Back to Bed (Wii U) Review

The first ten levels or so are easy enough so as to be completed almost without thinking. More time might be spent wondering why the developer chose 'b' for menu confirmation than any of these puzzles. While a gentle tutorial/introduction is good in a game, worries set in pretty quickly that this goes past casual and straight to boring. Things are made a little more interesting by the staircases in that provide a welcome reality-bend, letting you walk on walls as if gravity shifted. This fits the aesthetics Escher influences, although some may know this little trick more from the film Labyrinth. Oddly, though, Back to Bed hardly uses these structures, and never in a way that really adds to a puzzle.

Thankfully, despite this, things do get a little harder with the introduction of movable bridges. The game's at its best when the 'impossible' nature of a level layout influences where you must place the bridge. This is pleasing, but rare. More often than not, the difficulty comes more in the execution of a solution rather than the working out of it.

Helpfully, little footsteps show where the sleepwalker will go, but only up to a point, so it's fairly easy to place things just slightly off. Sometimes the floor's position can be ambiguous too, meaning you can't always tell when it's safe to jump from a ledge. Later stages also require some elements of timing, or object re-use, which also may take a few attempts to pull off as you quickly run around. Finally, the levels also have a 'nightmare mode,' which is unlocked after completing all the levels normally. This adds extra things to collect in each stage, but doesn't really make the puzzles more interesting. The main problem overall is the level design is never that engaging. It bafflingly never takes advantage of its most interesting features: the impossible layouts and the walking on walls.

Back to Bed can be played fully on the Wii U pad, which at least makes it easy to multitask play with doing or watching something else. Players looking for something a little more engaging, or with more substance, might be better of trying something else.