Descriptions of the Eye filtered through your emulated mind blend poetic mysticism with cyberpunk sci-fi, and the game’s dozen or so major characters are alive with personality and believable motivations. Every character in the game is rendered in vivid color, everything from their outfits to their body language telling the story of their lives in a single glance.įrom the start, Citizen Sleeper’s writing is excellent, and it only gets better as the game goes on. Within the game’s first moments, you also get your first look at Guillaume Singelin’s beautiful character art. Its synthy score by Amos Roddy moves between downbeat bleakness and shimmering optimism (like the story itself), swelling to accompany major narrative beats, backed by the low hum of the space station. Citizen Sleeper makes a hell of an introduction. What kept me invested was basically everything else. For the first few hours of Citizen Sleeper, I was disappointed by these resource management systems, which were always demanding energy that could have been spent on more compelling tasks but never seemed to raise the stakes in an interesting way. Video games don’t have the luxury of improvisation, so failure usually just means losing resources or wasting time. A good gamemaster can turn a failed roll into a complication that ends up changing the game, or at least your character. One of the best things about tabletop roleplaying games, from which Citizen Sleeper draws a lot of inspiration, is that failure is often more fun than success. My choices were usually driven by whatever I could accomplish with the dice in my hand, rather than being led by how I wanted my character to act. Fellow TravelerĬitizen Sleeper is mechanically sparse: I didn’t feel like I was interacting meaningfully with its world at first. More of the Eye opens up to you as you win its residents over. Each quest you complete rewards you with an ability point used to upgrade your core stats or buy special abilities, though these usually feel like more of a side benefit to the real reward: the story. As a Sleeper, you also have access to the vast cloud of data suffusing the station which you can pull valuable secrets by spending a dice with a specific value.įrom nodes on the game’s map, you spend your resources to complete quests ranging from corporate espionage to fast food delivery, trying to keep your head above water for one more day. Some actions also spend condition or energy, two refillable resources that gauge your health and limit your ability to act. Nearly every action you perform spends one of these dice, whether you’re stealing security documents or chatting with locals, with higher rolls more likely to get you what you want. At the beginning of each day, you roll up to five dice, depending on your current condition. Fellow TravelerĬitizen Sleeper spells out its simple mechanics in a few short tutorial messages. You can only do so much in a day before you use up all your dice. Doing that means doing the bidding of any wandering soul aboard the Eye willing to pay in cash, food, or trust. You’ve escaped from your corporate handlers and now must survive without a steady supply of the body-stabilizing substances they control to keep the Sleepers on a tight leash. From the beginning, your plan is simple and your options are clear. You survive the trip only by virtue of being a Sleeper - an emulated human consciousness stuffed into a robotic shell to be used as disposable labor for a hellish megacorp. You start Citizen Sleeper by awakening in a freighter’s cargo hold fished out of the void of space by a scrap dealer. They represent how a commune of botanists helps the owner of a rundown bar achieve her dreams, how a community bands together when institutions inevitably screw them over, how a child nearly frozen solid in the vacuum of space can build a life worth living under the harsh artificial light of a ruined space station.Ĭitizen Sleeper from Jump Over the Age (developer of the 2020 cult hit In Other Waters) starts by showing you the web of data its characters are all caught in, gradually revealing that it’s also a net binding them together if they’ll only promise to catch each other when they fall. In another way - metaphorical but more real than any digital receipt - these threads represent the connections between people. Text messages, bank transactions, security logs are all there for you to sift through. These threads represent strings of data only you can see. Inside, glittering threads weave through its halls, linking the people of the Eye: mechanics, smugglers, refugees, and street cooks alike. The massive circular space station known as the Eye hangs in deep space, still bearing the scars of a revolution.
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