There's a case to be made that none of the sensations that your character feels in Citizen Sleeper are real within the game's fiction, the way they are for you and I in our world, instead being the equivalent of eating a steak in the Matrix. After all, every aspect of a Sleeper is synthetic, only brought into existence to create value for a corporation, which in turn only exists to create wealth for a small handful of its most powerful members. Even if they are real, a secondary question emerges of whether they even belong to your character, because in a legal sense the body that creates them doesn't. Still, sensations are what define Citizen Sleeper, rendered as they are with vivid prose. Eating at your favorite food vendor, petting a cat, holding someone's hand all become arguments for withstanding the decay, humiliation, and toil it takes to just make it through a cycle, even as the game is kind enough to understand why you might prefer to simply leave it all behind.
As a game, Citizen Sleeper is defined by dice rolls, meters, and economies. Once understood, the gameplay loop becomes riveting, as you weigh your various options and the myriad risks to manage the dual pressures of staving off entropy of depleting meters and progressing critical storylines through fulling meters. As good as it is as portraying the stress of capitalism for the marginalized, gaming and mastering the system is arguably too fun in the same way that the violence in titles like The Last Of Us Part 2 are arguably too fun, however I'm not particularly concerned about that here because of the particular contours of the status quo that it explores. Sharing a quality with 2022’s runaway hit Elden Ring, 2022’s Sleeper hit (sorry not sorry) also engages with a fractured political landscape, where the once unilateral presence of a corporation has given way to a rival company, a protectionist gang, and a budding commune all existing together in different spaces on this remote space station. While you can acquire everything you need on the market, it’s also more safely and reliably secured through mutual aid and contributing to the community. In doing so, Citizen Sleeper manages to become the rare pop media text to properly eschew capitalist realism, and to envision an alternative, however fraught, to the structures that bind us.
As a game, Citizen Sleeper is defined by dice rolls, meters, and economies. Once understood, the gameplay loop becomes riveting, as you weigh your various options and the myriad risks to manage the dual pressures of staving off entropy of depleting meters and progressing critical storylines through fulling meters. As good as it is as portraying the stress of capitalism for the marginalized, gaming and mastering the system is arguably too fun in the same way that the violence in titles like The Last Of Us Part 2 are arguably too fun, however I'm not particularly concerned about that here because of the particular contours of the status quo that it explores. Sharing a quality with 2022’s runaway hit Elden Ring, 2022’s Sleeper hit (sorry not sorry) also engages with a fractured political landscape, where the once unilateral presence of a corporation has given way to a rival company, a protectionist gang, and a budding commune all existing together in different spaces on this remote space station. While you can acquire everything you need on the market, it’s also more safely and reliably secured through mutual aid and contributing to the community. In doing so, Citizen Sleeper manages to become the rare pop media text to properly eschew capitalist realism, and to envision an alternative, however fraught, to the structures that bind us.