If my boss came to me and said, “Yes, I tortured you on purpose,” I would buy it.

What is UpWakeNing? This game is a tough-as-nails, rage-inducing 2.5D platformer developed and published by Pham Studio (a.k.a. one guy) where you play as a person stuck in a box trying to climb your way out of a nightmarish fever dream and wake up. Besides having a ridiculous title, this game is basically a horror version of Getting Over It*. If those two combinations do not sit well with you, or you believe Getting Over It is already a horror game, you can stop reading. However, this game does have (slightly) better controls, and instead of an infuriatingly kind and encouraging narrator egging you on, the narrator is sarcastically mocking you every step of the way. 

GRAPHICS 7/10

The graphics for this game are crude and ugly, and the menus look like leftover drawings from a Flash browser game from the 2000s, but I think that’s kind of the point. Everything is made to look unsettlingly creepy; you jump across coffins, jack-in-the-boxes that laugh at you, bones, rusty rebar, eyeballs that continuously look around, and even something that I assume is a stuffed bunny demon. Nothing looks out of place, being that this world is supposed to be a nightmare, and gives off the look of a really messed up I Spy puzzle. However, the lighting is something I wish had been done a bit better, because the environment seems too well lit for a horror game. Luckily, there is little confusion over what the player is supposed to platform on because objects in the foreground are unmistakably in the foreground, so the graphics are both effective and practical in that way.

SOUND QUALITY 7/10

Like the graphics, the sounds in this game are of average quality, but relatively inoffensive. They scream ‘flash game’ to me, because the player’s character makes about four sounds every single time it hits a surface. The player’s character (who I will refer to as “Boxboy” from now on) is also voiced by who I can only assume is Alvin from Alvin and the Chipmunks, because it’s more of a high-pitched squeal. There is only one song that plays the entire time, but it doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay. Other than Boxboy, the narrator, and the music, there really isn’t much in the way of sounds, but nothing feels like it’s missing, and that is a good thing.

GAMEPLAY 8/10

Oh boy… the gameplay. As you can see by the 8/10, that means I like it, right? Wrong. You could not be more wrong. I hate it, but that 8 means that the gameplay works for what it is trying to be: a rage platformer in the vein of Getting Over It. This game requires jumping from platform to platform in an attempt to reach the highest point in the level, and that jumping is controlled exclusively by the mouse and spacebar. The longer you hold the spacebar down, the higher your jump will be (to a certain point). You aim your jump with the mouse, because Boxboy will jump towards wherever the mouse is pointed on the screen. This is a relatively simple control scheme, but in no way does that make the game easy. You can’t change your direction mid-jump, and Boxboy holds momentum, so you need to be absolutely certain of where you’re jumping. This requires an excessive amount of trial and error, and an infinite pool of patience when you fall all the way down to the beginning of the game.

The level design is… fine. I mean, platforms seem randomly placed later on, but the beginning gets you used to the controls in a safe environment. By safe environment, I mean it’s the very bottom with no holes in the ground or pits to fall into. You can’t really die in-game, but you can die inside.

STORY & CHARACTERS 8/10

The story is this: you fall into a deep sleep, or rather, a deep nightmare wherein you are stuck in a box falling to the ground in a place that could be considered your sleep-paralysis demon’s playroom. As Boxboy, all you know is that you need to get to the top of this nightmare. All the while, a deeply amused narrator mocks your every attempt at climbing to the top. And that’s it.

OVERALL 7.6/10

I wanted to give this game a 5/10; I didn’t want to be fair to it because I was so angry at it. But after clearing my head and getting over the emotions, I realized it wasn’t all that bad. It does what it sets out to do: be an evil platformer that will probably make a lot of funny videos for content creators. If that’s your cup of tea, then this game is right up your alley. But in my case, I don’t particularly like getting angry at my games. I play games because I want to have fun, and UpWakeNing just wasn’t all that fun to me.

*(If you do not know what Getting Over It is, Google it!)

UpWakeNing launched on November 12, 2020 and is available now on Steam for PC. The version of UpWakeNing reviewed was version 1.3, released on March 27, 2021. The reviewer received this game for free.