Mama's Sleeping Angels Review – Surreal Y2K madness that’s best experienced with friends

What is this game…? Well, I’m still trying to wrap my head around that as I’m sitting here and trying to collect my thoughts, having just played Mama’s Sleeping Angels with a couple of friends for two hours straight. This is a project its developer describes as a “Y2K dream-exploration game”, though “nightmare” is probably a more accurate word to use here, considering some of the things I’ve come across. It’s also a game that feels like it shouldn’t work, but somehow… it does. Kind of.

Gummy bears and nightmares

Mama’s Sleeping Angels is supposedly what you get when you combine Lethal Company with someone’s drug-induced hallucinations and put the whole thing into a cursed PlayStation 1 console that runs on gummy bears and nightmares. Also, I say “supposedly” because I haven’t personally played Lethal Company, but based on what I know about its formula, there are indeed *some* similarities: you and your friends venture into strange, dangerous locations to scavenge for items (with each level being a separate run), and then shenanigans happen.

Speaking of shenanigans: in addition to its fever dream of an art style, the game’s sheer unpredictability is undoubtedly one of its strongest assets. Much like in an actual dream, pretty much anything goes. At times, cars may randomly come alive to chase you around, or grotesque monstrosities resembling otherworldly, indescribable shapes will come lumbering towards you. At other times, your friends will start uncontrollably peeing themselves before accidentally firing off a nuke. And this can all happen within the same run. It’s like the perfect mixture of surrealist cosmic horror, dreamlike absurdism and eccentric humor – to call it absolutely unhinged would be an understatement, which is probably why it’s best experienced with friends. That’s not to say a solo run will not throw an untold amount of pure degeneracy at you, but when you have two or three other people on voice chat shouting at you about the latest instance of WTF-ery they just experienced, well… it really is something else.

Hungry hungry Mama

The actual game, though? It’s very simple, and not particularly sophisticated, at least in my experience. There are no intricate mechanics to worry about, which is a double-edged sword, making the game both easily accessible, but also potentially repetitive: you just explore the map, pick up items, bring them back to your “base”, and once you have enough, you can use them to feed Mama, the strange, nightmarish, almost Lovecraftian “thing” that demands to be satiated. And then the mission ends, and you do it again and again to unlock even more maps.

Mama’s Sleeping Angels is largely carried by its friendslop fun factor and the absolutely insane art style, but without those, there’s sadly not much left – and even with procedural generation, I still felt like certain levels were a bit too samey. However, if you’ve got friends to slop with, and the aesthetics pull you in, you’ll likely get a few hours of entertainment out of it before the novelty starts wearing off.