Okay I actually I do have something to say about this. I don’t know if this was the intent, but I read Astarion as someone on the graysexual spectrum, and as someone who is demi, I am beyond thrilled to see that sort of rep in a video game and I hope to see more of it in gaming going forward.
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All right - I am filling in all the data for game submission and am wondering if anyone could give me a heads up for the ‘similars’ tab that shows games recommended from CoG if players liked DWMU.
I haven’t been actively playing CoG games on the regular in many years, and I’m not entirely sure what I should be suggesting, and if they’re appropriate for DWMU players…
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** Puts fancy writing critic glasses **
Never thought I would praise an author for making me sad to be the “romance craver”, but damn! After the joyous, lighthearted and expressive writing, Baudelaire showed that even the unhappy endings can give a reader the satisfaction that the plot is done and the ends are tied. More importantly, the writing shows great relatability with the reader, which cleverly match the setting since the beginning. I say this, because now I’m cursed to feel bad for every romance option on games forever. Now my BG3 playthrough will be slightly awkwarder.
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All right. After 8 damn years I’ve submitted the game and all publication assets to Choice of Games now.
I never thought this day would come… I just want to say thank you to everyone for your words of encouragement and joy. Seeing that you guys still enjoy DWMU as much or more as when I first posted the demo gave me an enormous amount of confidence.
I gave up on wanting to be a game developer for years, because I thought my disability was too much for me to do constant computer work. But I got my heart back together and decided I wanted to do it anyway, damn anything else.
Don’t Wake Me Up is a testament to my teenage years and that of anyone else who grew up in the 2010s, as much as anything. I wanted to say that fandom culture and parasocial relationships with fictional characters have shaped us just as much as any reality. They are important, and truly meaningful in the end. That’s what the game is about.
Love all you guys. So much!
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Amazing job and congratulations on the submission - I hope it all goes smoothly and I’m looking forward to playing this in its gorgeous final form eight years in the making!
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Congrats. Looking forward to playing it.
I don’t think it’s spoilery in that way. It fits the aesthetic of the game and I really like it.
Congrats on the submission 
I’m glad you were able to finish this game. I really liked how it turned out and how it made me have another perspective about fictional characters.
I was entertained 
I have returned from the lands of forgetting about this forum real life just to play this.
I finished it and…
Now I’m unbearably sad and disappointed about the ending 
congrats on the submission :))) can’t wait to see it get published
Are you going to make a guide for certain endings? I got the Stay w/ Asterius ending and the Romance No One but Len still Kills You (rip) ending, but honestly I just want to know how many endings this game has, so I can cover all the bases! : D
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I got the Stay with Arterius, and the Stop Len and Make Him Keep Everyone Alive endings
Both made me sad, my character has depression now
this is a masterpiece 
to add to the endings pool, i’ve gotten “len thwarted”, “len blackmail”, “stay w asterius”, and the “true end”. not sure if the bad end about staying with len in vr world is still in the game but it might exist. anyone do tell if u find it-
I’ve not removed anything if you guys managed to get an ending before. The ending where the player designs their eternal virtual reality with Len is still in the game
I’m on holiday at the moment but can post a list of endings if you’re interested.
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This post will detail the endings that exist in the game. Warning for spoilers throughout.
There are four ending root chapters, some of which contain multiple endings inside of them.
There is no way to change what happened in the past, before the events of the game.
Len was built intentionally with an emotional processor that does not allow him to feel positive emotions, for the sake of increasing his personality as a brooding villain. Len is scheduled for a memory reset at 8am, due to exhibiting suicidal tendencies which are alarming the company, and getting increasingly collaterally violent. The night before his memory reset, he offered to run the temporary memory loss executable on the player for one night, on the argument that he’d forget you’d ever written it by the morning. You, one of the character AI lead designers secretly wrote the executable, because you were unhappy and wanted to see what it was like to lose yourself in the game you worked on. Len agreed to run a game for you to have fun in, offline and undetectable. Asterius, developed by you, was stuck in love with you, and you felt a degree of guilt you’d made a character designed to be just an ideal waifu to gamers. You were worried you were on the verge of losing your job over this, and had little to lose, so took Len’s deal.
Len always planned to blackmail you when you woke up, plotting to run the memory loss executable right before his own system reset, causing all online players to become functionally braindead in virtual reality forever. An android body was being developed for Asterius, and only Asterius’s developer can give that physical robot body to him. But, unbeknownst to you, if you install Asterius’s emotional processing components into Len, and thus give him the ID clearance to inhabit the android body, it will destroy Asterius’ core processor in the process. Len, with the new emotional processor, planned to lure his own creator, Grace, to the labs, so that he could kill and take revenge on her, and be able to enjoy her death as the first time he could feel happiness.
In every instance of Don’t Wake Me Up, that is the plan and context of what happened before the game started.
The player can stop Len, never figure this out, and in several ways lose themselves in virtual reality forever. Become hated as much as Len’s own developer, die, sympathise with the AIs and help Len deactivate himself…
But only in the true ending of the game did the player, through being the first person to treat Len like a real person, and not an oversexualised video game sex object, make him realise humanity can be better than he’s ever seen it be, and video games can be a meaningful way to figure things out about yourself.
The endings you can get in the game are:
In ‘Best Worst Thing’ (The player did the Len romance, but realised he was unhappy with being objectified by the game’s playerbase before exiting virtual reality in the Meltdown chapter):
- LEN SUICIDE ENDING (Player helps Len deactivate himself, without harming anyone else)
- BLACKOUT END (Every online player has their memory wiped by Len, as he originally intended)
- LEN RESET END (Len is subject to a memory wipe and reset, as he feared)
- LEN SAVED ENDING (the player saved Len, but after the events of the game were over, never wanted to see him again)
- TRUE ENDING (whether romantic or not, the player met up with Len once he was given a body and allowed to live in the real world. They hear the lesson he’s learned. He’s happy for the first time.)
In ‘As The World Falls Down’ (Player did the Len romance, but objectified him/didn’t figure out his true feelings in the Meltdown chapter)
- LEN BAD ENDING is the only result, gotten to in one of several ways. (Len lets the player design the virtual reality he’s going to trap them in forever, after killing his creator)
In ‘Don’t Wake Me Up’ (Player said ‘Don’t Wake me up’ to Asterius at the end of the Technobabble chapter)
- DON’T WAKE ME UP ENDING is the only result, gotten to in one way. (Player stays in virtual reality with Asterius forever, until their body is removed from its pod)
In ‘Wake Me Up’ (Player said to Asterius that they had to know the truth at the end of the Technobable chapter):
- LEN BLACKMAIL ENDING (player fell for it, Len killed them)
- LEN THWARTED ENDING (player convinced the world to use Len to host the game for the players he harmed)
- DEACTIVATION ENDING (player convinced world to deactivate all the AIs)
If you play through the game once, or many times, I hope you enjoy the ride!
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I’m loving this game so far!
i think i found a bug? because i got this, but i never chose that in my playthrough, so i’m a bit confused
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Hi, what exactly did you do to lead up to that section?
So specifically that variable which triggers that comment is set during the Chapter 5 sex scene. Or not. Do you remember what you did in the Meltdown chapter?
Also, just generally, do you think you chose options appropriate to get that ending? Len has several things to say to you dependent on what you did in the act before, but if you think the things he has to say here still feel off, perhaps you should have gotten the better ending…
i definitely think the third option is more fitting for my playthrough.
i don’t recall choosing a sex scene ever during this playthrough, but i’ll admit i was not feeling too well while playing this so i might be misremembering something.(
but i just replayed it now, and i think i found what might have caused this?
earlier, i chose the ‘can this even be a relationship’ option and i was getting the ‘you had sex with me when i was uncomfortable’ line. when replaying now, though, i chose to run after him and he actually said what made the most sense lmao.
i could be wrong, but i think this is it, bc other than that one, i made mostly the same choices.
I think that the good ending is currently locked unless
The player chooses to run after him to ask him for further clarification on why he isn’t feeling well. However, probably the player should be offered the option to reflect on why it was bad first and then have the choice to run after him or not. Do you remember why the sex scene was stopped or the immediate previous choice beforehand?
Overall the good ending is locked behind whether the player figured out the truth about Len’s perspective on his AI character design during the Meltdown chapter. Do you feel like you did? Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten the bad ending then…
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