Console Corner: Review of Citizen Sleeper

In case you missed it, 100% it bears repeating. We are living in a golden age of culture. Each media form is producing so much content it's impossible for one person to consume everything in their area of interest. And so many pockets, niches, and layers have evolved within each. The layer of video gaming which has most strongly evolved the past 5-10 years is indie games, i.e. technology has simplified to the point producers and directors can drum up enough cash for a few people to design and program legitimate gaming experiences. They cannot compete with the big AAA developers for size and scope, but at the same time their bite-sized offerings are precisely what many players are looking for. Maybe Citizen Sleeper (2022), a story-based rpg, is for players like you?

Citizen Sleeper might be called cozy cyberpunk. But there are enough hard decisions that the word 'cozy' only partially applies. Players take on the role of a 'sleeper': an android body occupied by a transferred human sentience. At the beginning of the game, you arrive on a lonely space station. Having escaped corporate overlords, you're looking for a new life. And so you start picking up odd jobs to earn credits. Your body also needs food and maintenance, and getting these quickly takes you into the underbelly of the station. It's there you discover the anarchists, the engineers, the yakuza, the nurses, the optimists, and everybody else making the station a colorful sphere of humanity. Whether or not it will become your permanent home is up to you to discover and choose.

The gameplay loop of Citizen Sleeper is resource gathering that triggers story inflection points. Players need to collect things here to spend them there, and advance the various storylines. While never directly stated, it quickly becomes clear that choosing where to invest directs your fate in the setting. Timers integrated into the various points of spending resources, there is a sense of tension that gives the story a nice edge.

The number and types of resources is goldilocks: not too many, and not too few. If there is a designer success story here, it is that players cannot do everything in one play through. They truly need to choose when spending resources as there are not enough for everything and everywhere. Corrupt corporations, aggressive cyber viruses, scavenger spaceport existence, terraformers—all come to life through this basic mechanism.

One other complement for Citizen Sleeper is the depth developers chose to go with the Sleeper's questions about existence and identity. I kept waiting for (and dreading) the game would go full-on existentialist. Thankfully, no. The Sleeper's cyber-existence is used to add layers to the setting, but it never overstays its welcome and becomes an unnecessary exercise in navel-gazing. He/she/it is, and you are, with only light probing.

In the end, Citizen Sleeper is a nice little rpg that balances resource management with indirect questing to advance an overarching tale. Imbued with story and setting, the space hub where Sleeper finds himself comes alive through text and dialogue. Likewise balancing utopia with the hard realities of life, help and hard work pay off just as malevolence and fate can intervene to turn the various scenarios upside down. It's solar punk as much as cyberpunk. If you enjoy text-based science fiction stories, give this a try.