Sleepless in the Sapphire City

[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.

This is really very good.

I know my schtick is usually to dress things up, do some tapdancing with a barely-related personal anecdote or set up a joke that pays off at the very end, or at minimum lay the groundwork for judgment instead of just announcing it. But here we are – and I’m saying this about a linear Twine game that uses vampirism as a not-even-thinly-veiled avenue to talk about loss, alienation, dysphoria, and the compromises we make to get through what we optimistically call our lives, at the level of concept there’s not much about Sleepless in the Sapphire City that’s very interesting, much less novel, at all.

The secret sauce, unsurprisingly, is the writing. I copied at least half a dozen full passages from the game into my notes, since they stand on their own as tiny poems and I wanted to be able to read them again. Here’s one of the first, and one of my favorites:

We say it’s dark
but look at that:
midnight
and the sky glows.

It’s not a haiku, metrically speaking, but it does everything you want a haiku to do. It’s also a nice bit of exposition, because the sky isn’t just bright at night due to ambient light pollution, but because the game takes place in a world with two moons, reflecting double the sunlight at the unhappy vampires below. That’s not just pointless worldbuilding, though, because that in turn sets off a rumination from the main character, who wonders if somewhere there’s a universe with one moon that’s more peaceful, because people can sleep better at night and the oceans are calmer. It’s got the structure of a joke, but also serves as a thematic reminder that one person’s worst-case status quo is another’s yearned-for escape.

Here’s another one:

I’m too aware
of where I live
I don’t say
“I live in a body”
I should say
“I live in a box
stacked up with other boxes
in a whole mountain of boxes
all the same
all different
and I’m a letter
in a word
in a sentence
on a page
in a newspaper
on a film reel
in a library
on a street of libraries
and we used
to be a novel”
I should say that
if I could speak to anyone
without leaving bite marks.

Reduced to its semantic content this is trite, but with these words and this meter, it’s a devastating statement of alienation and isolation.

I should say that the game isn’t all vibes and self-contained poems. Actually, there’s a reasonable amount of infodumping about bespoke vampire lore, but mirabile dictu, it’s actually a unique spin that updates the tropes while maintaining close ties to the traditions that birthed them. The cleverest bit here is the take on vampiric weaknesses: it’s not sunlight but the blue light of LCD screens that’s anathema to the undead, leaving them cut off from the screen-mediated society of humans; the symbols of faith that harm vampires are no longer religious ones, but corporate brand logos; and it’s not literal stakes but stakeholders, that is, connection with people who give a damn, who are the deadliest danger. Again, this has the shape of a joke, but is actually a canny way of repositioning the relationship between the vampiric protagonist and the elements of the living world, both good and bad, that will harm them, turning the logistics of managing an undead life into something more broadly resonant, into mythology.

There’s a plot too – it’s simple in its outlines, but effective, taking the protagonist from a childhood idyll through bereavement before ending in a squalid, heartbreaking climax. Or actually, not ending there, because my only complaint about Sleepless in the Sapphire City is that after it builds to a searing turning point, it keeps going for another ten minutes, with those final minutes largely return to the register of the opening, rather than sitting with the enormity of what’s happened. From a certain point of view, that’s thematic – pretending that a just-committed crime is no big deal is a classic coping strategy, after all, as is pretending that sleeping with someone you just slept with was likewise no big deal, and protagonist’s just done something that partakes of both those things – but I still found it a little disappointing.

That ending is a real weakness, but I minor one, I think. I return to where I started this review: Sleepless in the Sapphire City is really very good, exactly the reason why I keep coming back to IF decade after decade.