Citizen Sleeper Review

“Roleplaying in the ruins of interplanetary capitalism”

Since I’ve been busy with the move and all, I haven’t had much time to jump into a new game. But with a little extra time on my hands, I figured I should pick a new game to help me relax (moving into a new home is kinda stressful). I was still coming off of Elden Ring, though, and I knew I either needed to lean on another hobby for a bit, or I needed to play something so different, so atypical from my usual fare, that the sheer novelty of it could grab me.

I settled on a short indie game called Citizen Sleeper.

Citizen Sleeper is a strange one, and not one that caught my eye initially. It’s a heavily text-based scifi narrative game set on a derelict space station. The setting atmosphere itself reminded me heavily of Bladerunner and Alien (minus the aliens), and the gameplay reminded me of a tabletop role playing game.

For some brief background: you play as a Sleeper, someone deep in debt to the Essen-Arps corporation. In order to pay off this debt, you are put into cryo sleep, and your consciousness is transmitted/copied into a machine body. In this machine body, you are put to work over a period of months, years, or decades to work off your debt. The game starts with your Sleeper having fled from that life, ending up on Erlin’s Eye, a run down space station at the edge of civilization. But your machine body isn’t meant to exist on its own–it slowly deteriorates without specific meds and upkeep.

You work jobs, meet strange and intriguing people, and try to keep your machine body going one cycle (day) at a time. You have timers counting down for specific events, and throughout the game you will have tasks which must be completed before the time runs out, or else you ‘fail’ said task. This doesn’t usually result in a game over; it most often ends with a negative outcome to one of the unfolding stories on the station. This might mean you fail to continue a specific character’s arc, or it might mean their story takes a different turn than you expected.

At the start of each cycle (day), you roll dice to determine how many actions you can take before having to rest until the following day. Every time you rest, your energy and durability drops, so that every day is a constant struggle to stay alive while you meet different characters, follow different plot threads, all while you’re attempting to figure out a way to survive long-term. You’re also putting points into a skill tree throughout the game, allowing you to customize specific abilities to help in certain situations. Every scenario offers some different approaches–you might decide to face it head-on, or perhaps you want to hang back and gather more information. Each small roleplaying element feels straight out of a tabletop rpg, and that feeling is carried throughout the game.

Gameplay is mostly text-based. You have a sort of zoomed out view of Erlin’s Eye, with little icons spread all along the ring of the space station marking different locations you can visit, jobs to complete, or new characters to meet. Interactions with characters involve their portrait popping up on screen as you read text conversations and make dialogue choices. This offers a nice change of pace between the more dice-focused macro gameplay elements during every cycle.

It took about 30 minutes for me to really get a solid grasp of the mechanics, but after my first handful of cycles, I was hooked. There’s real care put into the writing. Not only do you meet a wide variety of fascinating people (and entities), each with rich backstories, dealing with their own unique issues, but your own character can be very self-reflective–they often consider their own place in the universe and the plights of those around them. The game is a great meditation on dystopian slice-of-life narratives. It offers a dozen+ varied looks at the genre, all wrapped up in an engaging survival loop that feels as integral to the story as any of the writing itself. Some narratives wrap up cleanly, some end in disappointment (some of that scripted, some of it because I didn’t complete certain tasks in time). It all felt like a cohesive experience of living out my days on this run-down space station at the edge of existence. Some characters drifted in and out of the story, popping up in other narratives, or disappearing entirely without so much as a goodbye. Even those moments when I failed to complete a character story in time felt like a seamless part of the narrative.

The game only took about 8 hours to beat–maybe a few more if you feel like pursuing multiple endings. When you roll credits at an ending, you’re able to continue playing past that point and pursue other endings. I initially thought I’d just roll credits and be done with it, but by that point in the game I needed to see how the other narrative threads wrapped up.

If you have any interest in science fiction stories–especially if you enjoy cyberpunk elements–you should definitely consider checking this out. It’s light on what I consider ‘typical’ gameplay, feeling more like a tabletop rpg with a heavy emphasis on narrative, but the gameplay itself is genuinely engaging, and the story, if you let it, can carry you through some truly special moments.

Final note: I would never have heard of this game, except it was one of the recent game additions to Xbox Game Pass. I already had the subscription going, so it just became an option to download. I live for my big tentpole Playstation titles, but Game Pass has helped me discover a ton of smaller indie games over the past year that I otherwise would never have checked out. It’s been a great asset for experiencing creative new titles, and I’d recommend trying it out for that alone.