Reviews from

in the past


In a 2019 New York Times video interview, "The Sopranos" creator David Chase is asked what he thinks of when he thinks of the show he created and executive produced over the span of ten years and six seasons. He answers, "cold."

When I think of my time with Citizen Sleeper, I think, "click." Click click click. Clicking squares, clicking and dragging squares. Click click click. Moving up the map, scroll scroll scroll.

The spirited and often inspired prose and worldbuilding of the game is the player's reward for trudging through the incessant minutia of its UI design. Refilling your food bar, crossing the completely unnecessary gap in the middle of the map, hacking for data- these dull tasks that the player is asked to complete nearly every cycle drained my excitement for the compelling stories that game presents, and I think that's particularly unfortunate given how short the game is. Fantastic writing does not a good gameplay loop make.



Citizen Sleeper is an incredible slice of life adventure that has stuck with me ever since I started playing that first hour. It is rare for a game to create such a sense of tension and emotion for me, but my life on the Eye was well and truly a treasure. I cannot wait for the sequel!

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.


Citizen sleeper is cyberpunk in the truest and most satisfying sense - anti capitalist with a narrative entirely driven by people and their community. An all time personal favorite sci fi setting.

its like hardcoded but without sucking and fucking


This game is currently in the Humble Choice for March 2024, and this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before April 2nd, 2024, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

A visual novel with resource management.

Citizen Sleeper has good writing and interesting ideas. The writing almost reminds me of Disco Elysium, but I feel like that comparison is a little far. Still, the situations have a real weight on them, it feels like the odds are stacked against the player and the characters are interesting. The gameplay revolves around slotting dice into different actions, to determine the odds of your success. Better dice have better odds, and that influences the actions you can take in a day.

However, having played this in Game Pass, I can tell you after the first hour or so, the game starts to resolve some of the stressful situations, and make the player's lives easier. It feels like every big bad danger seems to get resolved just as it gets intense, and while it feels like your decisions are stressful early on by the end of the game, you’ve amassed so much power that it’s just waiting for time, or just plunking away at a challenge to pass the time. The story loses all its intensity.

Pick this up if you like a good story. The narrative here starts strong and the resolution to the story is well told. The only problem is almost all the highest and most dangerous stakes in the story have been resolved about halfway through the story, and there’s no randomness so a second playthrough means all the same reveals will happen allowing you to manipulate the playthrough to your liking.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/PX2c6Gm5Jbg

Really special gameplay and storytelling through skill checks. As a lover of tabletop games with dice placement mechanics, this was right up my alley. I also adore the anime sci-fi aesthetic and both heady and emotional themes. I admit that some of the storylines got a little confusing but the grounded ones where my character was interacting with other humans and having to make challenging decisions were captivating to me. It's rare that after seeing the credits in a game, I still feel compelled to go back in and keep completing quests to experience every drop I can of the story. But Citizen Sleeper is one of those games, and I could not be more excited about continuing this journey in a sequel.

A glorified dice rolling spreadsheet, the game is lifted up on the atlas-like shoulders of it's writing, worldbuilding, and atmosphere.

I’d have liked this game more if I liked reading more

So many moments from this game just feel etched into my mind. I can vividly recall the tension of difficult choices and connection I felt to the world and characters and really it's all because of the incredible writing and music. The entire game is basically menuing and reading but I felt more connected and immersed to Citizen Sleeper than I do to most other games I've played. This might be the push that gets me back into reading books again.

Completion Criteria: Credits Rolled

It was fine. Not really my type of game. As my completionist tendencies hate choosing. But also, this is the first time I've played a game where I may judge someone who doesn't pick the obvious choice (which isn't really a compliment)

That we persist at all is testament to our faith in one another.

finished the game within 24 hours of starting it, its one of those games where u start playing at 10pm cos u r bored and the next time you look at a clock its 3 in the morning.
i got so emotionally attached to this game that im considering removing half a star because there is no option to romance emphis

Citizen Sleeper é o melhor livro de "Escolha sua própria aventura" já feito.

O que eu MAIS gostei foi a empatia, amor e confiança que o jogo tem pelos próprios personagens e também o quão simples porém pesadas as mecânicas são. A prosa do jogo é muito bem escrita e ela consegue expressar tanto noções abstratas quanto sentimentos complexos de uma forma linda. Entender como Citizen Sleeper funciona não é difícil em si, mas o jogo pode te punir bastante se você não aprender as suas mecânicas rápido. Eu amei a fricção que esse sistema causava durante a transição entre quando eu não sabia se eu ia morrer em menos de três dias ou não e quando eu tinha quase total controle sobre a minha vida. :)

O que eu MENOS gostei foi que jogar Citizen Sleeper com um controle é HOOOOO RROOOOO ROOOOO SOOOOOOOOOO. Eu não quero julgar os devs por causa disso, o jogo foi obviamente feito pra se jogar com um mouse. Mas se você só tem um console (eu inicialmente tinha começado o jogo no meu Xbox) é basicamente impossível avançar em certas partes do jogo. Talvez eles já tenham ajustado isso no momento em que você está lendo está review. :(

Second, complete, and final ending.

I am deeply moved by the sheer narrative power.

I will pre-order the next one so hard.


“ 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

The fear of death

Is what this game is so good at invoking

Even when you know it will not happen

Cause the game is much kinder than it seems.

The writing is throughout envisioning a cold world encompassed in darkness with the few specks of light giving you hope while at every periphery the potential for absolute collapse lies in wait.

But the game believes in you, and in humanity, and from the space-punk drenched corridors it carves you a life.

Citizen Sleeper is a cavalcade of space opera and cyberpunk weaved together, with a healthy injection of humanism (and some nice diversity). There are many ways this story can end, and you can see them all with a bit of reloading. As the game goes on, it becomes easier to survive as you learn the place, create connections, gather resources, and overall carve out your own little place in this world floating through space where you can feel relatively safe, the panicked survival of the first part of the game giving ground to a more relaxed just-getting-by (though it does feel like you've broken the game). You can even feed a cat.

The knowledge is always there, that you're not quite part of them; but the heart of the game is firmly in a kind of multicultural amalgam of poor people trying to live beneath the larger political and economic forces that occasionally break through, and usually not in a helpful capacity. The free DLC trilogy deals fully with such bigger forces, but the predominant themes still concern the lives of those that are othered and the people who can accept them.

For a game where the main visual is an nondescript space station and the only colours the occasional (very cool) character portraits and the gameplay basically scrolling up and down the station, clicking on points of interest and choosing dialogue options, it's a wonder how riveting and exciting this game can be, and how atmospheric, the writing pitch-perfectly evoking the feeling of living on a capitalist space station (with all the nostalgic strength of a childhood spent in sci-fi novels), and how touching, with moments that will remain (it's the kid and the dad for me - for, amongst others, deeply personal reasons …), right up to the gorgeous ending of the last free DLC.

Almost like a good book - only there you won't feel you're one bad choice away from dying of an illness that you don't have the money to cure.

Oh damn, it was "living under later-than-late stage capitalism" sim after all.

"At some point they cut away their own ability to see, to sense, to taste, to speak. And yet they kept cutting, until only those three threads remained, from millions that once thrummed here. Only their blindness, and chance, kept them from making those final three, fatal cuts."

'Citizen Sleeper' is a game of thorough design unity which, despite it's kinesthetically passive gameplay, uses often discomforting ludic principles to great effect in an effort to emulate and speak on a variety of socioeconomic discontents. It is a specific and enamoring game with a secure passion for it's values, making it possibly the best cyberpunk RPG since 'Deus Ex'.

The base mechanics of 'Citizen Sleeper' are the primary framing device which JumpOverTheAge use to get the player to connect and empathise with the character in control. Playing as a titular 'Sleeper'—a sort of humanoid machine with a consciousness placed in it—dice rolls for the skill checks of a given in-game day are dropped in a row at the offset of awakening. This dice check system is the central genius achievement of the game; the quantity and quality of dice is determined by the physical state of the Sleeper, if damage is taken or one exhausts themselves, suffering ensues in the form of not being able to preform a number of tasks in each day to rescue you from inevitable economic peril or progress in important quests, or perhaps not having the sufficient rolls to guarantee your safety in various tasks. The aforementioned hostile economy is, of course, an excellent supporting beam to a design structure principally about the interpersonal struggles of the capitalist workforce and where it intersects with our own physical bodies. This is a common cyberpunk motif, but it's the way that 'Citizen Sleeper' conjurers it ludologically that makes it so compelling and unheard of. I hope that the quote at the beginning of this review is a hint towards the fact that 'Citizen Sleeper' is a wonderfully written game, Gareth Damian Martin has quite a beautiful talent for waxing poetic about structuralism and the intersections between economics and our bodies in the game's dialogue, but—as is the case with other cRPGs revered for their writing such as the 'Fallout' of '97 or the 'Disco Elysium' of close temporal residing—I am hesitant to describe 'Citizen Sleeper' as 'novelistic' beyond the surface level view of the project from a distance, and to prescribe it this title is deeply misinformative. This is why I have focused so much from the outset on the mechanical framework, since they uphold the bulk of meaning for 'Sleeper.' As for them, the player is consistently placed in situations of nail-biting self sacrifice opposing self sufficiency, getting the opportunity to undertake a series of rather high strung days in the name of somebody else. I've played many games which apply a political litmus test later rather than sooner—the comedic ending of 'Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' anarcho-communist route comes to mind as very transparent example—but rarely have I come across a game which goes at it the other way around. The positive consequences for selflessness are distinctly not materialist in the first half of 'Citizen Sleeper' and are instead more understandably human ones. It takes an actual material sacrifice to do something connective, a sacrifice that might leave one queasy in a decidedly self-concerned way. You could babysit your coworker's young child, he needs that time to work himself, but that's time spent away from being able to work yourself and practice the onerous financial journey to acquiring basic necessities to live at all—the highly pressing health care challenge of getting medication specific to the livability of a Sleeper. The player interfacing with such systems provides two greatly true assertions regarding the puissant nature of material incentive under capitalism. The first is as it relates more gravely outside the sphere of aspiration and closer to ones needs as a marginalised individual now given a new arbitrary barrier from the connection and service of 'the other' because of not being adequately given the rights of living as successors, empathising with the cruelty of the proceedings as well as disavowing an immature notion that economics are subject only to affect within themselves and the exterior living conditions of an individual when in actuality there are some where it is the very fabric of their own bodies which are put at risk by the system. The second is those results of the self sacrifice as showing how it is still possible to have genuine human connection under capitalism, an optimism which is smartly attended with the underlying and necessary scrutiny that while such a connection is made slightly deeper in some ways by the need for certain self sacrifice that comes with the interaction's existence, the economic system demanding that selflessness does so with an act of passive prohibition which must be abolished for a true coming together absolved of needed self-injury—lily-white in bliss absconded from paper chains or numbers-in-mind and mutual completeness—to be achieved.

To warn of spoilers, this does not stay the same through the whole game. On the furthest, broken end of The Eye that the player may go sits a communal farm of mushrooms. Unlike every other task in the game there is zero material reward here tied to the greater capitalist 'economy', instead, here is the first and only place where your labour is linked directly to the well-being of yourself and others directly. It's not a trap, you simply work to get yourself food from the farm, plant more for others, and connect with people, like Riko, it's loose authority. This place is an almost compartmentalised structure of it's own, ripped away from the one which had lost it's "ability to see, to sense, to taste" and "to speak" which has been devouring you alive for almost the entire game. No longer forever, is the battle between the antagonistic economy and your tired body, here you could live as a person, truly a person, until you die. And, if you're anything like me, that is what you may well do. Because I failed the final test 'Citizen Sleeper' gave me. There is a possibly final moment with Riko, days past immersed in the warmth of a system that was truly human, truly communal, a collective. In this moment, you will enter the cross between of the consciousness and the digital and meet The Gardener. There's a serenading of promises, promises of real peace. A collective consciousness in true heaven. Death. Riko will beg in a whisper barely conceived among the blinding divinity of these proposals. It was not an innate desire for this bliss that made me leave Riko and everyone behind, I believe. More likely it was cowardice. An underlying fear that all the beauty I had seen there was destined to be wiped out by the horror which surrounded it. Our internalised cynicism which makes us unable to fathom a world living beyond the capitalist choke-hold around us now is just fear playing shit-bag, and it has made me look like a true fool.

While its mechanical systems sometimes falter towards the game's latter half, Citizen Sleeper remains a remarkable body of writing, and it is worth playing for that alone.

Loved the first few hours of this. Liked the rest of it. Does a wonderful job of immersing you in the world with the brilliant sound design and writing, but once I settled into the rhythm of it the lack of a more compelling gameplay loop started to hurt it for me. Wish it kept up the dread too, once you sort out the big ticking clocks it really feels like a core part of the experience is absent. Hyped for the sequel though. With a tiny bit of tinkering this could be a masterpiece.

Started playing this and the '97 Blade Runner Remaster almost simultaneously. This is the better Blade Runner Game. In fact, it is its own franchise identity. Welcome to The Eye. Welcome to the Helios Sector. Welcome to the world, of Citizen Sleeper.

Truly an indie gem which you can't put down once you begin.

This review contains spoilers

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.



enough like disco elysium to be crack to my brain but different enough to matter. also peak

The game plays like an interactive novel with some light RPG elements. You get a character class with attributes that help with dice-based skill checks. It has a fascinating far-future setting aboard a kind of cyberpunk space station, and you have to navigate your way as a second-class citizen of sorts. Overall, I think the execution is solid, particularly in the storytelling and interactions with the characters on the station. I do feel like the gameplay loop gets a little stale near the end, but I was truly riveted for a good portion of my playthrough. Overall, an engaging experience that is worth playing through at least once!

This review contains spoilers

The game was good however there was a big problem in it, atleast for me. If you complete a sidequest with a character, there is no way to speak with them again, and it was pretty shit when I actually get emotionally attached to a character, complete all of their quests, and that's it. Can't even talk with them again. And when you complete a quest with an ending you either have to take that ending or leave it. So if you haven't finished all of the quests and you want to 100% the game you have to leave that ending, and later go for another one. I went for 100% in the game and luckily I left one of my favourite endings for last accidentally.

Citizen Sleeper, with its three DLC episodes, is an amazing narrative game that quickly joined the list of my favorites. It stands out as one of the most unique games I've had the chance to play. Not because of its gameplay or story, but due to its exceptional writing, captivating characters, and immersive atmosphere.

It's really hard to put into words what makes it so unique and special, but if I had to, I would say it's a mix of emotions that the game captures - melancholy, longing, nostalgia, sadness, happiness, hope, compassion, and mystery - all blend together to create a distinctive experience. Something that was already present in the developer's previous game (In Other Waters), but in Citizen Sleeper, it's much more pronounced and refined. However, the uniqueness of Citizen Sleeper's writing goes beyond the emotions it evokes; it's also about how it evokes them. Rather than being an emotional rollercoaster with intense highs and lows, Citizen Sleeper takes you on a gentle, emotional ride akin to a slow carousel. Even in its most intense moments, it just tugs at your heartstrings without pushing you over the edge, which is what makes its writing truly brilliant.

The word "gentle" is probably one word that would best describe this game as a whole. It full of emotions but never overwhelms you. The characters, flawed and aspiring, are presented in a profoundly human and sympathetic manner as they struggle in a cruel and unforgiving corporate dystopia. The difficulty, while initially may make you struggle, never seeks to punish you. Even the game's multiple endings are written as gradual fadeaways rather than abrupt and final cuts, a creative choice that some may find unsatisfying. However, I believe it perfectly suits the essence of the game.

As for the other aspects of the game, the graphics, music, and sounds are all good (character portraits are amazing). Additionally, the dice system adds an enjoyable and innovative layer of decision-making to the otherwise typical "pick a task to do in this time-slot" gameplay.

I wholeheartedly recommend Citizen Sleeper. And to any fan of narrative games it is an absolute must-play, offering a remarkable and unforgettable experience.


Creates a fascinating and fairly unique image of a cyberpunk world through a series of mildly interconnected vignettes, but struggles to find a consistent narrative note to latch onto, which makes the whole experience feel a bit disjointed. Still, it's a unique take on the cyberpunk genre which never feels derivative or copying the greats, and that by itself is very admirable.
Has a pretty fun gameplay loop which integrates itself into the narrative nicely, at least for a while until you become the ultimate gambler winning 300 credits per day and never going hungry again.
Desperately needs and editor with a bag of commas.
I'm looking forward to the sequel.

What. A. Game.

This was actually fantastic. It is an incredibly immersive roleplaying game. I think I want to replay it right now, but its also the kind of game that I want to go back to in a year or so and reexperience again. I think my run was fairly short compared to what others have made, but I am happy to have it be that way, such is the way of life.

This game really captured a true science fiction feel in a way many developers don't manage. I couldn't bring myself to play DLC through because I found the main ending so stunning and impactful. Looking forward to the sequel!

9/10

The atmosphere, worldbuilding, and characters almost instantly sucked me into this game. I think I completed it in just one or two days, and that has nothing to do with its length. The largest issue with this game is the die system, which begins to come undone toward the end of the game as you run out of objectives to accomplish. Aside from that issue, it’s a deeply impactful experience and I can’t wait for the sequel.