Citizen Sleeper

Let the dice fall where they may

Why

Why Not

Impressions

Citizen Sleeper starts off as a pressure cooker. You wake up on a space station called 'The Eye' as a Sleeper, an android implanted with a copy of a human mind while the original slumbers in suspended animation. Immediately after doing so you're inundated with urgent tasks requiring your limited dice rolls to complete. As escaped corporate property you need a way to stop them tracking you before they catch up, plus a way to stop the gradual degradation of your body without access to the stabilizers Essen-Arp used to leash you.

Stopping or slowing your degradation is the most immediate concern, as without stabilizers you'll lose access to one of your precious 5 action dice every 3 cycles. This can have a cascading effect where you can't get stabilizers because you don't have money, but can't earn money because your lack of stabilizers means you don't have enough actions per cycle to save after keeping yourself fed. Turns out androids need to eat too, and if you go too long without doing so your hunger starts to eat into the same condition bar which determines your available dice. The strongest part of the game is these first few cycles of frantic effort to just find a way to survive, effectively making you feel like a fugitive in a desperate situation.

Not that the game's bad once you're established though; The Eye is populated with a colorful cast of (beautifully drawn/designed) characters with their own goals, agendas and (potential) rewards to offer. Becoming part of their stories while figuring out a way to survive the Essen-Arp hit squad no doubt hot on your tail makes up the remainder of the story until the DLC, which introduces its own existential threat. Each character leads you on their own little adventure, revealing more of their personality and (usually engaging) backstory as you go, until their story culminates in an upgrade point and occasionally a solution to one of your problems.

If there's a complaint I have about Citizen Sleeper's overall narrative, it's that many of these choices essentially boil down to whether you'll stay or go. You'll receive your first change to leave The Eye quite early on, and upon doing so (or sometimes even if you don't for some reason) will roll credits, causing you to miss out on hours of excellent characters, story and resource management gameplay. And this choice (admittedly with some interesting variations on 'leave') will be offered to you ad nauseum. Of course you can reload your save, take the other branch and keep going, but that feels a bit cheap.

I almost wonder if the early game is so compelling to encourage taking these 'leave' options then starting over with another Sleeper; your starting class quickly becomes irrelevant in the mid-late game as your snowball of completed quests and upgrade points gets rolling. I played decidedly less than perfectly, failing a few quests, but still had enough upgrade points to finish with only two "+3 to dice roll" perks left locked.

It's not just about the destination though, and the journey here is something special. I found it impossible to put this game down in the few days it took me to finish, playing it in basically every spot of free time I had available. I'm very eager to play the sequel, which from a quick scan of the screenshots on Steam looks like more of the same but bigger and with a higher budget. If they can add more choices than 'stay or go' as well, Citizen Sleeper 2 might be one of my all time favourites. Citizen Sleeper's characters alone make it worth picking up, and the gameplay is surprisingly engaging for what's essentially a visual novel with dice. If you enjoy narrative/character-driven games, definitely give this one a try.