Don’t Wake Me Up (v2024.09.05)

A memoryless protagonist wakes inside a broken virtual reality armed with the only knowledge that matters: a lifetime of video-game clichés. Don’t Wake Me Up is a sprawling interactive novel that turns trapped-in-a-game fantasies into a sarcastic, occasionally sincere comedy about romance, fandom, and the personalities people invent behind a screen. Its tone swings between knowingly ridiculous genre jokes and more uncomfortable questions about desire, escapism, and how much of the player character is performance.

Play unfolds entirely through prose and choices, with decisions shaping your identity, relationships, and route through a sequence of wildly different simulated worlds. You can define the protagonist’s gender and sexuality, trade barbs with a delusional gamer, an unwillingly melodramatic vampire, an alien poet, and a knightly princess, then pursue romances that become central to the plot rather than optional side content. The adventure moves from an old-fashioned spaceship escape scenario to a cyberpunk casino and a bizarre classical-music monster-truck event, using dialogue choices, puzzles, and comic set pieces instead of reflex-based action. A weaponized top hat helps sell the game’s commitment to absurdity, while the major romantic choice splits the narrative into substantially different second halves.

What stands out is the scale of its branching writing: this is a long, 400,000-word story with enough route-specific material to reward a second playthrough. Rather than merely referencing games for easy laughs, it pokes at dating-sim archetypes, fanservice, internet culture, and the often awkward emotional logic behind player-driven romance. The early-2010s web humor is deliberately part of the period flavor, so players who dislike puns, meta commentary, or exaggerated anime stereotypes may find it grating. Fans of Choice of Games-style fiction, dating sims, and satirical visual-novel storytelling will find a clever, character-focused adventure here, especially if they enjoy seeing familiar gaming genres dismantled from the inside.