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Don't Wake Me Up

by Baudelaire Welch

2024
Humor
ChoiceScript

(based on 1 rating)
1 review

About the Story

You’re trapped in a malfunctioning virtual reality with no memories. No memories, except of every video game you’ve ever played. Jack into a wild night in a virtual world you’ll never remember.

Armed with puns, pop culture, and a sharp dose of sarcasm, can you muddle your way through levels of satirical video game pastiches, back to reality?

Adventure through virtual worlds alongside a delusional gamer, an actual emo vampire (who really wishes he wasn’t an emo vampire), a poet from outer space, and a dashing princess in shining armor, among others! And perhaps, just perhaps, learn a bit too much about the kind of person you are when the real world isn’t watching.

A satire of the trapped-in-a-video-game genre, and a tragicomedy on the theme of dating sims.

Don’t Wake Me Up is a 400,000-word interactive novel about love in video games, where your choices control the story. Entirely text-based, and driven by your imagination. It is written by Baudelaire Welch, a professional game screenwriter currently working as a companion character designer for RPGs.

• Play as nonbinary, male, female, straight or queer.
• Travel through 6 worlds inspired by different video game genres
• Wield a weaponised top hat
• Rack your brains in a spaceship escape level inspired by old-school adventure games
• Compete in a classical music-themed monster truck rally
• Lose yourself in a cyberpunk casino
• Date the Ultimate Video Game Fanservice Vampire
• Or, date the Ultimate Video Game ‘Best Girl’ Waifu
• A period piece honed in early 2010s internet cringe
• Bifurcates entirely halfway through the game based on your love interest.

Sometimes true love is a wrong dialogue choice.

Ratings and Reviews

A thought-provoking adventure which doesn't quite end happily, February 11, 2025

The story starts out with you trapped in a videogame universe, trying to figure out what just happened. For the first part, you travel through several videogame worlds, meeting some other characters seemingly in the same predicament while being treated to various videogame references and jokes. It's an interesting start, although there is one very annoying spaceship puzzle which gave me a lot of frustration on my first run (it took me three attempts to beat it, on a blind playthrough) and alone really deterred me from multiple playthroughs.

There are two romance interests in the game. Be warned, there is no happily ever after here. Trying to keep things spoiler free, the game splits into two separate paths depending on your selection, with one RO path having much more content than the other. Here, the game explores some really thought provoking themes of AI, reality, existence and so on. I felt it was really well done, although folks after a happy ending would likely disagree.

There is plenty of branching at the second half of the game, and the writer released a full flowchart. However, if you want to see most of it, this necessitates playing through the earlier chapters all over again and doing that annoying spaceship puzzle all over again. Having checkpoints or a save system (seriously) would have made exploring more endings a less daunting proposition. For me, I played the game twice (one with each RO) and was too lazy to go back for more.

It's definitely a unique game in terms of genre and structure, and one that really gets you thinking. I liked it a lot, but it's definitely not for everyone.

And please give me the option to skip that spaceship puzzle on second playthroughs! (I know the game gives you an option to skip it, but I only got it after failing the puzzle twice.)

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The following polls include votes for Don't Wake Me Up:

Outstanding Choicescript Game of 2024 by MathBrush
This poll is part of the 2024 IFDB Awards. The rules for the competition can be found here, and a list of all categories can be found here. This award is for the best Choicescript game of 2024. Voting is open to all IFDB members....

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