Backstage: murdered sleep
A downloadable nightmare for Windows
Backstage: Murdered Sleep is a psychological horror adventure game. It is the long-dreaded sequel to my noted 2005 rpgmaker survival horror game Backstage: A Nightmare In One Act.
Inspired most by the original luminaries of the Survival Horror genre--Resident Evil and especially Silent Hill--and the pantheon of horror media classics that inspired them, Backstage: Murdered Sleep blends atmospheric exploration and simple puzzle solving with tense real time combat and resource management. It greatly expands the enigmatic mythology of the Backstage universe while introducing new players to that dark version of our world for new players, and extrapolates the consequences and implications of the original game to a frightening new scale.
Anna Molly Grace is an ordinary college student with an extraordinary problem: sleep terrors so intense they make her life a living hell, keeping her trapped in a cycle of self medication and insomnia. Her personal sleep paralysis demon is a faceless killer in a blank mask with blood red eyes. When Anna receives an invitation from the American Sleep Institute's experimental clinic on Santa Cassilda island, she has no reason to suspect the terrors in store from her, or the forces intent upon awakening something terribly real from the darkness of her mysterious dreams.
Purchase
In order to download this nightmare you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $11.90 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Download demo
Development log
- Game Manual16 days ago
- 57 Minutes To Halloween23 days ago
- 17 Days Until Halloween39 days ago
- failing/flailing at marketing + intrinsic/extrinsic (de)motivation + full releas...44 days ago
- 16 Weeks (and change) To HalloweenJul 09, 2024
- DEMO OUT + STEAM LAUNCH !!!!Jun 20, 2024
- EARLY ACCESS BETA RELEASE (version 0.2)Jun 08, 2024
Comments
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Hello is there guide for puzzles thanks
Not yet, but let me know where you're stuck and I can help you out!
Hello I can play test if you want thanks
If you are still looking for testers, let me know :)
Hi GarmdGriek, the beta (the 'new build' I've been 'releasing soon' for uh, several months) is finally live! If you want to just buy it, you can definitely do that. If you are willing to commit to beta testing the whole thing and giving detailed feedback, I can also hook you up with a download key. Just let me know where to e-mail it or otherwise send it to, apparently itch won't let me link or send download keys to itch accounts, it just provides the URL.
Happy to pay and support you
well that's swell of you! lmk if you have any issues buying it (maybe I should be more embarrassed to admit this but no one has, yet) because I've run into an issue at least once in the past where itch turned off my payment processing w/o telling me.
See it becoming available on Steam soon. will buy it there
I noticed you were looking for testers on your Twitter? I might be interested, although I gotta ask a little about the gore/jumpscare factor. I don't mind bloody smears and corpses along with some sudden spooks, though I've got my limits.
Thanks for reaching out!
Well, I was aiming for maximum scary. The gore is taken to the furthest extreme possible WITHIN the pixel art style and scale the game is using. Like, this image is as bad as it gets, probably:
(Ordinarily I'd have spoilered this behind a TW but I don't think itch has spoiler tags.)
There aren't, for instance, scare screens where you see the same thing but in a more realistic style/at a much higher zoom and resolution.
I think jump scares are used in relative moderation. There are definitely a few in there, but it's not the main way I was looking to scare players, I was more focused on creating a holistically disturbing atmosphere and narrative. All of this is REALLY subjective though, and I do know I'm a bit of a gorehound into some pretty extreme stuff myself.
I'd say check out the Playable Teaser and if you can handle that, I'd say there's nothing *much* worse in the full game as it exists at this point.
Alright, I gave the teaser a shot. As far as the gore goes, what I've seen so far hasn't really bothered me, and the story was compelling enough to get me to wanna play more. Unfortunately I think I triggered a bug that prevents the elevator from going back down into B2:
I rode it back up to B1 after picking up a key to the right of B2 and getting chased by skeletons(?) because I wanted to save and not repeat the riddle scene after every death. But when I tried to go back down the elevator seems to get stuck in a loop where it appears to constantly descend, and when I try to leave it just puts me back into B1.
That elevator has been a perennial hive of bugs. Pretty sure I've fixed that particular one in the seven months since the teaser came out. IIRC there's a save point right in the next hall if you head "South" (down) and then "East" (right).
did you make sure your flashlight is on through the inventory? If it's on, I recommend you increase your screen's brightness. Lastly, not sure if this will help, but this is the route you need to take to get out of the vents