Finished playing Citizen Sleeper (from jump over the age games)

I absolutely adored this game. The writing is fantastic, the systems are interesting, and the presentation rules. Citizen Sleeper starts incredibly strong, remains interesting as you follow each story thread, and ends with scenes that I found quite powerful. This game simply hit for me, it is crafted to my tastes in many ways. I loved exploring this world and I loved reading all that text. The mechanical structure from which the player engages with this content is both the greatest highlight and only place where the experience stumbles.

Had I played Citizen Sleeper at release, I could have been left with some disappointment, but the additional episodes changed my mind about quite a few things. This leaves me with very little that dampened the experience, even with plenty of things that could have been better.

Over and over in writing my thoughts in this game, I’ve returned to talking about some aspect that is “not like other games”. [I’ve actually cut a few instances of that out, and I’m not someone who usually respects the reader’s time]
Perhaps Citizen Sleeper won’t hit you as well as it did for me. Regardless, I strongly recommend it on the basis of its uniqueness alone.

I really hate writing spoiler-free generic shill paragraphs- but Citizen Sleeper surely deserves them. The game is certainly in my top 25 of all time [the specific ranking is left as an exercise for the writer]. Jump Over the Age has currently released two games (this and In Other Waters), those 2 are already enough to make them one of my favorite developers!


Time to start giving my specific thoughts on Citizen Sleeper… I have a lot of them.
{Here’s a cursed fact: I’ve spent more time writing this than I did playing the game itself!}

Citizen Sleeper Spoilers from this point onward
(EXHAUSTIVE SPOILERS! [including refuge,flux,purge])
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The star of the show is all these cycle clocks and progress counters. The multithreaded nature of how you interact with your problems and goals is incredible. Citizen Sleeper centers a concept of time, in a way that few RPGs are interested in. This design intent evokes an incredibly unique experience, one that is especially meaningful for me to engage with.

I find making life decisions quite hard. My most frequent dilemma is “How do I spend my limited time?”. I’ve lived the entirety of my life treating time as a precious resource. Each day I am overwhelmed by countless possible futures and endless things that I want to do. In order to realize one, dozens of others must be discarded. It’s difficult to empathize with people who feel they have too much time. Sometimes I feel that the concept of Opportunity Cost is imprinted into my cells, I cannot live without that burden.


Games allow us to step into the magical universe where stress is fun. It’s a safe context where I can appreciate the interesting challenge. In this strange and twisted reality, I can find myself appreciating the “evil” of systems. Now that I think about it, it’s quite remarkable that I consider calling a game evil a compliment.

That’s all to say that Citizen Sleeper’s systems feel evil, in a way that is quite special to me. I loved being overwhelmed with things I wanted to do. I loved feeling the heavy weight of the things I needed to do. I loved choosing where to spend each cycle’s dice and watching in horror as clocks progressed.

This effect is especially powerful during the beginning of the game, that’s part of why I consider the opening so strong. After the (incredibly evocative) intro, you are bombarded with pressing concerns and interesting unknowns. Arriving as an outsider who barely survived the journey, sourcing medicine to delay your obsolescence, making enough money to consistently buy food, exploring the eye, the ominous “hunted” countdown, the awakening of the sleeper’s interface with the digital layer and encountering the hunter… each of these aspects are individually excellent, and they converge to make quite the memorable experience.


I’ll give a specific shoutout to the prose and imagery in the scenes describing the digital layer, it’s sooo cool. [Descriptions of cyberspace never get old, no matter how many stories I see it in]. I love the way the writing describes this realm of connections. Hunter is an excellent threat, and I loved the way it was illustrated as a wild tangle of threads. To me this stood above all the other pressing concerns, due to the way it rejects the validity of your existence and turns what should be an empowering source of freedom into a liability. {This reminds me of Cytonics and Delvers in Brandon Sanderson’s excellent Cytoverse/Skyward series}
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There are quite a few excellent design decisions I’d like to highlight.

CONDITION- Like most health systems, you can lose some of this when you fail something. The part that really sells the sleeper experience is the automatic deterioration. This adds an inherent cost to cycles, even before you consider any of the timers. I love the way this reframes obtaining healing as prolonging a losing battle- a Sisyphean task upon which the rest of your life depends.

The genius bit that truly makes this work is how passing certain thresholds of bad condition reduces your dice pool. It’s not just dying to be scared of- the journey down there is a slow motion free-fall of failure. It’s a particularly poignant depiction of the feedback loop with declining health and the way your finite time left becomes more and more tangible as your body fails you.

The good news is that using a stablizer fully heals your condition bar. Yet the scarcity of them turns this into an interesting dynamic. How much is it worth delaying a full heal to get better value out of it? That’s a question video game players are intimately familiar with. There’s additional complications to make it more interesting: coupling action efficiency with health and the obvious fact that you don’t have the luxury of wasting stabilizer.

Every vial feels impactful. The ones you buy from the dispensary are pretty much this game’s equivalent of having to make rent payments. It’s neat that there’s only a limited amount of them, although I think the game should explicitly tell you the amount the dispensary has left in stock (instead of as an offhand reveal at the end of the sabine-yatagan questline when you get the rest of them for free). The winter light one stands out as a relief in a time of need and complement to the tragedy of discovering another sleeper’s fate. The reveal of the gardener creating the mushrooms specifically for you is amazing (and it is an essential part of the game’s intended arc, more on this later}
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DICE ALLOCATION: Citizen Sleeper has the RPG staple of skill checks, but here they feel much more respectful to the player. The twist of rolling your dice- THEN deciding what you want to do is fantastic.

First, it allows players to ensure success in the things that are truly important to them. This alleviates a lot of frustration around arbitrarily being locked out of interesting directions and failing at things it feels your character is meant for.

Much can be said about the way randomness and roleplaying are inherently coupled in the genre. On the one hand, it adds an essential uncertainty to success/failure; On the other hand, it often leads to situations where a game sabotages its own core appeal. TTRPG gamers embrace the storytelling potential of failure and power of “Yes/No, but…”- yet in the transition to the more rigid world of video games, too much failure often leads to a strictly worse experience.

Citizen Sleeper makes an excellent compromise between uncertain success and fairness to the player. Assigning dice works incredibly well in the context of the game. I like the additional layer of each die value mapping to a simple positive, neutral, or negative outcome table. The analysis is quite approachable, requiring no experience with probability or dice distributions.

During the part of the game in which dice values still matter, deciding where to spend them is quite interesting. 5s and 6s feel special and the modifiers from skills have a high impact on what you choose to pursue. Low values become an interesting risk assessment, since they’re well used on safe tasks but always doing so is an inefficient action economy.

Spending dice in Citizen Sleeper is an abnormally informed choice. You know if the task you’re attempting is safe, risky, or dangerous, you know what counters progress on success/failure, there’s a perk that lets you peek at some of the risks and rewards. The timers make their urgency countable, if something is time-sensitive you usually know exactly how much time you have.

This is the kind of transparency that you generally see in board game design. It’s an invitation to engage with the systems and explicit proof of your agency. I quite enjoy this approach and found it both refreshing for a narrative videogame and well-fitting for Citizen Sleeper.

The catch is that the gameplay systems will not surprise you. The surprises are contained to the narrative and content. It’s like the text scenes are an elevated monadic world that keeps the gameplay “pure”. The gameplay gets to manage the flow of story, but the story only gets to interface with the gameplay. New scenes will block ending the cycle, but otherwise politely wait their turn. Text scenes have a well-defined set of gameplay side-effects: create new counters/locations, lock out counters/locations, add resources to your inventory, and reduce condition/energy. Your skills and dice will never affect the outcome of a prose scene.

This doesn’t mean that Citizen Sleeper lacks surprises. I’d actually say it’s packed with them – just that they exist within a defined and ordered structure. Story threads and scenes constantly defied my expectations and took interesting directions. I think I’d even be so bold as to say that every single drive in the game has an engaging and surprising progression.

Citizen Sleeper gets a lot of benefits from structuring narrative and gameplay as distinct layers. Part of why it works is the way the gameplay explicitly exists as a wrapper for the narrative. Citizen Sleeper never has a moment where I’m annoyed by a new scene popping up- that’s the fundamental appeal of the game. It’s also incredibly easy to switch layers. It’s not jarring to go from UI interaction to reading a scene. This transition avoids loading and the feeling of wrestling active control away from the player, it feels natural.
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NEW LOCATIONS: I love the idea of having to spend several actions exploring a node before you get to meet any characters or do useful actions. That’s such a neat way of gamifying being a outsider in an unfamiliar place. It complements the systemic decision making well, it’s interesting to balance exploring unknown new opportunities with the rest of your more concrete objectives.

It’s also a way to regulate the pacing. As you have space to spend actions in exploration, you get new action sinks. It ensures that you don’t just have new story threads dumped on you- avoiding the standard RPG experience of arriving somewhere and being bombarded with new tasks. Citizen Sleeper is more careful about how it hands out story threads. New drives feel more like a reward for some investment than a moth drawn to your game-protagonist light.
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AN ECONOMY OF CREDITS, DATA, SCRAP AND MUSHROOMS: There’s only a few types of inventory items in this game. Inventory management is thankfully a concept that doesn’t exist here. It’s honestly kind of incredible how they get away with this.

It’s even funnier when I think about how much mileage the game gets out of its mushrooms. It makes sense when Emphis asked me for mushrooms, it felt like an obvious “key quest item” intentionally locked in Greenway. Yet then mushrooms just progressively become more of a standard resource. One of the pranks in bliss’ questline involves her being paid in crates of mushrooms. You can offer that you’d be happy to take some for yourself and the hilarious part of this whole scenario is that as a player at that point I actually would have been satisfied receiving a mass number of mushrooms. [I did crime exactly one time in my playthrough to steal a random shipment from the crane logistics area. I got mushrooms and at the time I considered that a great boon!]. It feels like the developers are in on the joke of mushrooms being abnormally useful, as seen in the late game scene with a throwaway line about “those mushrooms you love so much”. The best part is that it makes sense for these mushrooms to be so important, since there is an entity actively designing them as a gift.

Perhaps more intuitive is the nature of the salvage economy. There’s common scrap and uncommon shipmind fragments. Once you’ve found the right places, you can convert those into credits. Each time the ship docks, you can convert credits to some salvage rolls. I like the asymmetric conversion here. There’s a couple of scrap sinks littered throughout the game and a game changing perk to self-repair with them. The initial 2 shipminds requests which block the navigator and ankhita quests feel incredibly impactful, it felt weird to be swimming in them later. {I didn’t even see a point in selling them.

The flotilla aid quest needing 8 scrap is quite frustrating. I like the idea of a lategame quest putting strain on a plentiful resource, but if you don’t have +1 endure, then there’s no consistent way to get lots more scrap at that point. I was stuck clearing out the scrap ship and hoping for engineering tasks to drop them. Shoutout to all the ship mind fragments I got during this phase. It felt silly to have a slice of surplus time but not a way to meaningfully progress that objective.
DATA makes the player’s life easier. First of all, hacking is one of the best uses of low rolls (even more so with an interface build). Agent data converts to money nicely and Castor’s onetime purchases are quite useful. I wouldn’t say it’s overpowered, rather it’s just a nice chip on the player’s side. Part of what makes it work is the looming threat of hunter, and the power to freely hack feels like a good reward for completing the navigator quest.

{Shoutout to Castor’s introduction scene! I’m a huge fan of scenes in stories where people play a game. It’s awesome for a writer to suddenly focus their attention on the part of life that I care about most}

The Credits economy is an integral part of the game experience… until it isn’t. In Citizen Sleeper, it is inevitable to reach a point in which spending money is trivial. That’s quite a shame, since the role money plays before then is phenomenal. I love how you have to spend money to keep living. In most games, you spend money in much the same way a child does. Here you get to experience the wonders of having expenses: medicine, food and eventually Ethan’s tab. Then on top of that is the quest progression that needs large sums: bliss’ eventually not a scam business partnership, crossing the founder’s gap, and potentially purchasing shipminds. Money in this game serves as both carrot and stick incentives. I love the strain of fitting paying jobs into your cycles. It serves the game very well- feeling crucial to the mechanical decision making and thematic intent of criticizing capitalism.

The financial concerns I listed in the above paragraph deserve more specific spotlight. Your 3 main expenses get cool characters and story attached to them!

I like the progression of Sabine’s quest. The way Yatagan is handled is a pretty classic storytelling trick, that’s not a complaint- I like how it worked here.

I LOVE the “get to know emphis” drive – the story scenes are amazing. The decision to make you (the sleeper) tell the first 2 stories is awesome. It’s a clever excuse to tell some sleeper backstory- and just wow the writing here is so powerful! This game is full of excellent writing and scenes concerning sleepers, these 2 stories are the highlight. Oh yeah Emphis’ story at the end is neat as well- it’s just a little overshadowed.

Ethan is a fascinating surprise. The hunted countdown makes for a solid buildup, but there was a strange meta sense of safety from my confidence that the game wouldn’t simply end there. I was expecting to have some lucky moment of temporarily giving him the slip. Ethan simply deciding to take a drinking vacation and make you pay for it is much more interesting. It’s a great way to explicitly delay the threat for the player in a way that makes sense (without taking away the tension!) . I like the strange dynamic and characterization explored with these Ethan scenes. It’s especially cool how pathetic Ethan gets right before and after his contract is cancelled. I didn’t get to see the conclusion of his questline, because I turned off my tracker before the 2nd Essen-Arp hunter arrived. I’m pretty sure this is the only content in the game I missed. The way Ethan simply disappears in this scenario feels quite awkward.

The Bliss cargo bay quest is hilarious. I love how it requires monetary investment and time sensitive action contributions, then leaves you with nothing [twice!]. I did this quest when I was Rich and had no stake in receiving rewards, but I just adore this idea. I can imagine this being fiendishly devasting if you do it while money still matters and equally satisfying for payoff to finally come through.

Finally, I like the way the founder’s gap divides the game. It makes sense that things like disabling your tracker, finding Ashton, the start of the dlc episodes and discovering a sustainable source of stabilizer are all behind this gate. Furthermore, I love the wonder of unlocking a new section of the map- full of greenery and digital fog. The greenway is super cool – it’s great as an exciting new environment that’s a complete shift from the game you’ve experienced so far.

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In Citizen Sleeper, you are not an Adventurer. There’s no mechanization of violence or combat. You spend the game rooting yourself in one large community instead of drifting through the world. HELL YEAH, MORE RPGS LIKE THIS PLEASE.

I find this game’s focus on routines especially interesting. The gameplay layer is able to “abstract away” the tediousness inherent to this direction. This game is filled with repetitive tasks- but it can get away with that because you’re not bogged down with actually doing them. The lack of friction in interacting with the gameplay is fantastic- there is little downtime forcing the player to wait. At least 95% of your time is spent choosing or reading.

That isn’t something I consciously noticed during my time with the game… such is the tragic fate of good UX. Now that I am thinking along this angle, I’d like to shoutout the decision to represent the world through a scrolling camera and selectable UI nodes. Would it be cool to play a game where you walk through the eye? Yes! Would I probably still prefer Citizen Sleeper as it exists in reality? Yes! Have I just now realized that I love when games cut out walking? Yes!
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Hyper capitalist sci-fi settings often miss for me. Emphasis on the greed of humans feels quite close to telling me that water is wet. It’s hard to feel satirical sharpness from comically evil corporations. I keep seeing the same parable against exploitation over and over again. Luckily, I don’t have these problems with Citizen Sleeper. Aside from simply having good writing, the main thing Citizen Sleeper does in this regard is focusing on the lives of people living in the margin of space capitalism. Erlin’s Eye is an excellent setting.

Extensive focus is given too how people are exploited and crushed by companies- but more importantly is the focus on the community that’s been cobbled together at the eye. Instead of just shouting complaints, they show you a place that has meaning- despite the systems of oppression that exist within and around it.

When first learning about this game, I wasn’t too excited by the concept of sleepers. This ending up being one of the cool ways in which they surprised me, it’s a unique idea that’s explored well. I really like the distinction that you’re an emulated mind that exists in a frame- it leaves them with the standard blank check to do android storytelling, but also leaves room for some more interesting stuff. {Some cool examples: you’re character appreciating scars as proof of their uniqueness, the weird middle ground you have with your simulated senses and the already discussed planned obsolescence}

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My analytical attention doesn’t focus on sound and visuals, so don’t take my lack of words on them as an insult. The soundtrack for Citizen Sleeper is incredible- I really love the vibes it sets. I listened to it many times while writing all these words. My favorite tracks are Optic Nerve and Yesterday’s sky. The music adds so much to the experience here, I wish I had the audio awareness to elaborate on that.

I like the entire aesthetic of the game, the character art is especially awesome though. Shoutout to how the dice have custom faces to represent each number, that’s a small stylistic thing that I heavily appreciate.
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I’ve alluded to the arc your character goes through several times now. You start as an overwhelmed outsider with 99 problems. Gradually those problems are replaced with friendships. Anxiety makes way for stability. The eye becomes a place you can call home.

The game starts after your character has leaped towards freedom. They spent the entire trip flickering in the cold twilight between life and death. Considering this, It’s chilling to learn the fates of other sleepers- you were the fortunate one. It’s lucky when Dragos finds and shelters you. It’s lucky when Emphis gives you the first meal for free. It’s lucky when Sabine can source a medicine for you (and give you a vial for free). This “luck” isn’t random, it’s active kindness from others.

The real helping hand you need is getting that tracker disabled. Luckily, Feng quicky offers to help with that. All you need to do is help him out with something…. Then help with something again… then you need to wait while he goes dark… then help with something again… then help with a final task in the greenway that requires focused attention. I love the way that both of you treat each other’s problems as the less important one. From your perspective, he keeps moving the goalposts and is holding your life hostage to help with his personal quest. From his perspective, there’s a deep-rooted injustice which threatens the entire station, and disabling your tracker is something he genuinely wants to do but simply cannot prioritize. It makes for quite the great troll to the player- it’s impossible to get your tracker disabled before Ethan shows up, but you won’t know that and still prioritize it.

Anyway, finally getting that tracker disabled is a turning point. The moment this happens you’re no longer making few meaningful dice allocation decisions. Your remaining drives simply become a backlog of quests you’d like to complete. Once you have mushroom farming to, time is no longer finite.
It’s not just that the sleeper’s life becomes stable. The player becomes Super Sleeper TM. By end-game, you have a nearly maximized build- defined by the 1-3 things you don’t have yet rather then what you choose to specialize in. Now I was the “lucky” kindness helping people in need, except I was a relentless machine who wakes up simply to solve others problems. Quests in this game feel incredibly different depending on if you do them as Citizen Sleeper or Super Sleeper TM. (I didn’t even meet Lem + Mina or Bliss until I was Super Sleeper TM)

At first, I was incredibly annoyed with the way the excellent tension simply deflates. It feels like the most interesting part of the game was taken out from under me. I no longer agree with this kneejerk reaction, but it was a strong thing souring me on the game during a phase of my playthrough.

First of all, the systemic tension is not the most interesting part of the game. It’s the writing and that’s not even a contest. The freedom from pressure in late-game means that you get to do everything. The game creates the expectation that you’ll have to make hard decisions about what to do- this conception is initially accurate and then eventually takes a hit from a friendly sledgehammer. In fact, the game being Evil is simply an illusion, it’s not only incredibly fair but designed in your favor.

Citizen Sleeper is a one playthrough game. It’s possible to fail quests, but I didn’t experience that. In my playthrough, I didn’t just win, I finished without having to make any sacrifices. No compromises, no regrets, no paths not taken- I experienced all the content in the game. {Except for the aforementioned late “Hunted” stuff after Ethan offers his protection and not being able to get enough scrap for the flotilla aid quest}

Surprisingly, this is a positive of the game for me. I’m a contrarian who dislikes branching content in games. I prefer my playthroughs of games to be as exhaustive as possible. It’s weird that losing one of my favorite aspects leads to a game more to my tastes. In this sense, Citizen Sleeper pulls off the experience of “having your cake and eating it too”. I got to experience the struggle of having to choose AND I didn’t end up missing out on anything. I’m still mulling over how it was possible for the game to pull this off.

I was further won over by the realization that the experience of becoming Super Sleeper TM is intentional.

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We must live and struggle against systems that want to spend us. To do so we must cradle a fragile hope- one that can be easily dropped and effortlessly crushed. Our lives are defined by a recurring choice, one that is new each time it arrives. When do we risk leaping into the unknown and when do we stay to build to build something worthwhile? Choose the air and its chaos will eventually pass. Choose the ground and its stability will eventually pass. The places that accompany our journeys have lives just as we do- ever-changing and ultimately temporary. This is what Citizen Sleeper is about.

The most impactful choices in the game are its endings. Each one presents you with a variation of “Should I leave or stay here?”. There are 2 things that make these shine: the vastly different context of each choice and the stellar writing in these scenes. I’ll go through them in the sequence that I encountered them.

THE GARDEN: The AI entities in this game are a clear highlight for me. Navigator is my favorite character and discovering Gardener is my favorite reveal. If I was willing to spend more time writing, I’d dedicate an entire section to them. I love how grandness of navigator’s true form and emphasis on how much they’ve lost. I love the concept of the gardener, it’s part of why I find greenway so compelling.

I love the recuring dichotomy between digital freedom and the physical tether. This idea reaches its peak when the gardener invites you to join the chorus. The choice presented here is incredibly compelling, I adore the setup of this scene. There’s the pull to join them- to transcend- and the pull from Riko – reminding you of what you’d be abandoning. I love the unbridgeable gap of understanding on both sides. The Gardener would never understand why you would refuse and Riko would never understand why you “died”. Neither of them would ever understand what you had to give up or even the nature of the choice you just made. I really like the way the writing sells what it means to choose your tangible life here.

This is the only leave option that I truly choose, the rest I just picked because I wanted to see the scene and knew the game would let me reenter the save and pick stay.

Ambergris into the Starward Belt:
I love Ankhita’s quest. The Ashton encounter is especially impacful- shoutout to the contrast between the lively greenway environment and the violence that occurs there; shoutout to the way you don’t get to control what your character thinks here- all subsequent interactions with ankhita are tainted by this traumatic event Then it’s an even more interesting decision to bring her back in as the one more job in the cargo bay. It’s cool to connect these 2 drives and even cooler to interact with ankhita after your character considers her a killer.

Sidereal Horizon:

I didn’t ever care about obtaining a ticket for the sidereal. I was just doing my Super Sleeper TM thing and finishing off quests. Due to when I started clocks, the ship ended up leaving during the purge episode, an amusing coincidence. {that last timer is excessively long- I bet without the dlc content it could be easy to just have nothing to do while it ticks if you start it too late}
The name of this colony ship also constantly reminded me of my favorite boardgame- sidereal confluence. {this was made worse by the fact that I went to go play that game the night I finished citizen sleeper}

Anyway, lem & mina are cool. It’s really fitting to do this quest as Super Sleeper TM, since you’re like an angel that just comes into the family. I like the idea that you have to watch mina just so lem can work.

Shoutout to the writing of the leave with lem+mina ending, I love the way they focus on how the sound of ship’s systems will accompany you as your body loses to time.


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I appreciate the way the additional episodes trigger quest clearly announces itself as late-game content (which you start on your own terms). That’s especially important here, because it wants your full attention and is designed for Super Sleeper TM. These episodes are what ultimately changed my mind on the player becoming Super Sleeper TM.

Firstly, Refuge reintroduces an urgent timer. More interestingly, it presents you with an ambitious undertaking, when you’ve been spending your time so far helping individuals. The approach of breaking the aid heist into several tasks is cool. I found the scenario pretty compelling, although I think it’s missing some extra systemic wrinkle to make it really shine. It’s good at evoking the urgency but didn’t actually ask me to make any interesting decisions.
Helene and the council dynamics feel pretty underexplored, although their concern did successfully leave me unsure if running past the cordon was a good idea.

It is thus funny to start the flux episode and watch as the cordon immediately becomes irrelevant. Seriously though, the intro of this episode is cool. The flux is quite the interesting threat, I like how the 2nd episode rides off this mystery instead of another urgent timer. Interacting with the 3 flotilla factions is neat as well, they’re interesting {like all characters in this game 😊}

Purge is an excellent finale to the game; I love how they brought in most of the characters still left on the eye. It feels much more like a conclusion of the whole experience rather than the way other endings are off-shoot branches that terminate. I really like the framing of “this is the last time you’ll make [this leave-or-stay] choice”. The decision has more weight to it because the previous 3 endings all ask you to decide if the eye is a worthwhile place to choose. Each time I stayed, I grew more certain that the eye was my home THEN these episodes roll in with the flux, and say “Would you still choose the eye if it’s future was uncertain?”. By reminding you that there’s no such thing as complete security, the whole experience of becoming Super Sleeper TM no longer feels like a misstep or classic video game progression fantasy.


This leads the game to end on a much more profound note. The eye is still worth choosing even without its offer of stability. You can’t choose a risk-free path and it’s still worth building in places that are temporary.