In 2017 Apple one of the world's biggest companies admitted to intentionally slowing down phone batteries. Referred to as "Batterygate" this action opened up a string of lawsuits that Apple were intentionally using 'planned obsolescence' to encourage people to upgrade their phones or fork out to apple for replacement batteries. Apple always denied this by all reports stating it was actioned to preserve the device.

Moving forward 5 years and we have Citizen Sleeper, an indie game made by a one person studio Jump Over the Edge. In this game you play as a Sleeper, an emulated copy of a person with no rights as part of a Essen-Arp Megacorporation contract. Through design without the right treatment your body will decay over time making you reliant on them in a form of indentured servitude. Planned Obsolescence of a copied person. You escape however ending up on the Eye, a self run Space station surviving after the collapse of the Megacorporation Solheim it and many companies were once part of. Somewhat lawless but welcoming, it's a perfect place for a Sleeper trying to survive.

The lore and world created here is a fascinating one. The way the game takes examples of situations like that of Apple as a form of consumer control but exaggerated into the extreme Cyberpunk Megacorp world really stands out. The characters you meet on this independent space station are broken, struggling, running and surviving but are a great cast to interact with as further world building about the outside universe is dribbled to you through these events.

The game actually plays akin to a visual novel mixed with a dice placement tabletop board game with a few light sprinklings of RPG stats on top. Each turn or cycle (as there is no day and night on a space station) you get several dice rolls based on your Sleeper's physical health condition. Each dice can be used towards actions, some immediate some building up charges to complete. Depending on the number result of the roll will depend on it's chance for success with a positive (5-6), neutral (3-4) or negative (1-2) outcome. These numbers can be bolstered with + values depending on the skill involved and you level in it such as 'engineering +1' to increase your chance. All along the station are different locations with different characters and events that can feed you, repair you or push along character quest lines.

How you choose to progress is entirely up to you after the opening couple of quests. It's a fairly open ended adventure with multiple different endings depending on who you interact with and when. This is both a positive and negative in my view having seen them all. Citizen Sleeper despite it's grand ideas for the outside lore of the world feels more like a slice of life story so each character questline is personal and don't interconnect with each other in anyway leaving everything feeling a little directionless. Additionally though your circumstances are in many ways quite dire it never feels that way in the writing which at times is a little too matter a fact. What writing there is though outside of that small caveat is excellent. The characters, their problems and events are all really interesting, I got rather absorbed into their lives and personal struggles which is why I went out of my way to see all the endings on offer.

My only real issue with the game is actually if you are wanting to see all events there is a lot of downtime mechanically. Initially every dice you use has to be really thought out in regards to survival / story progress balance but it soon becomes extremely obsolete meaning you are mostly just burning down clock cycles to get to the next story beat sometimes doing nothing. The thing is I am a board gamer and this reminds me a lot of a game called Alien Frontiers where you place dice for resources to build colonies. What I hope Citizen Sleeper learns from this is to use the full range of numbers for actions rather than high = good and low = bad. Have certain actions only available on a 1 or 2 etc. and smaller ways of knocking them up and down would have made the turn based element more strategic and interactive throughout.

When all is said and done though I had a really good time with this and the fact that it was made by mostly one person is pretty nuts. The wonderful character art, somber music and writing pushing this along make for a wonderful experience and I do look forward to the announced sequel.

+ Fantastic art, music and atmosphere.
+ Citizen Sleepers universe and lore.
+ Mostly excellent writing and characters.

- Dice mechanic could have been more interesting.
- Sleepers personal situation often felt detached from events writing wise.

"To be human and to be humane are two very different things."-Some 15 year old on Tiktok, probably.

Before I start this review, I'd like to give a massive thanks to @duhnuhnuh for gifting me a copy of this game. They have a steam giveaway list on their profile, so check that out!

Citizen sleeper is a game about obsolescence. This is made clear when you start the game, your robotic body already failing due to built in corporate dependency, washed up on an old space station that frankly, kinda sucks. A story about people who've either achieved their goals or become complacent. It's a cyberpunk setting, so implants, corrupt mercs, and lower city crime gangs abound here, but all with such stellar execution.
Once you finish the tutorial, you're pretty much free to explore the city at your leisure. You talk to people and take on odd jobs to get by and expand your scope of the city, in a day to day system similar to something like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, only your body can shut down if you don't take enough drugs. Standard stuff.
But the sandbox element is a great draw. It's not super limiting and anything that does have a deadline is pretty generous, the only limit is needing a specific dice which rng could just not give you (Feng bro I'm so sorry) The implant system is generally a genius mechanic, beautifully blending gameplay and narrative together. Do you use another for more desperate attempts at the dice, or do you wait until your robotic body is barely functional? Choice is yours.

But above all that, Citizen sleeper is a game about people. People stuck in the same situation as you just trying to get by. People like Tala and Emphis just trying to make the best of their situation, people like Sabine and Feng trying to change the system entirely, and people like Lem just working for themselves. I straight up cannot think of a bad character in this game.

The next thing I gotta praise is the atmosphere in general. Even at the start when you're trying to get your bearings, the world's beautiful setting and sound design keep you invested, as well as the general mystery of what's the next thing out there. If I fill this meter, what do I get? What, or who, is there for me? I gotta buy access to the next part of the ship? Sure thing, who's there? It's just such a brilliant setting.

If there's one thing I think should be looked into for the next game, I think more variance in sprites should be nice. Character sprites only change after a dramatic turning point in their plotlines, so just a few different emotion sprites would add greatly to the immersion.

So overall, it's just a masterpiece of an experience that left me engaged throughout, and a game you just need to play. I only got one of eight possible endings, so I'll definitely be returning at some point.

Despite being a game about precarity and stress, I finished the game with like 1000 cryo, three skills at +2 and with like 7 stabilizers and 30 pieces of scrap.

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I think it says alot when a game makes you accidentally play for like 4 more hours than you were planning to without even realizing it.

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------Things I Like

- The near-dystopian (and I use this term cautiously) “cyberpunk” setting. Its well thought out, its pretty to look at, it explores some not-entirely rote themes. Its good.

- The time management design is mostly thoughtful (but not for all parts of the game, and while it makes the game good I could probably never love being stressed about time)

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------Things I Hate

- The pacing really drops off in the second half of the base game, and is the primary reason why I became brokenly wealthy with resources - which feels like a problem in a game about timers and restraints. For about 6 (or more possibly) hours of my playtime I had 5 dice permanently available for every cycle. God Mode is fun for about 20 minutes, challenges are fun for longer and this feels like a progression leak in the game.

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------Things I Love

- The Dice/Skill system makes RNG alot more entertaining than games in the same format. You have up to 5 dice so you can choose which dice you want to apply to which checks which allows you to control your risk more directly on more serious actions. Luck systems where strategy helps you gain some agency over your outcomes create a good balance I think.

- The vibe. Moody music playing while looking at lush character portraits while some fairly engaging moments play out makes Citizen Sleeper a very captivating and enthralling experience that I would recommend on presentation alone to some people.

- There are some really touching moments, and I think the game really understands why people care about people and writes to that very well. Ill try to keep this spoiler vague and brief but theres nothing quite like leaving L&m and M&n& as they board a craft without you.

- Hunter, Killer, Navigator, and Gardener are all patently sick as hell and thats notable all on its own.

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------Things I Wanted To Love

- I think the writing is good, but an issue arises when a game is 13 hours long and consists primarily of reading: you lose alot of energy when all situations sort of draw on the same emotion. I think theres only so long I can feel sad and sympathy and grief and tensity before the Sad/Sympathy/Grief/Tensity Well runs dry and Im left with a tedious feeling. (I also personally dont need elaborate descriptions of settings that are just, like, a room with wires that Im never going to return to. I dont need to know everything, just the interesting or pertinent things)

- I wasnt sold on the Sleeper concept. It wants me to care alot about being a clone or company property or being a robot and yet none of these things really impacted John Sleepers ability to care about other people - and it sure as shit isnt something that I, John Human Gamer, could possibly relate to my life in any real way. It wanted me to care but it never felt real so I didnt care - and if it wanted me to care it should have never let me take the tracker off. Being hounded as property for the whole game might have sold me more on the notion.

Você é um sleeper: uma mente humana emulada em um corpo mecânico, uma venda de direitos autorais da caixola do seu eu original que nasce sumariamente para servir uma corporação. Citizen Sleeper recontextualiza o personagem blank-slate diretamente através desta ótica: sua interface com o mundo são as suas ações; suas conquistas no Eye vem através do mesmo meio para o qual você foi criado - servitude. Porém, agora seu mestre não é apenas a corporação que rastreia a sua propriedade perdida, mas também os elementos - fome, sono, saúde, dinheiro, tempo. Citizen Sleeper, em seu melhor momento, é sobre sobreviver e triunfar, das maneiras minúsculas em que um pode, sobre a opressão do capitalismo tardio. É sobre vender o almoço pra comprar a janta, sobre quase se matar de trabalhar pra conseguir garantir um futuro um pouco melhor para uma criança, ou para uma comunidade, ou para a bartender bonitinha que te deu o seu primeiro sorriso, e se definir como alguém além de sua subserviência ao capital - flores que se espreitam e brotam pelas frestas do metal gelado, apesar de tudo. O começo do jogo te captura nessa peleja diária, uma série de ampulhetas descendo paulatinamente, e todo o tempo do mundo não parece o suficiente para garantir o seu e o de quem te acolheu - um sistema simplérrimo que não passa de um d6 e quatro atributos regendo uma orquestra delicada com muita precisão.


Infelizmente, não tarda muito até tudo descompassar. A tensão opressora do jogo dá caminho à uma monotonia entediante (ainda um bom comentário, mesmo se não intencional) e as curtinhas histórias se revelam mais pelo que elas são: o que antes parecia um ecossistema vivo é na verdade uma série de one-shots lineares, que nunca se converge, e a falha absoluta nunca foi uma realidade - de alguma maneira, você vai conseguir dar um jeito em quase tudo que aparece pra você, seus atributos e perks já robustos o suficiente para carregar toda a estação nas costas.


Também não ajuda que cinco dos dez finais do jogo não são definitivos: embora narrativamente representem um ponto final nessa história e os créditos rolem, o jogo não faz o suficiente para satisfazer o jogador com a conclusão que ele atingiu e torna fácil demais voltar para concluir tudo. Diria que até espera isso do jogador, com o DLC que contém o ‘true ending’ - que, apesar da sequência final bonita, exacerba todos os defeitos do late game - fazendo muito mais sentido se você tiver concluído todo o resto do jogo, e, ainda assim, acho que entrega um final menos interessante e impactante do que o do jogo base. Não diria que Citizen Sleeper peca pelo excesso, e sim o contrário: a carne do jogo, que deveriam ser os diálogos, completamente lineares; seu Sleeper, sua condição e seus recursos jamais sendo afetados por algo que ele decide ou diz durante eles. O jogo não conseguiria incorporar bem finais mais definitivos de fato sem dar uma capacidade de expressão satisfatória para o jogador.


O elefante na sala é óbvio: Citizen Sleeper nasceu e vive sob a sombra de Disco Elysium. Evitar comparações é impossível, e é um embate duro para qualquer um que queira brotar de um jogo um em um milhão como ele. Ainda que Citizen Sleeper tenha uma escrita cativante pela eficiência em que consegue puxar emoções de clichés sci-fi, não só lhe faltou um pingo de excelência, quanto também precisa desesperadamente de um revisor - não faço ideia como não corrigiram a gama enorme de erros ortográficos e pontuação bizarríssima que detona com a prosa do jogo. As palavras podem ser bonitas, mas o ritmo é constantemente falho, o que deixa um gosto ruim na boca. Ainda assim, Citizen Sleeper sabe, ainda que por pouco tempo, brilhar excelentemente, e representar muito bem esta narrativa através de suas mecânicas. Fico interessado na continuação.

"I was surprised to walk away from a story about struggling in an impoverished gig economy surveillance capitalist hell state feeling rejuvenated and alive." (IGN, Rebekah Valentine)

that's exactly it, making this game an absolute favourite. a simple but engaging gameplay loop while being the sort of game that leaves a deep ache in your chest; incredibly human and embodied, heartbreaking, woven with hope and compassion - the sort of writing i will never forget

(played through once w two endings)

I really wanted to love this, and I truly did the first 4h or so. Part of that was that the mechanics clicked together perfectly and the introduction to the world was truly interesting, even though the prose is nothing to write home about. After those 4h I was already thinking about how I would shape my next playthrough. Well, I didn't need to do that, since the game becomes so easy after you upgrade 4 or 5 times that you can pretty much achieve anything you want during your first playthrough.

It's a shame those mechanics fell apart about midway through my run. The further you advance in the story, the storylines, the daily actions you take and how they relate to the themes of the game grow further apart, making the actions feel empty and what started as a tense resource management game became a boring (but kinda cozy) slog.

Anyway, the exploration of it's main themes is pretty on the nose, which is fine (it is also very on the nose in Disco Elysium, since everyone is comparing these too), but here it's so much more shallow. If it wasn't, I don't think I would have minded the cozyness, it would be a great reward, even.

The game needed more work on ironing out these things, because the foundation is pretty good. Hope the sequel learns from these mistakes, although I don't think it will since the game was pretty universally aclaimed.

While flawed, Citizen Sleeper gives one of the more immersive and grounded Cyberpunk experiences I've come across.

As you can imagine, a game with a very central narrative that is inspired by TTRPGs and cRPGs is rather light on gameplay mechanics. You have timed cycles, instead of days (as you are in space), and numbered die that represent the actions you can make. It is pretty straight-forward and does a good job of being engaging while not suffocating the world, characters or story.

You embody a imperfect copy of person residing in a dying, artificial body. You are a Sleeper. With little memory of the past and no real direction, you must push forward into the unknown of a dilapidated space station, hoping for a better tomorrow.

And that's the real beauty of this game. While it can be very bleak at times, the overarching message is surprisingly optimistic. Regardless of your past, you still have a future to look towards.

The stories that unfold on the Eye won't leave me anytime soon.

“ You don't look back at Gardener. You don't dare risk it. Instead you follow the thread, delicately, carefully, like a diver following their lifeline back to the surface.
The river whirls around you, but it doesn't pull, it isn't jealous. Neither does it understand. It is, after all, just a river. It isn't a person, a flesh and blood person, with wants, with desires, with the capacity for love and hate.

It doesn't understand you, and you don't understand it.

So you don't focus on it, you don't think about it, on what feels like such a long journey back through the dark. You set your mind on eyes instead. On hands. Things you can focus on, hold onto.

And then, after an age of crossing, you are there, settling back into the chair, into a body in a chair, and the overwhelming sensations that come with being a living thing with a rich and detailed sensorium.

For a moment you feel like you have made a terrible mistake. Who would choose this weight? This anxiety? This deep well at the center of existence.

But then you feel it. Riko's hand, gripped hard around yours, trembling a little, sweating a little. Riko's hand with its brittle bones and crumpled skin. Riko's hand.

And in that moment you understand why you made this choice. And then you squeeze Riko's hand, and you wake up.
”
Beautiful game, incredible soundtrack, full of love and humanity in a cold and hopeless world. The ending above made me cry. Cant wait for the sequel

I'm torn on Citizen Sleeper cos I feel like it both really should have been longer and more complex than it was, while also having to admit that it provides a lot of content and is satisfying just the way it is. Really gorgeous artwork and general vibe to the game - I loved the mellow soundtrack and the generally melancholy-but-hopeful feel of the game. Really cute little storylines about finding home, and what home is to someone who isn't even at home in their own body. I can't imagine replaying it unless I wanted to knock off a few more achievements - but I don't think replayability is necessarily a must for a game like this. Nevertheless I'm very happy I finally got around to it, and I'm very excited about the prospect of Citizen Sleeper 2 being bigger and better.

For what it's worth, my favourite ending is 'STARWARD PASSAGE'.

We all have to get to know ourselves, Sleeper. To know what it is that drives us. I'm sure you'll decide to act in the manner you know. But you also have to ask yourself why it is so. Don't neglect that.

If you take one thing away from this review let it be this: If you enjoy connecting with a wonderfully diverse set of characters, learning how their experiences shaped them to be who they are and what motivates them to keep going as the world deals them a bad hand, then I can not recommend this to you enough.

As with many games I've tried through Game Pass, I knew very little about Citizen Sleeper. A couple hours in I wasn't sure if I was enjoying it. The gameplay loop was odd, the writing felt a bit verbose, I couldn't exactly keep track of what was happening in the world.

But I stuck with it because it was just giving this vibe, something that was keeping me drawn into this world, and as I kept playing, I became more and more appreciative of everything the game had to offer.

Most of the credit for keeping me entranced probably goes to the music and sound design, which is certainly one of the most immersive I've ever experienced. I would feel a sort of whiplash whenever I took my headphones off to take a break, and be genuinely stunned at the silence of my own room and the sudden realisation that all I was doing was staring at a screen. The ambience here is just mwah.

Eventually I really started to get into the gameplay loop, and at times where it was appropriate, I enjoyed the occasional strategy of trying to finish the routes for characters I was most interested in, but also trying to survive, it was engaging and satisfying! Not to mention the little details describing all the tasks you carry out, which helped those tasks feel just a bit more immersive.

As I mentioned before, the writing could feel a bit verbose and sometimes I couldn't tell what exactly was going on, this actually persisted throughout the playthrough to some degree, I didn't fully get it all, and maybe that's due to my own literacy, I don't know.

What I do know is that despite all this, every conversation felt so deeply personal and every character was so different and brimming with individuality. When it needed to, the writing and the music would perfectly synchronise with the impact of surviving and carrying out tasks for so long, to beautifully craft moments that would move me emotionally. It didn't matter in the slightest that I wasn't fully grasping everything, I felt for everyone, for their past, for their present, and their future.

That is why I love Citizen Sleeper, and that to me is games as an art form.

(Also, Citizen Sleeper is a banger title, knocked it out of the park with that one.)

when i read Neuromancer back in 2011 i think i was never able to quite picture whatever William Gibson was trying to describe. there's a thing with sci-fi text based works where everything is described by comparing it to a familiar object, connected to another familiar object and somehow you should be able to imagine the whole picture going by that. well i can't, i don't think it's a particular lack of imagination, i think it might be the exact opposite really, because i'm sure whatever i'm imagining has nothing to do with what was described. this is not frustrating in any way though, i think it just makes my experience with this type of work a tad more abstract. citizen sleeper is already inherently abstract, so in some level i imagine i was supposed to imagine whatever i wanted, however i wanted.

it's a good game about befriending people, listening to stories, hating capitalism and corporations, accepting physicality and transience. or at least that's how i played it. i don't think the game gives you too many options to branch out, but i still think each individual input can make this experience a whole lot different. i'm eager to know how many people were experiencing money issues while Ethan forced you to pay their tab, or unlocked places and or situations far earlier than the game expected you too. it's just fun, short and sweet, i enjoyed my time with it even though for a while i didn't think i would.

Citizen Sleeper te coloca na pele de um sleeper, um humano que teve sua mente digitalizada e colocada num robô pra ser controlado por uma mega corporação interespacial. O jogo inicia quando seu personagem consegue escapar em um cargueiro, chegando a uma estação espacial esquecida nos confins da galáxia, The Eye, onde vc deve sobreviver e lutar por liberdade.

Um jogo que entrega um texto primoroso, que aborda muito bem temas como liberdade, felicidade e autoconhecimento, sendo ambientado num mundo em ruina, o jogo trabalha de maneira exemplar como cada personagem vive e lida com os problemas ao redor, personagens esses que são incríveis, cada um tendo sua própria historia, personalidade, rotina, sonhos e ver como nós podemos impactar a jornada de cada um com nossas decisões é o que torna a experiência de Citizen Sleeper especial.

[ played via steam deck ]

So, I've had a load of games I've wanted to get through in the beginning of 2024. I've played a pretty good spread of genres and qualities and got hit with both a blessing and curse: a two-day long, still ongoing power outage. I got sick of playing the things I've been getting through so I took a break with this one. Sitting in the pitch dark, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I... enjoyed my time with it, I think? Although I felt very underwhelmed once I realize how shallow the world, the systems, and the characters were.

It's weird to say, and it sounds a bit pretentious, but have you ever played a game and been struck by the realization that you are not the target audience? Not because the game doesn't appeal to you in themes or genre, but because it feels like its targeting players unfamiliar with what its trying to be? Thats what Citizen Sleeper has felt like to me. I don't like saying it, but it's true, and it boggles my mind ever so slightly because resource management simulators in the way CS presents itself are not new-gamer familiar. Despite this, you are given very long, hand hold-y dumping menus the first time you interact with people, with systems that seem to serve no.. real purpose? After only an hour or two, I had gamed the system well enough to not feel any of its difficulty. Despite the many paths in its story, I never felt pressured or had the fear I couldn't feasibly complete the content available to me. I don't think every game HAS to be difficult or lock me out of content and require many playthroughs (i honestly hate it when games do this), but CS's world would have been the most perfecf place for this and it rarely comes up. You can encounter different endings, yes, but it is entirely possible to accidentally stumble into every piece of content even if you don't fully understand the systems. I was very confused on the condition/energy system for a solid 2+ hours and still managed to complete every time gated prompt with ease thanks to the generous leveling systems and time windows.

In fact, the entire class system is pointless. All it did was ensure that when I finished the game, the stat I had a debuff for was the only one that ended at a +2 bonus rather than a +3. If the stats were fixed or more scarce or even impacted by the choices you made in the story, it would have felt more rewarding to pick and choose what risks you made. Instead, I just chose "what do I have perks for", which often was a +1 or +2 to a critical dice roll, with the option to reroll my dice if they were low costs. There was consistently no stakes present, and the one part of the game (the 3 part DLC? after stories) that stressed how intense and difficult the window of time would be... I completed it in half the allotted time.

I am not a game designer. I don't have a perfect recommendation on how to fix this in a neat way, but removing the outright stat bonuses to dice and only having perks or only providing bonuses as a result of your choices would help increase the pressure and difficulty a little bit, while still feeling satisfying and not changing the core mechanics so much. There were other issues I had with balancing (by the end of the game I had an overflow of 700 coins, and could effectively buy any of the balancing resources necessary without thinking), but this was probably the most game-breaking. It removed any hint of strategy I faced, and I felt really disappointed by this aspect of the game. I hoped that the story and overall world-building would suffice in picking up this slack, but...

The premise at CS's core was great. I loved the idea of our emulated Sleeper robot self finding their place, seeking refuge and their place in the world. It was fun to meet characters and find new places constantly that made the Eye feel alive, but unfortunately the writing, aside from a few select characters, felt so bland. It is well written for the most part in its prose and when it has things it wants to say, but the actual time we spend with most characters to get to know them is short.

One character I really liked was Tala, a bartender who you meet after facing discrimination for being a Sleeper, and eventually befriend and work for. Unfortunately, you talk to her for a few minutes, do some fetch-dice-quests, and then suddenly you speak in another visual novel-esque sequence and you are already good friends. None of the build up is actually there, on screen, and while I still liked the relationship the MC and Tala have and the things I learn about her, it still feels like I'm not even experiencing this in my own story. It happens without me, and this occurs multiple times with other NPCs. The after stories fix this and is genuinely the better part of Citizen Sleeper's entire campaign, but it happens so late. You're given brief impressions of characters and asked to invest in them, and you do and you can, but I wish that 75% of them had been expanded on whatsoever. Feng was wonderful, as well as Peake and Riko, but they are also the few characters who have long and sprawling storylines that interweave with the Eye's political turmoil and each other's struggles at least tangentially.

Even the big political factions are only brief mentions with little impact on the story until the absolute end (and it still feels tacked on). You can choose to provide intel and complete stories where you side with conflicting political factions and rise in their ranks but it never reflects elsewhere.

Citizen Sleeper takes itself seriously, but feels too shy to commit fully to anything. It doesnt want to give you complex narratives, maybe because it doesn't have faith that the dice mechanics are capable of supplementing the decision-making systems, I dont know. But there is a really strong foundation that it fails to capitalize on. I think it's a good game regardless, but that almost makes it worse because I can see so clearly how it could have been great.

I still recommend you pick it up as I enjoyed my time with it, but I dont know... I see they're making a sequel and I hope that when they do, they aren't afraid to be more in-depth with the mechanics and storytelling at hand.

Starting out, I thought the dice system was cool, and the cyberpunk setting was neat. The resource/time management aspects I liked and I thought they could do a lot with those concepts.

But at a certain point, you figure out the gameplay pretty well and then there is no challenge anymore. No struggle for money, no struggle for good dice rolls, no struggle for time. At this point, the game slows down and you are left waiting for side-quests to be available, doing nothing truly important each day. At a certain point, I was trying to figure out how to end the game because I felt like I should be done after becoming this powerful.

One thing that could make this game incredible would be if the writing was amazing. But in reality, it's... just good? The story of the game feels very disconnected. Stuff happens all over the place, but none of it is really related to each other. The game has a bunch of cool story points and choices you make, but they all seem to come out of the blue and seem like they've been forced in there for no real reason. I felt a lack of engagement with the events happening in the game. The whole time I simply did not really care. I didn't care for any of the characters really, (emphis was cool) especially the protagonist.

The main character of this game is intentionally made a blank slate so that you can - I don't know: "forge your own path in this lawless world" or whatever. But I felt no attachment to them at all. I hate to do the obvious and compare this to that other game, but having just played Disco Elysium recently, the disparity in the writing was inherently obvious to me. In that game, I was 100% invested in every character, including the protagonist. In Citizen Sleeper I didn't care what happened. My character felt like the Dragonborn in Skyrim, joining all of these different factions around the whole region, living several lives all at once. Being able to do all of these things at the same time with them not being connected at all or having any consequences was weird. It felt so disjointed and you can't truly get a grasp on the protagonists personality, stuff just happens and you do other stuff to move the game along. Also, it felt like none of my choices mattered. Things move along whether you want them to or not. The writing isn't bad but it just wasn't at a high enough level to enthrall me. I was never fully captivated.

I got 2 different endings and they both felt abrupt and meh. Like the story in the rest of the game, I didn't really care what happened. In the late-game, I felt it was dragging on as I had only like 1 quest going at a time and I just wanted to get it done so I could finish the game. So the pacing was a bit weird too.

I'm just a bit disappointed I guess. The game could've been amazing but it had some issues that just seemed weird to me. And a lot of my issues became much more prominent in the last few hours of gameplay, which sadly had the game leaving a sour taste in my mouth. I'm not sure anymore if I am going to play the DLC episodes. Maybe later I will play those and if they're super good I might update my review.

Absolutely hypnotic prose combined with a world and UI that feels so cold and uncaring that allows for you to hone in on the warm little human interactions. The narrative structure here works exceedingly well specifically because of the ways in which you have to interact with the gamey parts of the game, and the setting itself. One of the rare cases of video game storytelling that takes advantage of its medium and does so in a way that feels less like narrative trickery and more like narrative necessity.

Citizen Sleeper is an object lesson in making magic with limited means. The game assets essentially consist of a single 3D model of a space station, two and a half dozen beautifully hand-drawn character portraits, an evocative soundtrack, and lots and lots of text. Yet I found myself gripped by and emotionally invested in this story, this world, and these characters. This is the second time in my life I've ever teared up while playing a game (the first being Disco Elysium).

But in spite of falling completely in love with this game, there is one thing that keeps nagging at me after finishing it. Citizen Sleeper is also an object lesson in something else: ludo-narrative dissonance.

Rather than add on to the heaps of praise this game has gotten (with which I wholeheartedly agree but to which I have little new to add), I want to take the space of this review to dig into what I see as its one primary shortcoming. Not because this shortcoming diminishes my enthusiasm for the game in any significant way (I still recommend it without reservation), but because it illuminates for me a potential shortcoming of the genre (or even medium) as a whole, and has spurred me to reflect on its limitations and possibilities.

Here's the long and short of it: Despite its overt anti-capitalist themes—evil multi-planetary megacorporations, neo-slavery, anarcho-communist self-organization, refugee solidarity, the trials & tribulations of the gig economy—I began to realize about halfway through playing it that the game ends up being one of the most effective pieces of capitalist propaganda I've ever encountered. The inevitable trajectory the player ends up taking is from a destitute and precarious escaped slave living on borrowed time—their very body a piece of corporate property and their labor their only means for survival—to a secure, stable, and potentially prosperous member of the petit-bourgeosie.

In other words, this is a quintessential "rags to riches" story. Whatever its apparent radicalism, at the end of the day Citizen Sleeper is Horatio Alger in Space.

In his book Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification, game designer and theorist Patrick Jagoda writes about the neoliberal value of "entrepreneurship of the self" enacted by Stardew Valley (a more short form articulation of his thesis can be found in this essay). Citizen Sleeper very much exists in this same mode. The only way to progress is by pulling yourself up by your cybernetic, ceramic-plated bootstraps, cycle by cycle, gig by gig, sidequest by sidequest, until you eventually find yourself the sole proprietor of a bar & restaurant, owner of 5 different homes, awash in cryptocurrency, with multiple means to counteract the ticking timebomb in your body that keeps you tethered to your corporate owners: precarity successfully overcome.

At one point, you're given the opportunity to ingratiate yourself with an agrarian commune. Put in enough volunteer hours on the communal farm or canteen and you're offered a coveted spot in the commune itself, triggering the "COMMUNIST" achievement. I had to laugh. Despite some flavor text about commune members being expected to work recurring shifts in exchange for meals, practically speaking these shifts function hardly any differently from many of the other possible gigs one can pick up around the station, and there is no consequence whatsoever for shirking your comradely duties entirely. For a game otherwise so inventive, a world otherwise so vividly realized, and a story so otherwise fervently critical of capitalism, it seems to run out of imagination the moment it runs up against the challenge of even hinting at a mode of existence beyond either wage labor or entrepreneurship.

Is the role-playing genre, with its inherently quantified and optimized vision of selfhood and impetus toward endless resource accumulation, doomed to not only convey a fundamentally capitalist worldview, but actually help inculcate a fundamentally neoliberal form of subjectivity through its behavioral reward circuits? Or is it possible to design an RPG whose vision of the self and mode of being is not inherently "entrepreneurial"? What would such a game look like? I'm not quite sure. But imagining all the possible ways that Citizen Sleeper's Hypha Commune might have been implemented differently feels like a good place to start.

i liked but not loved this and i am not sure why.

the mechanics are simple but compulsive. do the loop while juggling some meters balancing staying alive and forwarding various stories.

the stories are cool, queer, anti capitalist, various shades of literary influence coming through like le guin and delany. i should be right on target but i didnt 'feel' anything. even food is a focus in a big way and compounds nicely with what bodies are, what it means to be human. each theme should read like a greatest hits for me. There are nice flourishes of writing but I was never cheering for one character, feeling that strongly for lem and mina, or anyone else beaten down by these systems. and that is partially more of a me thing too.

i do still think it is a puzzly narrative delight that allows you to set the pace of your own stories in an impressive way.

art and music do a lot to make this setting really work. i liked admiring the eye and you can picture life there.

Citizen Sleeper is a fairly linear narrative adventure that feels like a sprawling RPG. The developers somehow make you feel like anything is possible in the Eye as you take on odd jobs and try to eke out another day by the skin of your teeth. The quality of writing here is superb, I just wanted more of it.

This is the true best Cyberpunk RPG on the market, and it shouldn't be missed. All I ask for is a proper fail state to keep you stressed about losing, as Citizen Sleeper is content to let you fuck around and make terrible choices with little consequence, which makes it a fairly chill game. This game captures the same feeling as a great book you can't put down with a tight addictive loop, and I highly recommend it.