[ 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.

[played via steam deck, as there is no steam deck platform option]

this game is cute, dont get me wrong, but its really nothing special. im not sure if im just old and jaded now, but the humor and writing of this really... well, it makes me realize how much of an issue i have with the VN formula. it's impossible to write a character that fits every single player possible, especially when you're writing a romance and need the love interest to bounce off of the dialogue each player chooses. you just can't capture all the nuance that comes with an individual person unless you decide to code thousands of edge-cases that tailor each route and interaction to the player, but that is so unfeasible its never been done (to my knowledge, at least) and definitely not without sacrificing the story they want to share.

grim is a real sweetie, but from day one you can see what archetype they are going for and if it doesnt work immediately to captivate you, the game... doesn't do much to try and fix that. despite trying to pretend he is anything but, grim is a very shallow character. its to be expected, i guess, from such a short window of "dating" in universe and only two-ish hours in real life, but i really struggled to put myself in this guys shoes. right off the bat you get the option to call him "babygirl", they bring up homestuck, mention things like kaomojis and slang like "rizz." it's clear who they are pandering for and the type of humor meant to attract them, which is okay! just not really for me. i cant really critique the story. not because it doesnt have flaws (i think its pretty poor overall), but because i just dont have the language for it. im sure with more time thinking about it, i can summarize it in a concise way, but this is backloggd so... sorry! if you're familiar with butterfly soup, this game is the newest version of that, just limited to one character. its uniquely charming and i think if i was 16 again, this would have hit a lot harder than it does for me now!

that said, there are a few things i like. the art is really fucking good. while some of the character creation things are a bit goofy, it's overall really great and i like the tiny bits of flavor it added to the game, even if its really not used for anything. the pet thing is cute and the neighbors story existing alongside your own is also a fun add, but the game has a lot of nothing outside of the text chains and calls. if this could have been fleshed out with maybe another week of in game bonding time, i think the game would have increased in quality dramatically.

solid dating sim. if you like it, you will probably really like it. if you dislike it, you will know right away. its free, so pick it up and give it a go if you feel so inclined. grim is a cute generic anime boy and i still would be his friend :-)

this game is so weird. everyone else has summarized it better than me in terms of "wow this is so chronically online, but it redeems itself sort of" but it's more than that. entering this girls dungeon that just reminds me so hard of your typical league-of-legends-playing-anime-loving-gun-obsessed-4-chan-user is almost immediately uncomfortable to me as someone who has met people like this and had the worst experiences. the true ending (?) is sort of sweet, with her realizing that being a degenerate NEET isn't really great after all, but she's just so unlikable before this point i can't believe i played it all the way through. idk. she's potentially trans and bisexual which would be cool except it's so minisculely hinted at it gives the same audience they're pandering too enough plausible deniability to ignore it. so its like. i mean i guess. only reason i wont give it a 1 is because i can understand her underlying autism coding and there was like a few minutes where i thought the character was pretty okay.

when you decide to play cooking mama, you know what you're getting and this one isn't really any different.

there are a total of 60 dishes in the main gamemode, dojo/time trial levels upon silver medal completion, and 31 minigames that are not always cooking related (completing a dish unlocks a new minigame every so often). i played through every single minigame and main dish, and 100% gold-medaled all the main courses. i played some courses in dojo mode, but ultimately it was just doubling my time with this game for no reason so i stopped.

the main courses are OK. they are classic cooking mama, and are fun for a while before you realise there are a handful of techniques/cooking games they cycle between. there is a big issue with some unclear instructions or shoddy inputs that mean going for 100% is tedious. i discovered a trick in which if you know you are going to get a bronze/silver on a step during the dish, you can press start and quit and try the step again with no consequence on your score as long as the finished sign doesn't pop up which helped a lot. i think without it, i would have given up on going for full golds just because of how long the recipes get later in the game. if you enjoy cooking mama, this is no different. its fun, but after the first 10 recipes it really wore me down.

the minigames are... there? they exist? i dont know why they do, but they are definitely in the game! there are 4 separate categories of minigames being: help mama, harvesting, help mama's shop, and... studying? there are studying minigames where you solve basic arithmetic in thrilling gameplay like "1 + 1 = ?" and u are asked to fill in the missing numbers. this is a kids game, so i guess it makes sense to have them, but even for a child they are just so boring. there isn't a fun caricature of mama, it's literally just math problems on your ds. the other minigames are mostly fine like in the mama's shop portion, which has minigames like scooping ice cream for customers, taking orders and being a waiter, etc. they are a lot like old flash games, and are genuinely not bad. in help mama, you do household chores for her like sorting her thread spools, feeding her pet fish, and nursing baby birds to health. idk. its fine. the harvesting ones are about the same level of quality as the mama's shop games, and are pretty okay. playing catch to harvest fruit, sorting out green and red apples, collecting seafood from enemy crabs. they're okay and i played them all once or twice. the only real reason to play them is for what they unlock which is : decorations for mama's backdrop during the main courses and the main menu screen. that's... it. you don't even unlock the fun decorations after beating it/getting a perfect score. you have to get a perfect score on the minigame i think 3 times??? before you get a prize. its supposed to incentivize playing the minigames more, i understand, but it is so tedious if you DO want to unlock everything that there isn't really a point. the minigames are just kind of stupid. i didn't like their existence but i'm also probably not the target audience so who really cares in the end.

the final part of this game comes from the dojo or the time trial editions of the main recipes. once you beat the main recipe with a silver or gold, you unlock the dojo version of the dish. this mode means making the dish under a much tighter time constraint that generally doesn't allow for mistakes, which is actually a fun way to play the game. it is a lot more stressful, and definitely more annoying to 100% because of the timer aspect, but i liked playing a few levels of it. i already know that some recipes will be hell if you wanted to do it because of their tedious steps (the entire chicken tender/nugget recipe) (the step where you have to measure out foil/wrap for the food that brought nothing but pain and annoyance because of how sensitive the ranges are), but it was really fun. im not sure if this mode has a set of unlocks, but i beat a dish with a gold medal rating and it gave me nothing so... im going to assume you dont get any prizes. this was more fun for me than the base recipes, but it is also the same exact thing. i like challenges, and some of these levels were genuinely difficult with the close timings of them, but it was great! easily the best part of the experience for me.

so why did i play this game. did i even like it? to answer: i have no real clue. i like cooking mama, but actually beating everything was a chore. 60 recipes and their respective dojo levels AND the 30ish minigames on top of that is a lot to do, with little variability in the core dishes. you will experience the same egg cracking minigame a thousand times and it will be 0.1% less fun every time after that. i had a blast with the first 15 recipes, and then i thought "i must be halfway done." then i kept unlocking, and unlocking, and unlocking. maybe don't be like me and try speedrunning completion.

my rating of this game is: Just O.K.