Sleeping Gods

The pitch is a choose-your-own-adventure crossed with a co-op sandbox exploration game, your crew’s ship gets pulled into a strange world and you sail it in an actual atlas, flipping to numbered paragraphs when you land somewhere new. First campaign in, I was genuinely charmed, the writing is good, the sense of an open world you’re free to poke at rather than march through in order is rare in this genre and it works.

Second and third campaigns are where the cracks showed for me. Thirteen different endings sounds like a lot until you realize the game funnels you toward the same two or three unless you’re deliberately hunting very specific item combinations, and the achievement unlocks I’d hoped would open new epic questlines mostly just tweak a mechanic slightly instead. The lore itself stays thinner than the atlas format promises, you never really learn what visually separates one race from another because there’s no art showing you, it’s all text.

The other thing, and I say this as someone with a fairly high tolerance for slow games, is that once you learn the combat combos the difficulty falls off a cliff. We nearly died once in our first campaign and never came close again after that, which undercuts the tension the exploration is otherwise pretty good at building. Emergent story matters a lot to me in a cooperative game, whether the group actually generates its own memorable moments rather than following a script, and Sleeping Gods gives you real ones early and then repeats itself. Good for a single long trip through it. I don’t think it holds up to being someone’s forever-campaign game.