Release Date: October 12, 2026
Developer: Eye Blink Twice
Publisher: Eye Blink Twice, Serafini Productions, Gamersky Games
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, with Xbox Series and Nintendo Switch planned for Q4 2026
Genre: First-Person Puzzle Platformer
Playtime: Around 3 hours .
Price: $14.99, with a 20% launch discount
My name is Stryftek, and I'm here to ask and answer one question: Is it worth your time?
On trial today is Time To Wake Up, the first commercial game from indie studio Eye Blink Twice.
Time To Wake Up is a first-person, story-driven puzzle platformer built around one particularly interesting mechanic: blinking.
When you blink, the world around you changes.
You are essentially looking at two versions of the same world and two perspectives of the same situation. That mechanic is used for storytelling, puzzle solving, traversal, and platforming throughout the game. I enjoyed mechanic quite a bit.
My biggest problem was that I wanted more of it.
Story
You play as Alan, a 39-year-old man whose life is not exactly going well. He's unemployed. The apartment is a mess and the electricity gets shut off. By all accounts, Alan seems to be struggling just to keep himself together. On top of all that, he's hearing a voice in his head.
After taking some medication, Alan passes out and awakens inside some kind of dream world. From there, you begin reliving memories from different points throughout his life, starting in childhood and gradually moving forward.
As you work through these memories, you begin unraveling the truth behind the mysterious voice, a person named Tom, and ultimately Alan himself. The voice accompanies you throughout the journey, talking to you and seemingly trying to help. Whether you actually trust it is another question, and the game gives you opportunities to decide exactly that.
I'm intentionally keeping things vague because this is a short, heavily story-driven game. Giving away too much would undermine a huge part of the experience.
What I can say is that I enjoyed the story and, more importantly, I really liked the way the blinking mechanic was incorporated into its storytelling.
The world itself can change depending on which version of a memory you're looking at, allowing the game to communicate things visually rather than simply telling you everything outright.
Gameplay
As mentioned earlier, a huge portion of Time To Wake Up revolves around blinking. Every time you blink, something about your surroundings can change.
Sometimes this allows you to move through an otherwise blocked hallway. Other times it changes pieces of a puzzle, resets moving objects, alters the environment, or gives you another route forward. My favorite use of the mechanic comes during the platforming sections.
You might be jumping between objects while blinking back and forth between two versions of the environment, forcing you to keep track of what exists in each one while continuing to move. It's simple, but fun. And that leads directly into my biggest complaint with Time To Wake Up….
I wanted more.
More puzzles. More platforming. More complicated uses of blinking. More opportunities for the game to really push the mechanic. Not because what is here is bad, but because what is here works so well.
The blinking mechanic fits perfectly with the story and the ideas the game is trying to portray. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like the game had only scratched the surface of what could be done with it.
That said, I understand why Eye Blink Twice may have shown some restraint. Adding another several hours of increasingly complicated puzzles and platforming could easily slow down the story, and this is clearly intended to be a tightly paced narrative experience first.
Still, I could absolutely see this mechanic being expanded into a much more gameplay-heavy game.
Graphics and Sound
Visually, Time To Wake Up is simple but satisfying.
It uses a clean, stylized presentation that can change dramatically when you blink, helping each version of the environment reflect the memory, emotion, or situation being presented. Nothing ever really felt out of place. The visual style does exactly what it needs to do without distracting from the story or mechanics.
The sound design, however, impressed me considerably more. One of my favorite details is incredibly subtle. The music itself can change when you blink. It helps make the two versions of the environment feel different even when you're not consciously paying attention to what the soundtrack is doing.
But the voice acting is what really stole the show. Mike Bodie, who provides the primary voice you'll hear throughout most of the game, gives an excellent performance.
Bodie has appeared in a long list of games and other projects over his career, but his performance here is particularly important because so much of Time To Wake Up depends on the relationship between Alan and the voice accompanying him.
For a game this dependent on dialogue and narration, a weak performance could have seriously damaged the experience.
Thankfully, that isn't the case.
Is Time To Wake Up Worth Your Time?
So we arrive at the important question….
Is it worth your time?
Time To Wake Up is short.
My first playthrough took around three hours. At first glance, $14.99 might seem a little steep for a three-hour game.
But I like comparing game prices to other forms of entertainment, and movies are an easy comparison.
A matinee ticket near me costs around $11.25, and a typical movie lasts about two hours. That's approximately $5.50 per hour of entertainment. Using that completely arbitrary metric, three hours would cost roughly $16.50.
That already puts a single playthrough of Time To Wake Up ahead of the $14.99 asking price, with anything you do afterward essentially being extra.
It gets even easier to recommend at launch, when the game will receive a 20% discount and drop to roughly $12.
Of course, dollars per hour isn't some universal measurement of whether a game is worth buying. Everyone values their entertainment differently.
What matters more to me is whether I enjoyed the time I spent with it.
And I did.
I enjoyed the story. I loved the central mechanic. The voice performances were excellent. My biggest complaint is quite literally that I wanted the developers to give me more opportunities to play with the ideas they created.
That's a pretty good problem for a game to have.
So, in my book…..
Time To Wake Up is worth your time.
Release Date: October 12, 2026
Developer: Eye Blink Twice
Publisher: Eye Blink Twice, Serafini Productions, Gamersky Games
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, with Xbox Series and Nintendo Switch planned for Q4 2026
Genre: First-Person Puzzle Platformer
Playtime: Around 3 hours .
Price: $14.99, with a 20% launch discount
My name is Stryftek, and I'm here to ask and answer one question: Is it worth your time?
On trial today is Time To Wake Up, the first commercial game from indie studio Eye Blink Twice.
Time To Wake Up is a first-person, story-driven puzzle platformer built around one particularly interesting mechanic: blinking.
When you blink, the world around you changes.
You are essentially looking at two versions of the same world and two perspectives of the same situation. That mechanic is used for storytelling, puzzle solving, traversal, and platforming throughout the game. I enjoyed mechanic quite a bit.
My biggest problem was that I wanted more of it.
Story
You play as Alan, a 39-year-old man whose life is not exactly going well. He's unemployed. The apartment is a mess and the electricity gets shut off. By all accounts, Alan seems to be struggling just to keep himself together. On top of all that, he's hearing a voice in his head.
After taking some medication, Alan passes out and awakens inside some kind of dream world. From there, you begin reliving memories from different points throughout his life, starting in childhood and gradually moving forward.
As you work through these memories, you begin unraveling the truth behind the mysterious voice, a person named Tom, and ultimately Alan himself. The voice accompanies you throughout the journey, talking to you and seemingly trying to help. Whether you actually trust it is another question, and the game gives you opportunities to decide exactly that.
I'm intentionally keeping things vague because this is a short, heavily story-driven game. Giving away too much would undermine a huge part of the experience.
What I can say is that I enjoyed the story and, more importantly, I really liked the way the blinking mechanic was incorporated into its storytelling.
The world itself can change depending on which version of a memory you're looking at, allowing the game to communicate things visually rather than simply telling you everything outright.
Gameplay
As mentioned earlier, a huge portion of Time To Wake Up revolves around blinking. Every time you blink, something about your surroundings can change.
Sometimes this allows you to move through an otherwise blocked hallway. Other times it changes pieces of a puzzle, resets moving objects, alters the environment, or gives you another route forward. My favorite use of the mechanic comes during the platforming sections.
You might be jumping between objects while blinking back and forth between two versions of the environment, forcing you to keep track of what exists in each one while continuing to move. It's simple, but fun. And that leads directly into my biggest complaint with Time To Wake Up….
I wanted more.
More puzzles. More platforming. More complicated uses of blinking. More opportunities for the game to really push the mechanic. Not because what is here is bad, but because what is here works so well.
The blinking mechanic fits perfectly with the story and the ideas the game is trying to portray. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like the game had only scratched the surface of what could be done with it.
That said, I understand why Eye Blink Twice may have shown some restraint. Adding another several hours of increasingly complicated puzzles and platforming could easily slow down the story, and this is clearly intended to be a tightly paced narrative experience first.
Still, I could absolutely see this mechanic being expanded into a much more gameplay-heavy game.
Graphics and Sound
Visually, Time To Wake Up is simple but satisfying.
It uses a clean, stylized presentation that can change dramatically when you blink, helping each version of the environment reflect the memory, emotion, or situation being presented. Nothing ever really felt out of place. The visual style does exactly what it needs to do without distracting from the story or mechanics.
The sound design, however, impressed me considerably more. One of my favorite details is incredibly subtle. The music itself can change when you blink. It helps make the two versions of the environment feel different even when you're not consciously paying attention to what the soundtrack is doing.
But the voice acting is what really stole the show. Mike Bodie, who provides the primary voice you'll hear throughout most of the game, gives an excellent performance.
Bodie has appeared in a long list of games and other projects over his career, but his performance here is particularly important because so much of Time To Wake Up depends on the relationship between Alan and the voice accompanying him.
For a game this dependent on dialogue and narration, a weak performance could have seriously damaged the experience.
Thankfully, that isn't the case.
Is Time To Wake Up Worth Your Time?
So we arrive at the important question….
Is it worth your time?
Time To Wake Up is short.
My first playthrough took around three hours. At first glance, $14.99 might seem a little steep for a three-hour game.
But I like comparing game prices to other forms of entertainment, and movies are an easy comparison.
A matinee ticket near me costs around $11.25, and a typical movie lasts about two hours. That's approximately $5.50 per hour of entertainment. Using that completely arbitrary metric, three hours would cost roughly $16.50.
That already puts a single playthrough of Time To Wake Up ahead of the $14.99 asking price, with anything you do afterward essentially being extra.
It gets even easier to recommend at launch, when the game will receive a 20% discount and drop to roughly $12.
Of course, dollars per hour isn't some universal measurement of whether a game is worth buying. Everyone values their entertainment differently.
What matters more to me is whether I enjoyed the time I spent with it.
And I did.
I enjoyed the story. I loved the central mechanic. The voice performances were excellent. My biggest complaint is quite literally that I wanted the developers to give me more opportunities to play with the ideas they created.
That's a pretty good problem for a game to have.
So, in my book…..
Time To Wake Up is worth your time.
ABOUT US
We wanted to play games that were worth our time. From work to family and kids, and other hobbies, game time was scarce. Our goal is to help you know which game to spend your time playing.
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