Has there been an uptick in our attenuation, culturally and individually, to the Icarus myth? Maybe this is one of the biases of living through a history of culture, one piled with objects more opulent, ever present, and referentially potent than at any time previously in its possibility amongst human states, as opposed to consuming that history but in the 21st century Icarus has seemed to draw more fascination and sunlight than had been, anecdotally, spotlighting his ascents and descents in the time between his first flight and now. As time has worn on, as time has allowed the delocalisation of centres of communication standing in for the varying world’s working class’s abilities to express sentiment and empathy between each other in a form and with functions not propped up by their non-elected representational nationalistic enterprises isolating them in hierarchical and interested speech, it seems as though evocation through myth has come to ground from its former place atop Mountains Olympus and Halls Valhalla. I’ve had it most obviously intended for me with Anne Carson’s mythical interpretations as well as the mythos interpreted and remade in Anders Nilsen’s Rage of Poseidon but clearly the trend is occurring heavily in games at the moment: God of War greatly pathologized it’s antagonistic forces with a humanism bred from systemic failures that occurred not in the grandiose melodramas of its earlier games, and Hades tenders from its pantheon a kind of postmodern conscientious empathy that occurs in our highly dialogic ecosystem with a form directly opposite to traditional mythic portrayals of the same characters. It seems like myth has been reorganised from a top down affair, seeing from which great heights may lend fall, to one that describes from the bottom a rebuke, whereupon that which falls leaves a mess and kills a friend.
The Icarus myth has been traditionally taught to be a display of one figure’s failure in recognising what constitutes hubristic reach and how behaviours can teach us our limits. Today, often without the name attached but with the wings stapled on just the same, we learn from Icarus what a small reach beyond one’s station will incur from that which our world revolves around. Citizen Sleeper has its beginning fawn like an Icarus who flew to the Sun and fell but on treacherous orbits breached was instead caught in a gravitational pull of something other than earth, where knowing what Daedelus wrought wasn’t attached to a spheres of gods but to that which was dominated over by their powers disattached. For their Sleeper, that wrought flight is not one of hubris expected by one out of their domain but of the thrust into the styx of which exploitations beget further exploitations entrusted to us in our purchased complicity (or more likely, what is societally enforced through however many propagandistic excesses are necessitated in our connections and expressions). In showing this fall, or rather flak shredding gravitational pull, CS in a lot of ways interstates the driving urge to develop a character from the outset of an RPG experience: entering your machinations at the where there has been a turning point in the remaking of a life, a chance which has become the driving force coinciding one’s becoming strange in the ways which announce value and type to systemic architectures.
This is the axis Citizen Sleeper ultimately fails itself and succeeds on. Thematically, it cannot allow the player character to become god emperor of the domains they plaster all eyesight aboard, indicating an examination of the mechanical emphases that place play subsidiary to narratives of specifically modern and potentially “eventual” complexity but no introspective complexity which devalues intentions of action with accessibility to action within the systems and within the narrative, backseating both into, at its most optimistic, making do with whatever you are given that day(often less do we see triumphs of the genre take this route, more frequently changing perspective of audience within these worlds of exponentiality from primary protagonist to ancillary protagonist a la Witcher 3). In play, this works for a while to an extraordinary degree - the first 3-4 hours are a taut balancing act between starving, being shot, wearing away into a carcass sprouting circuitry, and losing yourself amidst a sea of askers promising gifts without seeing those boons fessed. After that however, having reached the end of one or two quests and receiving the surprisingly large paydays squirrelled out from people ostensibly in the same situation as your PC, the tension is deflated entirely: you are never at a loss for good rolls, cash, and things to do, and by the final third you have presumably removed the target on your back as well. The mechanics which create scarcity, because of their function as a model for capitalism fucking people over, eventually lead you to become the 1% of your little world because that’s just how economics work when you are the most active agent with the greatest leniency to invest and divest. I don’t know what the devs could’ve done to really keep the boot down without making the game both far more complex as well as miserable, but their systems ironically fucked them over in ways totally unrelated to cash.
It’s unfortunate as well that at the end of things, with hordes of 6 die rolls and credits and mushrooms and corporate intel, your Sleeper is no different looking in their perspective and adaptability than when first starting the game. While there is a generously branching skill tree which can create preferences for activities on the station, there is no actual characterization to generally differentiate what these acts are informing in the state of play or narrative - you may be a mechanic by defect of muscle proclivity but you interact with the barkeeps in just the same dialogue as an artist or diplomat. There are options for dialogue, and of course the player will have characters for whom they invest the only scarce resource, interest, in, but they are choices in the vein of “hell yeah” and “that went well”. As well written and pursuant of depth Citizen Sleep is, make no mistake, the dice are not those found in Dicey Dungeons or Disco Elysium: it’s choose your own adventure visual novel territory.
Has Jump Over The Age flown too close to the sun? No, I don’t think so. You market the game however you can to try and proliferate it, and RPGs are big for a reason. A bit of slapdash game design, which does legitimately impart the feelings attempted for a while, on a worthwhile and well told narrative concerning highly prescient and necessary issues is still all that with just a bit extra. If they were a broader studio with a bigger budget, it’s easy to see that the final product would appear to us as a different spectre haunting not just the space above Europe but also any devs making +2% fire damage weapon skill trees. But this isn’t an RPG killer even if it is a killer little game.
The Icarus myth has been traditionally taught to be a display of one figure’s failure in recognising what constitutes hubristic reach and how behaviours can teach us our limits. Today, often without the name attached but with the wings stapled on just the same, we learn from Icarus what a small reach beyond one’s station will incur from that which our world revolves around. Citizen Sleeper has its beginning fawn like an Icarus who flew to the Sun and fell but on treacherous orbits breached was instead caught in a gravitational pull of something other than earth, where knowing what Daedelus wrought wasn’t attached to a spheres of gods but to that which was dominated over by their powers disattached. For their Sleeper, that wrought flight is not one of hubris expected by one out of their domain but of the thrust into the styx of which exploitations beget further exploitations entrusted to us in our purchased complicity (or more likely, what is societally enforced through however many propagandistic excesses are necessitated in our connections and expressions). In showing this fall, or rather flak shredding gravitational pull, CS in a lot of ways interstates the driving urge to develop a character from the outset of an RPG experience: entering your machinations at the where there has been a turning point in the remaking of a life, a chance which has become the driving force coinciding one’s becoming strange in the ways which announce value and type to systemic architectures.
This is the axis Citizen Sleeper ultimately fails itself and succeeds on. Thematically, it cannot allow the player character to become god emperor of the domains they plaster all eyesight aboard, indicating an examination of the mechanical emphases that place play subsidiary to narratives of specifically modern and potentially “eventual” complexity but no introspective complexity which devalues intentions of action with accessibility to action within the systems and within the narrative, backseating both into, at its most optimistic, making do with whatever you are given that day(often less do we see triumphs of the genre take this route, more frequently changing perspective of audience within these worlds of exponentiality from primary protagonist to ancillary protagonist a la Witcher 3). In play, this works for a while to an extraordinary degree - the first 3-4 hours are a taut balancing act between starving, being shot, wearing away into a carcass sprouting circuitry, and losing yourself amidst a sea of askers promising gifts without seeing those boons fessed. After that however, having reached the end of one or two quests and receiving the surprisingly large paydays squirrelled out from people ostensibly in the same situation as your PC, the tension is deflated entirely: you are never at a loss for good rolls, cash, and things to do, and by the final third you have presumably removed the target on your back as well. The mechanics which create scarcity, because of their function as a model for capitalism fucking people over, eventually lead you to become the 1% of your little world because that’s just how economics work when you are the most active agent with the greatest leniency to invest and divest. I don’t know what the devs could’ve done to really keep the boot down without making the game both far more complex as well as miserable, but their systems ironically fucked them over in ways totally unrelated to cash.
It’s unfortunate as well that at the end of things, with hordes of 6 die rolls and credits and mushrooms and corporate intel, your Sleeper is no different looking in their perspective and adaptability than when first starting the game. While there is a generously branching skill tree which can create preferences for activities on the station, there is no actual characterization to generally differentiate what these acts are informing in the state of play or narrative - you may be a mechanic by defect of muscle proclivity but you interact with the barkeeps in just the same dialogue as an artist or diplomat. There are options for dialogue, and of course the player will have characters for whom they invest the only scarce resource, interest, in, but they are choices in the vein of “hell yeah” and “that went well”. As well written and pursuant of depth Citizen Sleep is, make no mistake, the dice are not those found in Dicey Dungeons or Disco Elysium: it’s choose your own adventure visual novel territory.
Has Jump Over The Age flown too close to the sun? No, I don’t think so. You market the game however you can to try and proliferate it, and RPGs are big for a reason. A bit of slapdash game design, which does legitimately impart the feelings attempted for a while, on a worthwhile and well told narrative concerning highly prescient and necessary issues is still all that with just a bit extra. If they were a broader studio with a bigger budget, it’s easy to see that the final product would appear to us as a different spectre haunting not just the space above Europe but also any devs making +2% fire damage weapon skill trees. But this isn’t an RPG killer even if it is a killer little game.