Writing in video games is a finite amount of content. There is always an end to a quest line, a limit to the amount of dialogue one character has, and an acceptance of the fact that there must be a conclusion to any interaction or story. Citizen Sleeper is a game that makes you comfortable with that ending and with the choices you make along the way. Though its world is detached from our own by ways of an inner-space colony reeling from a structural and societal collapse, it hits close to home.

Citizen Sleeper is a mix between visual novel, life simulation, strategy, and a light RPG. Every day, called "cycles" spent on the ring-shaped ship you call home, you are given a set of rolled dice. These dice, labeled from 1-6 determine the outcomes of any actions you can take during the day. Some days you will roll mostly 4-6, and others you will barely scrape by with 1s and 2s. Depending on your condition, you get a set amount of these dice to spend how you see fit on actions around the ship. Every "action" is tied to a person or job on the space station, from helping tear down scrap in the yard, to snooping in some dangerous areas, to even putting time into building up your own home. There are a plethora of options right from go, and it gives you a great sense of purpose and choice in determining which tasks to prioritize. While this may not be for everyone, I appreciated how the game found efficient places to use even the bad rolls in helpful places.

The game also uses a set of wheels to visualize how close you are to completing (or failing) a task. As you push through cycles, certain meters will have consequences, and balancing the tasks to keep all your eggs in one basket is a stressful, but welcome element to the game's strategy, and ultimately pulls you into feeling like a second-class citizen just trying to keep your head above water. The game frontloads a lot of information on you, from its aforementioned dice rolls and deteriorating body and energy meters, to the simple skill tree that grants new abilities as you complete requests. However, once you get the hang of maintaining your body, money, and work, Citizen Sleeper becomes an addictive loop that is difficult to put down.

Many of the tasks you can complete around the Eye are for the game's diverse cast, which range from a doctor trying to unseat her captives to a father and daughter attempting to escape their poverty. You sympathize with many of these people, the victims of a class-based society, as you work to give them not only hope, but a friend. Like all of the writing in the game, the dialogue of these stray souls are pensive, cautious, and fully realized. Even your responses, while short, allow you build a relationship with the various Citizens, as well as a personality for yourself. It's worth it to see every story this game throws at you, and you can find new characters in the most unexpected places. There are multiple endings depending on clear, binary choices you make throughout the game, but I was able to see a few thanks to some endings pulling you right back into the station. I loved the way my story ended, but I wish there was a manual save option so I didn't have to play through much of the same content again just to see the other side of my decisions. That said, despite only a few impactful decisions, I was impressed at the freedom of the narrative, as there is no one critical path; further emphasizing the game's desire to let the player see what they want to see.

The entire runtime of Citizen Sleeper takes place on the circular station. Accompanied by a soft, ambient score of synthwave, you interface with the various areas and slowly expand the territory you can explore. Sorting through all your tasks works well enough, but I wish you could move from each of the sections of the station a little easier, and that the game's quest tracker was a little more helpful. If the icons were able to be accessed from a menu or straight from the quest log itself, it would save a lot of wasted moments manually checking each objective. On the other hand, I did like seeing the station evolve over time, and wish I could've seen more interiors or locations from around the lives of the NPCs.

Citizen Sleeper's main hook is living in its world for a few hours. It's not the most mechanically deep or gameplay heavy experience, but its literature is fascinating, diving into its dystopic ideas with an emotional and intimate approach. If you are a fan of forging your own path and taking the leap into the unknown, you may just want to stowaway for a few hours and give this one a shot.

Edit: I'm adding this section after all 3 DLC episodes released and WOW. After an already fantastic game, returning to the world of the Eye was not only seamless, but despite several possible endings built in the base game, the DLC gives the finality to the game that I didn't know I needed. Like the base game, it's a set of risks and choices that interweave more fascinating characters into one of the most realized sci-fi worlds I've ever seen. I love the opporttunity that these new episodes add to Citizen Sleeper and can see new players sinking right into the "third act" ideas of the story. Masterful for a masterpiece.

The game is great, you should play it. The characters are good, the art is wonderful, the music is appropriately moody, and the writing is incredible.

Technical Problems:
The controls are rough. They work fine enough, but there are several quality of life changes that really ought to happen in a Definitive Edition update once they finish the refugee arc. For no apparent reason, the world space is broken up into three separate sections that you have to click through menus to get between. This is rather annoying given how often you’ll be traversing your camera across the whole station. I understand in the case of going to the Hub, but it really should not require a confirmation menu. Just an icon, you click it, and the camera snaps over to the hub.
The only item you should have to drag are the dice, there is no reason to make the player individually drag each item from two inexplicably separated item bars with mutually exclusive accessibility. If I click into a location, and I have the items required to do an action, the slots on the action should just auto-populate. Also, if an action requires items to fill up a clock one by one, I should just be able to put them all in at once, instead of having to individually add each item one by one.
I would also like to see the dialogue history show the dialogue option you picked, as well. The dialogue isn’t hard to follow, it’s not something that you’d need to re-read a ton, but it would be nice.
Other improvements I can see for a Definitive Edition: more art! The art is so lovely, I would love to see art of ships and buildings and such. I think the game might benefit from some good voice acting, but it’s not necessary, I don’t think.

Art Problems:
The station stops feeling meaningfully reactive pretty early on. What I mean by this is, big events happen and the station seems basically entirely unaffected by them. It’s hard to discuss without spoilers, but the culmination of Feng’s plotline, the Sidereal lottery, and the cordon mission, to name a few really feel like they should have ended up going somewhere that they just didn’t. Those should have had widespread effects on the station, it’s atmosphere, it’s communities, and it’s politics that should have spun off several other plot lines. And I get that you have to limit the scope, but there really needed to be something more there. Particularly with regards to Feng’s plotline and the cordon mission.
Another problem that has rightly been pointed out is that it gets way too easy to live. There’s not much more to say about that, other than it kind of ties back into the hanging threads, because if those were tied back into the story, it could offer some new threats to keep things dicey. Another problem is that the character build is basically irrelevant by the end of the game because you can almost max out everything, which really contributes to the feeling of having mastered the system and the tension being gone. That is sort of the inherent struggle in a game about leftist ideas, particularly ones that lean towards anarchism like this one, because you have to strike a balance between a compelling story and making sure the player is not the sole agent of the revolution, lest you end up with a game that is boring, or a game that betrays it’s beliefs. This is why I think the best revolutionary game must not be about the revolution.

Criticism I think is bad:
The copy-editing that everyone complains about is such a non-issue that it baffles me why anyone cares enough to mention it in a review. The worst thing I noticed was a few instances of a missing space between a period and the first letter of the next sentence. I saw one review on here that called the writing “terminally-online” which is a pretty ridiculous claim in my eyes and I honestly don’t care what they saw as terminally online, because there is like a total 5% chance that it was a good faith critique. Some have criticized the fact that the game seems to have a specific ending it’s directing you towards, but I think people were expecting something the game was not trying to do. I think it’s fine that the game has a sort of “canonical” ending, because it’s frankly the one that makes the most sense, and I think the game does a pretty good job of convincing you of it. I am also not a fan of people comparing Citizen Sleeper to Disco Elysium, favorably or not. I love Disco Elysium, it deserves every ounce of praise it gets, but it does not own the concept of “game about leftist politics.” That’s ridiculous, and thinking of the two as better or worse attempts at the same thing does them both a disservice.

Fortunately, all of this considered, the foundation of Citizen Sleeper is excellent. It has provided a framework that I really hope the developer, and others, take and run with to create even better stories, and better games by extension.

I would have already a mark for this game if it managed only to carry over the stellar writing, music and vibe of In Other Waters, but I wasn't expecting to be so drawn into that gameplay loop! The small risks involved with moment to moment decisions add tension without overwhelming, and really lend a lived-in quality to the experience. Really had me going "is this an all-timer?" for a while, but there is a point where all the urgency that propels you through a smattering of wonderful, well-considered character stories is sapped and the game slows to a crawl. Freeing yourself of the slow dread the game has built is incredibly liberating, at first, but the feeling quickly morphs into one of malaise. It's only a small blemish, all the more noticeable because aside from that.. this thing goes full blast.

A well-written and distinctive sci-fi story with gameplay that is surprisingly engaging considering it is all menu- and dice-based. The resources all felt well-tuned to the point where everything was manageable but never easy. You can choose the order you tackle plotlines to some degree which is cool but resulted in me finishing what felt like the core plot/conflict while there was still a ton of other content left. Without that looming threat, I didn't feel particularly driven to follow the remaining story threads, so that back portion of the game wasn't anywhere near as engaging as what led up to it.

If I have any stylistic quibble, it's that the game can be a little too similar to Disco Elysium. The genre and setting are so different that it's easy to get past, but the general interface with the scrolling text in the box on the right-hand side of the screen is needlessly similar to the game's clear inspiration, and some of the writing, particularly in regards to the hacking/more surreal elements feels like it's trying to ape Disco Elysium's writing style (and not quite nailing it). I see this as a bit of a game-industry-wide issue where many games go a bit beyond taking inspiration and get a little too close to copy cat-ing for my liking. If films lifted as much wholesale from each other, everyone would call them out as rip-offs, but nobody bats an eye when it happens in games. Part of this comes down to how game genres proliferate based on individual successful games, with Souls-likes and how every battle royale game is ripping off the design elements of the others and whatnot. That doesn't happen in cinema. But this is a larger topic for another forum. Citizen Sleeper is good.

I feel the mechanical nakedness of this game is both a blessing and a curse. At first I was worried that it would hurt immersion, but the great characters and fantastic ambience & music design dragged me fully in after the first 20 or so minutes. I even found that the nakedness of the system made you really feel what your impact in the world is, and really highlighted the sense of player agency which is plentiful in this game.

But on the flip side, the game being so exposed made me avoid exploring for exploring's sake; it felt like if I was meant to find something, the game would lead me there, and I was worried about accidentally skipping content or wasting my finite time; I acknowledge this may just be a me problem, but it made the mid-game a bit confusing when quests were leading me to 3 or 4 places, none of which I had discovered.

Towards the end, when there was only one or two things left to advance, the gameplay loop becomes very straightforward and actually quite boring, but hopefully the atmosphere and writing will have invested you enough by then so you can push through it. The main standout aspect of the game to me is that writing, with the endings in particular being some of my favourite pieces of writing in all of gaming. I do think the quality of the writing drops off quite dramatically in the free DLC, but I'm not one to mark down a game for free additional content!

Completed with all 100% of achievements unlocked, all endings reached. I'm honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed Citizen Sleeper, an unusual combination of turn-based tabletop-style RPG, visual novel, management sim and survival game. The game casts the player as a "sleeper", a digitised human consciousness in an artificial body, waking on an unfamiliar space station which must then be explored, learning more about the societal background, finding a way to survive, make allies (and a few enemies) and, ultimately, thrive aboard or escape from the facility.

The game plays out primarily through selecting from a series of actions scattered throughout the station and then assigning one of a number of dice to completing that action - with resulting positive, negative or neutral outcomes. Heavily text-based, progress generally is measured by the progression of 'clocks' associated with a particular goal, achieved by favourable outcomes from these actions - and strategic use of the dice awarded for each in-game 'cycle' being vital to success. You'll want to assign high-value dice to the riskiest actions, while also taking advantage of bonuses afforded by progression through a skill tree.

While it may sound somewhat dry, in practice this system works amazingly well and, alongside consistently excellent writing and well-realised characters, makes for a highly immersive experience. Certainly there's a fairly steep initial learning curve, but it doesn't take all that long to overcome with a little effort - and the potentially unforgiving difficulty can be overcome once you discover certain reliable methods to maintain yourself in the face of the survival mechanics.

The promise of a series of free DLC is the icing on the whole package; the first of these has been released at the time of writing and maintains the high quality of the rest of the game, providing an additional questline with a real sense of urgency.

Scathing critique on capitalism. There’s a lot you can say about this game in that regard, but I’m only going to focus on a part of it that hit close to home for me. In the game there’s a certain medication you need to pay for to stay alive. It’s $100 which in the beginning of the game is quite pricey and even as I got more money it still hurt my wallet a lot to have to pay for it. As an American there’s lot of us that literally have to pay to stay alive by paying high prices for life saving medication. One example is insulin which costs about a dollar to make a weeks worth, but costs thousands depending on insurance status. I could keep going, but I’ll just end it here by saying that’s absolute ghoul behavior

With art by Guillaume Singelin and music and sound design by Amos Roddy, Gareth Damian Martin's Citizen Sleeper is a genuinely gorgeous and rich game that gently reminds you that staying still is not always the best option, even if you manage to pull yourself – or get pulled – into a better place. It also gently compels you to think about those moments in your life where sacrifices or compromises had to be made, and how the “choice” to make them wasn’t always voluntary, nor was it always yours to make in the first place.

Narrative games normally don't entice me, but the art style and reviews enough were enough to at least give the game a chance.

Story: I was surprised how quickly I became attached to the story. Every character was unique and I found myself actually curious about where each character development was going. The pacing was my favorite part because I was allowed to decide what and who I wanted to focus on first making the relationships with characters feel a little more personal. I had a hard time understanding what to do and what was going on at first, but the game encouraged curiosity and exploration. By the end, everything tied together and my questions were mostly answered. Balancing events and survival at the beginning of the game was challenging at times. A few instances the story took an interesting direction because I wasn't able to get enough money or high enough dice roles to satisfy every character. It wasn't too difficult, but I think it was enough to require some tough decisions and interesting conflict.
The dlc was a little easy since I was over prepared after the game warned me, but it developed the lore a little further which was exactly what I was hoping for.

Mechanics: Obviously, there aren't too many mechanics to the game since it is a narrative rpg, but the dice element to the game was actually really good. I wasn't too thrilled about it at first, but the chance aspect was actually brilliant. It was simple, but it led to me making difficult decisions that I knew might introduce conflict and negatively effect my character. The ability to use my poor dice rolls to steal data made every number feel useful.
The upgrade points came slowly at first, but since they progressed with the objectives of the story it led to me feeling more comfortable and controlled with the game at the same time my character was starting to fit in and thrive.
Finally, the narrative choices were straightforward for the most part, but there were several times I wasn't sure how what I said would affect the story and I was surprised on multiple occasions. Every decision seemed to count.

Visuals: The visuals were basic for the most part with stand still characters, but the art style was beautiful. From the relaxing colors to the expressiveness of lines on characters it was easy to feel immersed and get lost admiring the art at times. Though I would've loved to see some animations, the team did an incredible job with the what they were able to create. Everything was set up perfectly, as it was easy to understand, see, and move around the eye.

Sound: Honestly I don't normally put much focus on the music or sound effects of a game, but the music in this game was perfect and helped immensely with the immersion. It was relaxing and helped me focus on reading. It picked up and created some extra tension during conflict. It was about as perfect as it gets for a chill indie game like this.

I have one major issue that I think could've been fixed pretty easily.
The lack of a screen size adjustment setting was unfortunate for my setup. I couldn't see the amounts of my items or data making it a guessing game at times. I could see the tops of numbers and had to keep mental track at times, but it was a difficulty that I think should've been avoided.

Originally was drawn in by the art style and the vibe, and the game really didn't disappoint me. I enjoyed the straightforward gameplay (even though it seemed to be a bit feast or famine), but the strongest element for me was the characters and setting. I found myself invested in the Eye and the lives of the people I met, and felt pangs of loneliness during several goodbyes.

Mostly I appreciate that it doesn't overstay it's welcome, I was able to see most endings and finish out the story in less than 8 hours which is exactly what I prefer nowadays.

Despite my one major complaint that it gives you a weird amount of power and influence as well as just becoming too easy in general too quickly, I do think Citizen Sleeper bangs. It probably has one of the most interesting political situation and analysis I've stumbled upon in a video game that isn't TNO, mostly because it doesn't focus on the politics itself. Rather you only really ever speak to one or two of the actual politicians, but the forces that be are always still out of reach, always playing one big game with each other, and everyone else under them suffering the consequences.
I think Citizen Sleeper was at its best somewhere between the early-game to mid-game when the world really expands for you, but you can't quite keep up with everything and may have to make a few sacrifices. You were helping people out here and there, but you're still kinda desperate to survive.
However, that phase of the game went by too quickly and then it starts giving you responsibility for much larger groups of people than you really shouldn't be able to and kinda hit at the immersion.

Ok so this game is good. Great even! It’s similar to Disco Elysium and Fata Morgana where there isn’t gameplay per se, it’s more of an interactive story. The writing is good, there are cool choices and consequences, etc etc. I’m pissed off about something in particular though

I was like 10 hours in. Did a lot of cool things. I was almost done with the dlc stuff too. Had good friends, finished pretty much most of the quests, and was happy with the outcomes of 80% of them. Anyway, I was doing this quest about spoiler and as I was reading stuff got really fucking weird and I DIED?????? I literally just died I think? The game ended! I had no clue this quest with NO action or danger would just randomly end my game bruh. This actually made me irrationally angry lmfao. Anyway 3 stars. Cool I guess