absolutely whips. incredible design, sound, art, worldbuilding, pacing, and length.

a game that asks the question of what community is to you: is it the body you occupy, is it the world around you? is it your friends you help or simply every life you touch? do the people you love in far away places form that community as well, even those you are incapable of remembering? all of these questions balance on a knife's edge in a world that hates you, one that actively plans for and expects your death. they Necessitate it. in a life and a world where control is so nested in corporations who will never see consequences for their actions or remember that you exist, waking up feels like protest, choosing your own life is the new punk.

The setting and aesthetics and dice-based decision-making all remind me a lot of Tharsis, except swapping out that game’s challenging roguelike puzzles for open-ended storytelling. It results in a narrative with clear consequences that never felt like punishments for “choosing the wrong thing.” There’s a lot of compelling characters along the way and I appreciated being able to pursue only the story threads I was interested in, towards many different conclusions. My initial playthrough was an operator who exhausted the social links and quests available and ended up torn between many equally interesting options for their next stage of life; in contrast, I played a much quicker second run as a brusque mechanic looking to get off the station as fast as possible and who didn’t waste time with anyone lacking an obvious transactional benefit. It was an equally valid story with a much lonelier and colder tone.

The electronic soundtrack is also fantastic. Lots of Boards of Canada influence throughout while still being its own thing.

Citizen Sleeper asks you to decide if escape is possible. It took several minutes of impasse and tears and not touching my controller for fear of making a decision before I was ready for me to know what I thought about that question. Citizen Sleeper gives you several potential answers and in the ones that resonated with me was the kind of deep personal freedom you only find, sure enough, through community.

Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysphoria and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things the grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts. Citizen Sleeper is good.

I both never wanted to put this game down while also never wanting it to end.

The combination of unparalleled writing, heady sci-fi concepts, and satisfying management/RPG mechanics really grabbed me.

I was continually impressed with the stories that were being told and how the simple mechanics informed and added to those stories.

Citizen Sleeper is my GOTY so far. I am extremely surprised by how this game has consumed me with it’s world, it’s characters and the overall atmosphere. I’ve not played ‘in other waters’, but I’m in love with it’s soundtrack. So it’s no surprise that Amos Roddy (yet again) delivers one of the best soundtracks to a game you will hear this year, giving off huge Nils Frahm vibes and perfectly underlining the melancholy of this space station. I didn’t even know about citizen sleeper until I saw it on the Xbox game pass, so I went in basically blind and got out a fan.

I’ve always said that I wanted more good sci-fi point and click games and this delivers on that front and on many more. It’s gameplay loop is rather unique, mixing big chunks of well written text, with table-top rpg like actions using dices and a round-based structure. It makes the station explorable in addictive ways, where dangers wait to be avoided, stories wait to be heard, where meaningful interactions happen and decisions matter.
Great little stories are told here and there, but the overarching goal I had set my eyes on, led me to a conclusion that literally left me in tears.

Another masterpiece, taking what was great about "In Other Waters" and taking it even further.

Despite dice being a core gameplay element, there is surprisingly little luck involved in getting the outcomes you want. You quickly figure out how to manage your dice efficiently, and from then on the narrative hangs entirely on your choices, not on the dice you have been dealt.

Which is a very good thing. After all, where "In Other Waters" was defined by it's supreme world building, "Citizen Sleeper" also focuses on a non-linear, divergent narrative. There a quite a few endings to the game, and thanks to the game's unintrusive gameplay, I felt encouraged to really get them all.

I always like to note when games suck me in, so I think it's worth noting that I played this from around midnight local time until the early morning hours.

That said, I think some of the effusive praise likening this to Disco Elysium or other CRPG games like that to be a bit over the top. It's a stretch to even call this an RPG in my opinion, it's much more akin to a plain Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with some very light resource management.

I also think it's worth noting that since it's a CYOA, the resource/time management that's built into the game becomes pretty easy around two hours into the game. The first hour or so where you're scraping by to survive is very cool, but after that it begins to drop off precipitously in importance. I think that would be fine, but I feel like they should have traded the centrality of resource management for more focus on time management (which is also super easy to handle) and put more focus on not being able to do everything with every character in one playthrough.

And in that regard it's worth mentioning that I'm fairly certain I saw every character's story through to the end in a single playthrough. Nice for people who don't like replaying games (me), but it also means there's low replay value here. I do think it's funny that the game autosaves and doesn't allow for manual save(scumming) because the devs want to presumably encourage replays...but then they also allow you to see almost everything in a single playthrough other than the text specific to each ending you didn't choose.

Those caveats aside, I think as a CYOA game, it's pretty great.

The story is generally well written; the story/writing doesn't get preachy, which is a pretty common issue for sci-fi writing in my opinion; the character art is done in a style that I really love; and the characters themselves are largely interesting enough that you'll want to hear most of them to their conclusion.

In particular, there's one side-storyline that I really loved, and the ending I chose based off that side-story was genuinely touching. I won't spoil what it was, but after reading that ending I can say I'm very satisfied with my $20 spent.

I think anyone going into it should know that this is mostly a visual novel, with some light dice-game and resource management on the side. The gameplay is mostly there to pace the story, but it is clear that most of the focus went on the narrative.

It's a good thing then that the writing is good!
The game basically tells relatively linear stories of various characters which are separate threads you can progress by using your dice on them. At times the stories overlap, which was very neat. The tone is bittersweet with glimmers of humanity and hope, but thematically the game stays true to its Cyberpunk roots.

The ambiance of the game reinforces the stories nicely, with superb character art and good music / soundscapes. I would have hoped to perhaps see more 2D art depicting the environments beyond the 3D space station that functions as your 'game board' but what artwork is there is very nice.

While the gameplay is light and mostly 'fluff', it does do it's job in pacing the story, and creates a "one more cycle" element to the gameplay as you spend your dice and rest to get them back. It is just robust enough to not wear out it's welcome.

really neat game with a unique soundtrack and intricately thought out setting, complemented by a set of systems that reinforce the 'tabletop'-lite experience. it's essentially like playing an indie tabletop rpg but much of the heavy lifting is done behind closed doors, so you're not really bothered by the technicalities of running a campaign. it makes this quite a sleek, streamlined experience that sings when it gets really stuck into its setting.
there are a couple of quite significant drawbacks for me. firstly, (at least right now) playing on switch was marred by technical and interface issues that made navigating the game occasionally frustrating. there was at least one total screen-lock during a tutorial and other times i wasn't able to perform tasks my character technically should have been able to do but the game was a bit bonked. the interface is cool when it works, but there are at least a couple of locations that were incredibly difficult to click on using a controller, which meant having to memorise button inputs when moving between locations on the world map in order to go certain places, which took a lot of trial and error and was really frustrating, especially given just implementing a pointer would eradicate this issue completely.
another hang-up i had was with some of the writing. while the stories themselves are really great - just as compelling as the developer's last game, In Other Waters, but the prose can often go on for much longer than seems natural. i got the impression that the game was a lot more in love with its use of language, and scenes will often go on for a paragraph or two longer than they really need to and those paragraphs will typically be written quite flowery, which i felt undercut the overall experience.
none of this is to say that i didn't like playing this game, i actually thought that it was pretty good. i'm really looking forward to seeing how this system can be implemented with other stories in the future and i hope that the next game is as refined in its prose as the gameplay it's built on.

I wanted more!

Sound design and art direction are unimpeachable. Character design does a great job illustrating each character's idiosyncrasies without feeling like caricature. Character in general is the strong point of this game, every one just oozes charm and I loved how character-focused the plotlines/drives were.

Dice mechanics are great but fall a little flat as the difficulty bottoms out almost immediately. Early into the game I failed a drive because I took too long and completely lost access to an entire character's arc. I wanted more moments like that. The game starts to set up more tough choices, i.e. different characters demanding the same rare resource at around the same time, etc., but the choices were always robbed of impact when I realized I could just... get more. The NPC in question waited patiently for their turn and didn't even acknowledge I had made a choice at all. I liked the parts where characters re-appeared in different arcs referencing past events, but those were few and far between.

I LOVED Lem and Mina, their entire arc was masterful. I wish every character was as fleshed out as they were, and every arc had as many opportunities for interaction as theirs did. Their ending is my favorite and also (unfortunately) the only one that felt conclusive of the ones I got. The other ones tended to just sort of throw a dramatic "final choice" out of nowhere and fade out with little to no denouement. I think this could have worked, the interruption of whatever drives you were following could be an effective narrative shock, but, like the resource choices, they don't make you stand by that choice. It is way too easy to just boot your save back up with no consequence and immediately see the alternative. I get the function of this as a way to help completionists avoid replays, but I WANTED to replay the game. Within a few cycles, I was already thinking "okay so next run I'll prioritize this and focus on these stats..." etc etc. In a game with multiple starting classes I figured that was the point. But that desire faded as resource management became trivial and my stats were near-maxed long before the ending.

I honestly hope Jump Over the Age makes another one of these, not a sequel but another game that carries on the (brilliant) mechanics and storytelling of this and expands on them.

Sheu mynds on than that even a comet

is rived by the weyght o whit hid passes,
an whan hid's fired ootower the starns,
the starns is tirled by thir awn wheel,
an that wheel tirled in anither wheel,

til ivry escaep is anither orbit,
an ivry orbit anither still,
an ivry still aye makkan the promiese
that wi a tirl thoo'll win tae free.

-Deep Wheel Orcadia, Harry Josephine Giles

I thought of Giles' novel in verse often while playing this. It's an easy contender for my best book of 2022 and, like this game, I reached a point where I wished it would never end.

Un juego narrativo muy bien presentado y escrito y con buenas ideas jugables que, por desgracia, no aguantan hasta el final del juego.

Llega a un punto en el que todas las mecánicas son básicamente un trámite para seguir con la trama porque tienes tantos recursos que no hay riesgo de nada. Pero eso no le impide contar una historia muy interesante, intensa y emotiva sobre la identidad, el lugar de uno en el universo y las relaciones que te ayudan a lidiar con todo ello.

Me ha gustado bastante.

A fusion of sci-fi and tabletop games, taking queues from Blade Runner and Cowboy Bebop, with themes of ableism, corruption, isolation and so, so much more; Citizen Sleeper kept me compelled from start to finish of my 7-hour run. It started with unbearable tension for the first hour and left me teary-eyed by the end.

Some of the mechanics seem overwhelming at first (there are a lot of instructions to get through) but the core idea is simple enough, with my only issue being a few aspects I didn't pick up on till I was almost finished, meaning I missed on a few character arcs I wanted to see. However, the game clearly welcomes multiple playthroughs to navigate these different stories and has the muscle of exceptional writing and character depth to pull it off.

If possible, would recommend playing on PC, as navigating the UI with a controller is a little cumbersome.

The 2022 Indie darling Citizen Sleeper slowly but steadily crept into just about everyone’s year end list of favourite games it is hard to find a single video or article that isn’t glowing praise for the game. If you are into Indie story heavy games, chances are you have at least heard of it . And this positive reception genuinely confuses me.

I found Citizen Sleeper lacking in just about all aspects from its storytelling, general quality of the prose, the soundscape and the gameplay department.

The game dragged me in with it’s setting and art-style at first, a cyberpunk game set in space is right up my alley and I was enjoying the game quite a bit at the start. Its a very bleak game, with themes of debt slavery and you being the property of a corporation looking for freedom, themes I find myself interested in. And the game starts harshly, you are dying you need to scrape by enough nutrition to just barely sustain yourself. But that’s just at the start, survival wasn't a problem after just a bit, I never really was in danger and these elements of the game just became a tedious chore, rather than an engaging part of the whole.

So a lot of the game’s appeal now lies on the game’s ability to make the narrative engaging which is hard to do when the game doesn't even let you have an actual full-fledged conversation with characters, it breaks up the dialogue constantly by these characters sending you constantly on fetch quests which would be fine if the conversations can continue within a few minutes. It cant. So the game has a mechanic where events occur every few cycles, which means quests drag cause you do one part -> wait 4 cycles for it to continue->Do another part -> wait for another 4 cycle for it to continue. It breaks and the flow of the quest’s story as I have jump between and do multiple quests just to pass the time for the quests I actually want to do to be done. It’s very annoying.

But getting through these tedious quests didn't feel that rewarding either cause I never felt that the characters were that well written. There isn’t really much depth in the conversations, all of it feels disconnected from one another and simplistic. They lack a certain human charm to them. The game tries to invoke feelings of warmth, hope and belief, but it needed a stronger climax to the quests (writing wise cause story wise they are about what can be expected from the game) and characters whose thoughts, inner workings explored more. I don’t dislike the characters I am just consistently underwhelmed, for some I liked the focus on the sentience aspect(easily the best part of the game for me), but I don’t think it did much with any other of its themes. Fengs quest left me wanting more, same for the Yatagan questioned. I liked the characters a bit but I couldn’t find myself getting attached to any of them by the end. I felt like half the time I was just collecting mushrooms for 3 different quests. There’s not much engaging about any of it.

And all the time the game is failing with it’s complex prose. Which while it can describe a scene, it fails to actually describe being in that scene, a part of the world. It doesn't induce any emotions in me. A game doesn't need to have that as it can use its visuals and soundscape to ground the player in the world but the soundscapes in this game are lacking as well, would have loved if it matched the environment a bustling city sound at low end or something like metal works when working on ships but its strangely empty other than the music, the music is pretty good though. The art is great but I wanted to see more there’ not much of it, just some more detailed backgrounds would also have helped a lot.

The dice roll gameplay is not interesting or challenging so when a lot of it I felt was just grinding away cycles passing, and with minimal engagement I was done with the game. I got an ending and don’t see myself ever going back for more.

Una de estas pequeñas obras maestras que aparece en el medio cada pocos años y que nadie deberia perderse.

Citizen Sleeper utiliza su mecanica de dados como gestión de recursos sacada de un juego de mesa y la implementa de forma magistral en su loop de gameplay, de forma que te hace sentir en control en todo momento de tus decisiones y nunca a merced del RNG.

Pero Citizen Sleeper no es esto, esto va de su historia, de sus personajes, de sus problemas y de como empatizan con alguien que no deberian, mientras tu luchas por sobrevivir, literalmente, en un mundo controlado por unas corporaciones que muchas veces parecen que se han olvidado de los habitantes de "El Ojo" pero que en todo momento hacen notar su poder sobre cada uno de ellos.