With so many games and so little time, Citizen Sleeper was yet another indie release that caught my eye before being swamped by tsunami of gaming news promoting the next best thing. Thankfully, returning to it three years late is easy, with the minimalist but stylish visuals, slick interface, and evocative soundtrack effectively timeless. And I’m glad I did return, as there is something comfortingly familiar yet fresh about the hybrid structure that blends a choice-driven visual novel with a dice-driven, tabletop-style RPG. It’s also uplifting as hell, despite the often-bleak setting and scenarios you’ll face, and had me wondering if my life was also just a string of choices and more RNG than I care for?
It’s worth noting up front that you need to be comfortable with a lot of reading if you’re going to gel with Citizen Sleeper. There is no voice work and often paragraph after paragraph of text to work through. From the opening sequence that introduces you to your synthetic “Sleeper” body with a transferred consciousness, through to the heartfelt culmination of relationship-building quest-lines, and the handful of potential endings, Citizen Sleeper conveys everything through excellent writing, lightly animated character portraits, and the accompanying soundtrack. I found it an impressively thought-provoking experience that generated stronger emotions than the glut of cinematic “AAA” games I’ve played over the last decade – many of which featured professional voice work and lavish motion capture.
It’s possible you will recognise many of the sci-fi tropes the world of Citizen Sleeper is built upon, but the setting remains a strong hook throughout as the game doesn’t rush to explain everything up front. Instead, each character has a link to major players in the Citizen Sleeper universe, and through interacting with them you’ll come to understand the past and present of the world you now inhabit. What’s clear from the get-go is that “The Eye”, a decaying ring station in the Helion system, on the edge of the Core region, is home to human, augmented, and synthetic workers – some bound by company contracts or gang debts – all trying to get by providing essential services or engaging in dangerous space-faring work, like terraforming, resource extraction, and salvaging.
A corporate collapse a generation before resulted in the emergence of several factions: a workers union that evolved into a corporation with a structure it once despised; a gang straddling the line between governing body and criminality; a commune trying to make The Eye self-sufficient through novel food production methods; a charitable organisation driving new colonisation efforts; and a curious assortment of forgotten AI constructs. It is into this diverse and fragile fringe society that your Sleeper finds themselves, with no friends, no stable work, and no access to the stabiliser drugs essential for maintaining their synthetic bodies.
To survive, you’ll need to explore, find work opportunities, forge new friendships, and decide what purpose your new life serves on the edge of the inhabited universe. You do that by way an abstract and menu-driven system that is mechanically simple and intuitive yet, thanks to the incredible writing and characterisation, still engaging and frequently tense. If you strip away the narrative layer, Citizen Sleeper is a combination of timers, meters, dice rolls modified by a simple skill tree, and player choices that shape future interactions. It sounds incredibly dry, but like a table-top RPG led by an experienced GM, simple actions can be thrilling with the right narrative framing and high stakes.
Each cycle, you awake hungry and watch the condition of your synthetic body deteriorate. Each cycle, you’re dealt five or less dice that dictate your chances of successfully completing a job to earn currency to buy food or stabiliser drugs; values that influence your chances of mastering a social interaction that could improve your local reputation; or the exact values required to hack systems within The Eye’s vast and collapsing information network.
Every time the story imposes a cycle limit before events transpire or limits the number of times you can bungle a task, a segmented ring slowly fills up with abstract but terrifying red markers. Combined with the ever-present hunger and condition meters, they serve as a constant reminder you are living on the edge, and every decision is meaningful.
The gameplay mechanics can generate tension well enough, but what makes Citizen Sleeper special is how almost every interaction, be that player choice or dice roll, is linked to a specific faction or character. Through repetition, you’ll come to know them all, and through constant engagement, you’ll dig deeper into their lives. You’ll unlock new interactions with a cast of troubled but often hopeful citizens and slowly establish yourself on The Eye. You’ll soon realise Citizen Sleeper has few fail states beyond locking you out of some endings, but thanks to great writing and multiple quest outcomes, it’s incredibly satisfying to define your character through their choices and interactions with others – regardless of whether you choose to settle on The Eye or find a way to move on.
Wrapping up, Citizen Sleeper is any easy addition to an ever-growing list of iconic indie games that demonstrate how much you can achieve with very little. It’s like a well-written choose-your-own-adventure novel, in which triggering the next turn of the page means engaging in some simple but satisfying table-top-style dice rolls that can sometimes work for or against you. Citizen Sleeper also remains a timely reminder that if you are looking for a place in a community, you should be looking for a collective of individuals that share your values and struggles, not some monolithic organisation – be that corporate, political, or religious – with the expectation of your adherence to some ideological dogma that those in charge rarely follow themselves.
Citizen Sleeper was played on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox One, PS4/5, and Nintendo Switch.
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