I covered this game as part of my coverage of the Xbox Game Pass for May 2022

Resource management in spacceeeeee…

Citizen Sleeper starts with the player waking up on a distant space station. His body is failing him, he’s starving and needs money and rest. From there, players must spend their days trying to satisfy all their needs and wants. Each day involves the player getting action dice, and applying those dice to different jobs to accomplish goals.

Citizen Sleeper reminds me of Norco and Disco Elysium as it’s a completely story-driven game. Players will meet many different characters, and through them will get different opportunities and challenges. The writing is good and kept me engaged, and the first hour of this game is intense as the player struggles to meet the right people to earn the right resources. However after that opening hour, players start getting entirely too many resources and easily will have run of the space station by the end. Even when a big bad danger arrives, it feels like Citizen Sleeper is afraid to give players a bad ending, which is appreciated after four hours invested and an aggressive autosave, but also removes any desire to replay the game and try to get a different or better story.

Pick this up if you like a strong narrative. This is very much about the story, and while there will be a decent amount of time while the player has to chase resources, and the dice component is rather important, the majority of the experience is meeting people and learning about their struggles.

If you want to see the video this was taken of, or more from me on the Xbox Game Pass, check out: https://youtu.be/62CjXwS1zQg

Good game! Really cool sci-fi/cyberpunk adventure story. It weaves together a beautiful tale about belonging in extremely oppressive circumstances, and like good sci-fi stories some of the best stuff really sticks to your brain.

Strong writing that lacks the pretentiousness of Kentucky Route Zero and the like while still being stylish and thoughtful.

Two main critiques. The first is that I wish there was more art; what's there is so good, and I wish there was a little more for crucial scenes. I understand it's trying to recreate a tabletop adventure, so it's more of a personal preference.

Secondly, I found it difficult to navigate the game's UX on console. Not a huge issue, but a little annoying.

Really cool thing overall, though. Highly recommended if you have Game Pass (works great on XCloud too).

The perfect companion piece to Disco Elysium and not just because of their stylistic similarities. Where ZA/UM's unapologetically cerebral point-and-click RPG challenges the player by constructing an identity around their successes and failures, Citizen Sleeper challenges the nature of the player's identity - their avatar, their Sleeper, a lens through which to view the interactions on a starport in decline. Both games have rich world-building, a sense of imminent collapse, but through it all, the human spirit - our drive - pushes on, past what we once thought impossible, creating something remarkably poignant yet altogether unfamiliar. In short, the political text-based dice roll games made me cry. A humbling experience.

On paper, not my cup of tea.

In practice, I got hooked and it was beautiful.

Grateful to everyone on the timeline who kept banging on about it. I was ready to turn it off after five minutes, but thanks to you I persevered and saw something new.

I hitched a ride off The Eye, but I'll be going back in for more. I left too many friends behind.

Not my typical type of game, but instantly got sucked in by the story. The narrative and characters are great and the writing across the board is stellar for the entire playthrough. I can't say the same for the gameplay though. Although it makes an incredible first impression and feels very finely tuned, the challenge and economy take a nosedive after the first quarter or third of the game. It becomes much more of a visual novel, which is fine for some but I had enjoyed the bit of challenge and pressure from the start. Didn't ruin the experience, but I think it could have been executed better.

Sad to say Citizen Sleeper is a pretty neat little experiment that I only wished I could’ve loved more than I should. I really vibe with the visual look, music, it's more hands on approach to cyberpunk themes and concepts, and the Disco Elysium approach to the gameplay lacking conventional combat in favor of story exploration and dice roll mechanics. The game is also fairly non-linear, allowing you to basically pick and choose whatever quest lines or stories to follow in the Erlin’s Eye and pretty much make up your own personal main story to progress through. But once you’ve cracked down on how the cycle progression and dice rolls work in the game it just starts to feel very dragged out because you’re basically clicking and waiting for the real interesting stuff to happen occasionally. Everything in between those parts to do with waiting and resource management just doesn’t feel engaging because there really isn’t too much to it gameplay-wise and story-wise nothing is really going on yet. This didn’t tarnish the experience dramatically because of how short the game is, and if you’re willing to get pass that easy enough this should click with you more, but I would’ve liked to see this concept a bit more fleshed out to live up to its full potential.

Citizen Sleeper ist ein wunderschönes Abenteuer in einer detaillierten und interessanten Welt, welches einen emotional wirklich mitnimmt und welches ich so schnell nicht vergessen werde.

Das Schönste an dieser Welt waren für mich die vielen liebenswürdigen Charaktere, die man trifft. Denn im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen aktuellen Spielen mit gutem Storytelling glaubt Citizen Sleeper an das Gute in den Menschen und sieht die Menschheit und die Welt an sich nicht so zynisch. Natürlich gibt es auch in dieser Welt Intrigen und Verrat, aber es gibt auch so viele Gefährten, die das Herz am rechten Fleck haben und mit denen man gerne Zeit verbringt. Dadurch war ich ungewöhnlich stark dazu motiviert den verschiedenen Figuren zu helfen und schwierige Situationen mit ihnen zusammen durchzustehen, denn ich wusste sie würden das Selbe auch für mich tun.

Die Sympathie zu den Charakteren wird zusätzlich noch durch immersive und detaillierte Beschreibungen sowohl in Text- als auch in Bildform gestärkt. Generell ist das Writing in Citizen Sleeper wirklich stark und steht einem guten Buch in nichts nach.

So bestreitet man ein Abenteuer als Außenseiter, der erst sein Leben auf die Reihe kriegen und schließlich eine von vielen möglichen Zukünften anstreben muss und zwischendurch neue Freunde und Abenteuer findet. Diese Erzählung erfolgt wunderbar organisch und wird durch das simple Gameplay wunderbar komplementiert.

Das Gameplay ist nämlich zum Teil Würfel-RPG und zum Teil Ressourcenmanagement. Am Anfang eines jeden Tages erhält man eine bestimmte Anzahl an Würfeln, je nachdem wie fit man zur Zeit ist. Die erwürfelten Augenzahlen kann man dann jeweils genau für eine Aktion nutzen, und je höher die morgens gewürfelte Zahl war, um so wahrscheinlicher gelingt die Aktion. Dieses Gameplay wird dann noch durch ein paar leichte RPG Fähigkeiten ergänzt, die es zum Beispiel erlauben die Würfelwerte zu modifizieren.

Dadurch dass man nur eine sehr begrenzte Anzahl an Würfeln hat und sich auch noch um seine Versorgung kümmern muss, muss man sich gerade am Anfang für eine bestimmte Richtung entscheiden, und andere Aktionen ignorieren. Dadurch fühlt sich das erlebte Abenteuer auch sehr individuell an.

Weiterhin hat Citizen Sleeper einen wunderschönen, entspannten Soundtrack, der die Stimmung des Spiels perfekt einfängt und das Spielerlebnis ergänzt. Die Musik ist recht minimalistisch und gleichzeitig aufmunternd aber teilweise auch ein wenig melancholisch.

Kritikpunkte habe ich fast keine für Citizen Sleeper. Lediglich die visuelle Präsentation könnte mit einem größeren Budget deutlich aufgebessert werden. So besteht aktuell die Grafik nur aus einer groben Zeichnung der Raumstation und Punkten und Symbolen, die die verschiedenen Aktionen andeuten. Charaktere werden wie in einer Visual Novel als Standbild neben dem Text angezeigt während man sich mit ihnen unterhält. Aber darüber kann man wirklich hinwegsehen, da die Texte und Charakterzeichnungen auf einem sehr hohen Level sind.

i know this is a game about social themes because it told me so, very directly, about sixty different times.
towards the end i stopped fighting the writing and found a little bit of peace with it but it took me a while to stop skipping through the oceans of text to describe a single room.
i'm a little snippy about the idea this game is "learning from tabletop games" because it is still a very constrained game where you can see almost everything in a single playthrough. in no sense are you playing against a DM or making hard choices between compelling scenarios where it feels like anything can happen. there's just some resource management.
dragging dice around was kind of a chore - i left resources on the table several times because the process of collecting them was so unintuitive, towards the end i was spinning my wheels looking for something to do, navigating the whole station was a little clunky and exhausting.
it's not, like, a problem? but neither was it a revelation. corporations are bad, robots are people, people are good. is that really all cyberpunk has to say to us as a genre? or is this "hopepunk" where there are only vibes?

Beaten: May 17 2022
Time: 4.5 hrs
Platform: Xbox Series X

I'm tempted to call this a miniature sci-fi Disco Elysium, and honestly if that sounds like it's up your alley I think you should drop everything and play this right now. If you haven't dropped your phone on the floor to buy this game yet, let me continue:

It's so much more than a mini Disco Elysium on a space ship, even if it would so obviously not exist without that game. However, where DE is still mostly a cRPG mechanically, Citizen Sleeper feels almost like a board game. You get a number of dice per turn and you can spend them in any of the adventure game/visual novel-like points of contact for varying degrees of success. It honestly feels right out of the XCOM board game I used to play in high school, just with loads more writing (and much more forgiving difficulty, that board game was HARD).

Narratively it does what a lot of its ilk do, lobbing criticisms at our real life through vignettes and short stories while you essentially search for a way out of your situation. The moment to moment writing is great, gorgeous and descriptive and fun as hell.

My only real issue with the game is that I never felt it take a point of view I hadn't seen before. The games I feel it invites comparison to, the Disco Elysiums and Norcos of the world, all have this sharp blade of emotional criticism they will slide between your ribs without you noticing, until they pull it out and surprise! it's notched at the top. Sleeper by comparison keeps its blade sharp, but never drives it in, with things almost feeling like they went too well.

Maybe that's the consequence of the difficulty curve and the mechanics. It never felt like failing a check was something I wanted to see the outcome of, never like I had to use a low die roll on a task and accept the consequences (mostly because of the hacking system, which makes use of low rolls). It's interesting and fun as a game, but it all feels more dreary than emotional.

That's not to say I didn't feel anything playing it, there were loads of vignettes that were rather meaningful to me, and the ending I got was great!! Satisfying in all the coolest ways. But I didn't cry like in Norco, and I didn't feel like the game had called me out on the way I carry myself like Disco.

It's just a really good and fun game/novel, and there's nothing wrong with that, or even anything wrong with this game. I just wish I could call it a favorite instead of "really great".

but yeah still play it obviously

Citizen Sleeper took me by surprise. I hadn’t even heard about this game until I saw it pop up in some lists prior to its release. Even closer to its release, I played Jump Over The Age (the team behind Citizen Sleeper) their previous release ‘In Other Waters’ and liked it a lot, so getting Citizen Sleeper was a no-brainer at that point. The game grabbed my attention all the way through with its simple yet captivating TTRPG gameplay mechanics, all the unique characters and their fascinating stories, and the beautiful art that portrays those characters.

At the start of the game it can be a bit overwhelming with all the information it throws at you, explaining how all its systems and the resource management work. But once the game settles and you start to learn about the world and its characters, it becomes hard to put down.

All the characters have their own unique stories that stand on their own and sometimes intertwine with each other but ultimately their purpose is to grow your own character. It all flows so well and the game is filled with amazing moments that made me happy, sad, and angry. The characters are so well written with their own motivations and relationships and it made me want to explore all their stories.

(Slight spoilers ahead)

The more critical questlines all have their own ending for the game, which usually is a decision between leaving the Eye or staying behind. My only complaint with the game is within those decisions. There isn’t really an ending for when you choose to stay, or the equivalent of that decision, in each questline. You can keep going through cycles and doing tasks, but without a purpose. It would’ve been nice to get some sort of ending for this with some explanation about what happened to the characters that left. It’s a minor complaint because everything else ties up nicely and maybe this is just me being greedy and wanting even more from the game. I’m sure I’ll be visiting this game again in the near future!

Jump Over The Age has won me over with both of their games now and proven they put out the slickest looking games with some of the best narratives and so instantly becoming one of my favourite developers out there. If you’re a fan of narrative focussed games do yourself a favour and try this game, and while you’re at it also give In Other Waters a shot.

Beaten: 14/05/2022
Platform: Nintendo Switch

Very good game. It takes one sitting, and while the universe makes very much with so litlle I feel there are some characters that are less interesting than what it seems. It takes some things from Disco Elysium and it executes them well, taking into their own terrain, and while the hacking department is interesting as also the subplot around it, there are more dull moments than what it happens. I dig the transition from having to survive in a TTRPG game setting to exploring the different areas and decide at which point to stop, and thankfully the game subtly tells you so. I feel the writing is really good, but the beginning can get dull because imo most of the dullest characters are there.

Really liked enjoyed this game during the early parts, reminded me a lot of the time management and pressure from something akin to Paper's Please. However once you get only about an hour in, the game's difficulty drastically drops, as does a lot of the tension related to certain timed events once you get a feel for how the game works, and the game kind of just becomes a process of waiting for things to happen or items to drop in order to finish the story. Overall though the story and world is pretty solid and worth checking out if you are interested.

It's a testament to how much I like Citizen Sleeper that I'm giving it four stars despite having the absolute worst copy-editing I've ever seen in a professionally-released video game. It is strewn with typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and a thoroughgoing lack of understanding of the typographical conventions of written English. It is embarrassing, particularly in a game whose focal point is its writing.

All that said... it's still a good game. It walks in the footsteps of similar "modular narrative" games like 80 Days and Sunless Skies in using a light resource-management system to drive the player to allocate their time between many different bite-sized threads of plot, creating an individual route through the game's story. This is one of my absolute favorite microgenres but a difficult one to get right, and I'm thrilled with any game that can pull it off competently.

Citizen Sleeper isn't as successful at this as its forebears, though. By the end of the game you have enough resources to do almost everything the game has on offer, and there turn out to be minimal ways that plots can differ from playthrough to playthrough. Starting a new save feels more onerous than exciting, knowing that so much of it will be clicking through the same dialog rather than forging new paths.

I often finish modular narrative games with a sense that the system on which its built still has untapped potential. The calculus of quests taking inputs and producing outputs while clocks tick down cycle after cycle is simple but expressive—it could give rise to such an intricate web of interlocking threads. Is it too much to hope for that, with the groundwork now laid down, another game could be created on top of it... this time with an editing pass?

Citizen Sleeper revolves around playing as a Sleeper, those who gave their lives to work for corporations by becoming synthetic copies of their original selves. You decided to escape from those you worked for and need to pick yourself up from the bottom, trying to survive and build a new life as you hide out on a rundown but lively space station called Erlin’s Eye. All the while you’re constantly being tracked and your body is rapidly deteriorating

The gameplay is part narrative RPG akin to Disco Elysium (where actions are determined by dice rolls) and part resource management. With each limited cycle, much of the game is spent scrambling to find ways to make money to survive, exploring the various parts of the ship and meeting new people with their own drives to pursue. While also learning more about the station and the world itself through the game’s descriptive dialogue

Eventually it becomes much more manageable as you upgrade your character and gather various rewards from those you meet with regularly. Though you’ll start to exhaust most of what the game has to offer and still need to wait for events to trigger or items to appear after multiple cycles, which did get a little tedious. By the end though, Erlin’s Eye actually started to feel like home for the small amount of time you’ll spend on it