades away into his older form. Is Etuye somewhere on Earth with her hand sliding across her uncomfortably flat chest? Is she plagued with a vague feeling that public defecation, which is a completely normal thing, is actually strange and gross?

It's... challenging to try and practice the "death of the author" mentality in a space where the author is very much alive and will tell you where your interpretation sucks, but that doesn't stop me from trying. Isekai is a strange experience, one which I enjoyed in some perverse (Meaning: obstinate in opposing what is right, reasonable, or accepted, not inputting commands with one hand) manner and even found somewhat inspiring due to its strangeness. Recommending it to someone would probably be going a little too far, especially in its current state, but I am waiting to see where a more full version goes, once it releases. I don't know. This is definitely a game which exists, and I'm glad it does, actually.