cover me in leaves is probably, if i had to pick, the game that had the greatest effect on me. ever.

minecraft certainly shaped my life more than cover me in leaves, but not so much because of the game as because of the time i spent with it and who i spent it with.
cover me in leaves did it all by itself.

it was probably 2am. i was huddled up on my shitty desk chair, knees at my chest. it was the first summer of covid. it was hot in my house. i had a fan blowing at me, sitting on my desk. it was far too big to be there, but it was my only option.

"On bright minds, and the end of all things."
a wailing lament echoed across a frozen, snow-covered lake.

"And then we kissed."
it was all over from there. as soon as i clicked that dialogue, my fate was sealed. i no longer had any choice in the matter.

that sounds ominous, but i mean it in the best way. it took all of 10 minutes, but it felt like hours. cover me in leaves held my cheeks like a mother and whispered to me, "you have to live. whatever you do, it doesn't matter. you have to live."

i cannot possibly explain more. i'm 18, now. i'm going away to college come fall. i'm going to get a tattoo. "A leaf -- just a single leaf -- traced out on the soft side of my wrist."

p.s. i've spoken with elliot, the writer, a few times and she's absolutely lovely.

I've played about 40 hours of the game now. It terrifies me. Like, I just finished a round of Quick Play (for those who don't know, it's a secondary game mode where all the players have to hunt down one specific player, I don't know why it's called quick play) that ended with me maybe two feet from the player before I ran out of time. I finished the match about ten minutes ago now and I still have that deep-seated unease that arises from playing this game alone. There is a reason it's called Hunt. You feel like you're being hunted every second of the game, especially when you're alone. It plays incredibly well, it's beautiful, it's pretty well balanced, I love it. And I can barely handle playing it alone.

The game is great, you should play it. The characters are good, the art is wonderful, the music is appropriately moody, and the writing is incredible.

Technical Problems:
The controls are rough. They work fine enough, but there are several quality of life changes that really ought to happen in a Definitive Edition update once they finish the refugee arc. For no apparent reason, the world space is broken up into three separate sections that you have to click through menus to get between. This is rather annoying given how often you’ll be traversing your camera across the whole station. I understand in the case of going to the Hub, but it really should not require a confirmation menu. Just an icon, you click it, and the camera snaps over to the hub.
The only item you should have to drag are the dice, there is no reason to make the player individually drag each item from two inexplicably separated item bars with mutually exclusive accessibility. If I click into a location, and I have the items required to do an action, the slots on the action should just auto-populate. Also, if an action requires items to fill up a clock one by one, I should just be able to put them all in at once, instead of having to individually add each item one by one.
I would also like to see the dialogue history show the dialogue option you picked, as well. The dialogue isn’t hard to follow, it’s not something that you’d need to re-read a ton, but it would be nice.
Other improvements I can see for a Definitive Edition: more art! The art is so lovely, I would love to see art of ships and buildings and such. I think the game might benefit from some good voice acting, but it’s not necessary, I don’t think.

Art Problems:
The station stops feeling meaningfully reactive pretty early on. What I mean by this is, big events happen and the station seems basically entirely unaffected by them. It’s hard to discuss without spoilers, but the culmination of Feng’s plotline, the Sidereal lottery, and the cordon mission, to name a few really feel like they should have ended up going somewhere that they just didn’t. Those should have had widespread effects on the station, it’s atmosphere, it’s communities, and it’s politics that should have spun off several other plot lines. And I get that you have to limit the scope, but there really needed to be something more there. Particularly with regards to Feng’s plotline and the cordon mission.
Another problem that has rightly been pointed out is that it gets way too easy to live. There’s not much more to say about that, other than it kind of ties back into the hanging threads, because if those were tied back into the story, it could offer some new threats to keep things dicey. Another problem is that the character build is basically irrelevant by the end of the game because you can almost max out everything, which really contributes to the feeling of having mastered the system and the tension being gone. That is sort of the inherent struggle in a game about leftist ideas, particularly ones that lean towards anarchism like this one, because you have to strike a balance between a compelling story and making sure the player is not the sole agent of the revolution, lest you end up with a game that is boring, or a game that betrays it’s beliefs. This is why I think the best revolutionary game must not be about the revolution.

Criticism I think is bad:
The copy-editing that everyone complains about is such a non-issue that it baffles me why anyone cares enough to mention it in a review. The worst thing I noticed was a few instances of a missing space between a period and the first letter of the next sentence. I saw one review on here that called the writing “terminally-online” which is a pretty ridiculous claim in my eyes and I honestly don’t care what they saw as terminally online, because there is like a total 5% chance that it was a good faith critique. Some have criticized the fact that the game seems to have a specific ending it’s directing you towards, but I think people were expecting something the game was not trying to do. I think it’s fine that the game has a sort of “canonical” ending, because it’s frankly the one that makes the most sense, and I think the game does a pretty good job of convincing you of it. I am also not a fan of people comparing Citizen Sleeper to Disco Elysium, favorably or not. I love Disco Elysium, it deserves every ounce of praise it gets, but it does not own the concept of “game about leftist politics.” That’s ridiculous, and thinking of the two as better or worse attempts at the same thing does them both a disservice.

Fortunately, all of this considered, the foundation of Citizen Sleeper is excellent. It has provided a framework that I really hope the developer, and others, take and run with to create even better stories, and better games by extension.