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.
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.
4 Comments
Hey dude! I'm new to the site and I don't see a direct way to reply to a specific comment or like DM a user, so hopefully you see this? Anyway, thank you for popping in and clarifying, I definitely came on pretty strong about what you said and I'm glad that didn't dissuade you from engaging. I'm glad to hear it wasn't a dig at the identities of the characters or their appearances, because that's absolutely what I thought. I'm sure you can see how I might be predisposed to hearing "terminally-online" as a writing critique as effectively code for bigotry, at least in lieu of specific examples, given how The Internet Is. Since it's not about that, I'm not entirely sure what you meant, because to me the characters spoke pretty naturally, if a little exaggerated. Regardless, I'm not sure that if it were written in a sort of Twitter-esque dialect that it would necessarily be a problem. The internet, especially among younger generations like me (I'm 18), has significantly influenced the way people speak. Just for me, there are some affectations and phrases that I use in talking out loud and in writing that come directly from the internet, for example "bigly huge" or "extremely not." It doesn't seem like a stretch to me that people of the future might have a dialect influenced by the internet of today. And of course it might seem unrealistic that in a game set anywhere from 3-10 generations in the future, the young people talk as they do now, but any time science-fiction tries to predict dialectical shifts or future slang, it always feels cheap and fake unless they're putting an inordinate amount of effort into it. Beyond things like 'dollars' to 'credits' and 'bucks' to 'creds' it starts feeling wrong. So, in conclusion, I don't know exactly what you're thinking, but overall I'm not sure people talking as though they're on Twitter is inherently a problem.
No worries, when I read that at first I was a bit confused but then it clicked what you were probably thinking and that's 100% a reasonable interpretation given The Internet, hence why I wanted to clarify! Mostly it was just the term that came to mind initially when thinking about the writing -- I played this and Norco back to back and so I was doing a lot of compare/contrast between the two in my mind while working on this review. I liked Norco a lot less, but there were points in that game where I found myself pointedly admiring the prose, while I consistently found that in Citizen Sleeper that it felt... not as satisfying as I had hoped, and I had a hard time pinning down what exactly it was that felt a bit off-putting to me.
"Terminally-online" came to mind and it felt like an apt description -- the writing felt like it was trying to be clever in a bite-sized way, so as to fit sentiments and ideas in 280 characters, but completely neglecting the longer term prosaic quality that I find really elevates a game's writing to being great. It also felt weirdly self-aware, distinctly "Internet-Age" in essence, without necessarily being inwardly consistent, if that makes any sense? Like, to me, good writing often feels like just under the surface of the words, there's a constant web of meaning and connection, a living and breathing world of the written word itself separate from that which it describes, and when a text has that quality, self-awareness is an excellent attribute. But without that, it feels hollow, self-conscious, lacking in confidence while putting on a front so as to present otherwise. To me, that feels like reading, say, a Reddit thread, or someone's Twitter page. (The latter leans progressive, as does the game, while the former is decidedly the opposite -- hence why I used Twitter as a point of reference for description. I know people often do this as an underhanded way of being queerphobic etc., so apologies for any possible confusion there.)
You mentioned the dialogue in specific being natural, and I actually agree -- that's one place where I think the more online nature of the writing works strongly in the favor of the game. It feels like that's the type of language that the future would use, given that we're already pretty heavily going in that direction. (To be clear, I think that's a good thing! I fucking LOVE linguistic innovations and I think it's cool as hell how quickly niche micro-dialects can form and become nearly incomprehensible to people who aren't "in the know" -- stumbling upon new groups with their own specific language and jargon on Discord or Twitter or TikTok and figuring out the meaning of whatever words or phrases they've come up with and assimilating that language into my own daily use in a natural way is so goddamn awesome and I absolutely do not want to come off like old-man-yells-at-clouds here.) So I do agree, talking like they're on Twitter isn't an inherent problem, especially when it comes down to dialogue.
Hopefully you're not too surprised to hear that I agree with like 90% of your review, minus the conclusion as to how highly to rate it and whether to talk about DE in reference to this game. My review mostly came from a place of finishing the game, thinking that it was cool as shit and had a lot good going on, and wishing that I loved it, because for whatever reason, it fell short of being great to me. I wish it felt like a great game! It hits on a lot of themes I care about, had quite good characters, a plot with a ton of potential to go places and tie into the overarching themes, great music, pretty art, a gameplay concept that in theory I really like -- I think all of these things are just apparent from playing the game itself, so I didn't really say much about them! And yet it just felt like something about the execution kept me from loving it, and in a game that's like 90% text, that ultimately comes down to the prose. Terminally-online just felt like good shorthand for the overall deficiency in the writing.
It goes without saying that this is just a matter of opinion! Clearly the game did something right, because I came back multiple times to check out other reviews and think about the game more. And it did suck a little to see multiple people had written reviews directly blasting mine, but that's just the nature of posting opinions online, and ultimately I'm sure a lot of that is just on me for not being as clear as I could have been in my review. But I'm glad we've at least been able to have a bit of good faith discussion about the game, and I hope this clarifies where I'm coming from!
"Terminally-online" came to mind and it felt like an apt description -- the writing felt like it was trying to be clever in a bite-sized way, so as to fit sentiments and ideas in 280 characters, but completely neglecting the longer term prosaic quality that I find really elevates a game's writing to being great. It also felt weirdly self-aware, distinctly "Internet-Age" in essence, without necessarily being inwardly consistent, if that makes any sense? Like, to me, good writing often feels like just under the surface of the words, there's a constant web of meaning and connection, a living and breathing world of the written word itself separate from that which it describes, and when a text has that quality, self-awareness is an excellent attribute. But without that, it feels hollow, self-conscious, lacking in confidence while putting on a front so as to present otherwise. To me, that feels like reading, say, a Reddit thread, or someone's Twitter page. (The latter leans progressive, as does the game, while the former is decidedly the opposite -- hence why I used Twitter as a point of reference for description. I know people often do this as an underhanded way of being queerphobic etc., so apologies for any possible confusion there.)
You mentioned the dialogue in specific being natural, and I actually agree -- that's one place where I think the more online nature of the writing works strongly in the favor of the game. It feels like that's the type of language that the future would use, given that we're already pretty heavily going in that direction. (To be clear, I think that's a good thing! I fucking LOVE linguistic innovations and I think it's cool as hell how quickly niche micro-dialects can form and become nearly incomprehensible to people who aren't "in the know" -- stumbling upon new groups with their own specific language and jargon on Discord or Twitter or TikTok and figuring out the meaning of whatever words or phrases they've come up with and assimilating that language into my own daily use in a natural way is so goddamn awesome and I absolutely do not want to come off like old-man-yells-at-clouds here.) So I do agree, talking like they're on Twitter isn't an inherent problem, especially when it comes down to dialogue.
Hopefully you're not too surprised to hear that I agree with like 90% of your review, minus the conclusion as to how highly to rate it and whether to talk about DE in reference to this game. My review mostly came from a place of finishing the game, thinking that it was cool as shit and had a lot good going on, and wishing that I loved it, because for whatever reason, it fell short of being great to me. I wish it felt like a great game! It hits on a lot of themes I care about, had quite good characters, a plot with a ton of potential to go places and tie into the overarching themes, great music, pretty art, a gameplay concept that in theory I really like -- I think all of these things are just apparent from playing the game itself, so I didn't really say much about them! And yet it just felt like something about the execution kept me from loving it, and in a game that's like 90% text, that ultimately comes down to the prose. Terminally-online just felt like good shorthand for the overall deficiency in the writing.
It goes without saying that this is just a matter of opinion! Clearly the game did something right, because I came back multiple times to check out other reviews and think about the game more. And it did suck a little to see multiple people had written reviews directly blasting mine, but that's just the nature of posting opinions online, and ultimately I'm sure a lot of that is just on me for not being as clear as I could have been in my review. But I'm glad we've at least been able to have a bit of good faith discussion about the game, and I hope this clarifies where I'm coming from!
Seems like it just comes down to the vibes we get from it! It's definitely not a perfect game, but I did like it and for me at least, the star rating isn't super important. I haven't done a lot of star ratings so I don't have a super good frame of reference for it, and I think it's not a super useful way of representing quality. I'd say that like, for me it'd go
1 star: I have moral/ethical/philosophical/artistic disagreements with this work so significant that I think it would at best be a complete waste of time, and at worst be an active detriment to one's life.
2 stars: I pretty strongly dislike it for whatever reason.
3 stars: It's a good game but it's not going to stick with me.
4 stars: It's really good all around but not exceedingly so, or it has elements that it nails so well that the value in those is enough to make it worthwhile.
5 stars: Things that stick with me for years, maybe forever, or a gameplay experience so perfectly tuned that the artifice breaks down completely and I am entranced.
Having written out that scale, perhaps Citizen Sleeper would be more a 4 star than a 4.5, but the point being, the stars aren't the important bit really. Sorry to have come on so harshly, I'm glad we worked it out! <3
1 star: I have moral/ethical/philosophical/artistic disagreements with this work so significant that I think it would at best be a complete waste of time, and at worst be an active detriment to one's life.
2 stars: I pretty strongly dislike it for whatever reason.
3 stars: It's a good game but it's not going to stick with me.
4 stars: It's really good all around but not exceedingly so, or it has elements that it nails so well that the value in those is enough to make it worthwhile.
5 stars: Things that stick with me for years, maybe forever, or a gameplay experience so perfectly tuned that the artifice breaks down completely and I am entranced.
Having written out that scale, perhaps Citizen Sleeper would be more a 4 star than a 4.5, but the point being, the stars aren't the important bit really. Sorry to have come on so harshly, I'm glad we worked it out! <3
Shymain
1 year ago