Citizen Sleeper – Spotlight

A ring known as Erlin’s Eye can be found in the far reaches of space among the likes of corpos and bounty hunters. It is broken and fractured, but it is still able to sustain life. It’s all about you. In Citizen Sleeper, you play as a displaced alien forced to start over on Earth’s moon, the Eye. In the cyberpunk RPG Jump Over the Age, the moniker of solo developer Gareth Damien Martin, who worked with artists Guillaume Singelin and Amos Roddy on the project, this is the spark that lights the fire.

Tabletop RPGs are the inspiration for this innovative role-playing experience. The complexity of Citizen Sleeper’s systems can be overwhelming at first, but once you get past that, you’ll be rewarded with a rich sci-fi world full of lovable misfits.

In Citizen Sleeper, rolling the dice and watching the metres fill is the core of the game’s gameplay. Citizen Sleeper is a cyberpunk sci-fi RPG that blends various cyberpunk subgenres into a single cohesive world, but that description does little to convey the tension and rapid-fire decision-making that distinguish it. It’s all the more impressive when you consider that you only get to read about most of Citizen Sleeper’s world.

You are a Sleeper in this world, an emulation of a real person. You were created by a corporation using a copy of a human’s intelligence inside a robot body that was sold to a third party. Even though you’ve escaped your life of servitude, you’re still plagued by the consequences of the time when a corporation controlled your body.

A dice roll and two decreasing metres greet you each morning as you get out of bed. These include one that requires a special (and pricey) antidote, called Stabilizer, while the other requires you to eat and exercise regularly.

In Citizen Sleeper, the first two-thirds of the game, it’s the one thing you’ll have to juggle with everything else to get. Spending dice on odd jobs around the city is the only way to earn enough money to get by. Moment-to-moment gameplay is driven by a delicate act of balancing. Citizens Sleeper’s quests are referred to as “Drives,” a stylistic flourish indicative of the captivating prose that can be found throughout the game.

It is possible to earn additional dice by doing jobs or hacking your way around the map. Positive, neutral, and negative outcomes are all possible outcomes of an action. The number of dice you roll determines the probability of each outcome. If you get a 5, your outcome is either neutral or positive. You have a 25/50/25 chance of rolling a 3. Stat points are used to determine the amount of bonus experience you receive for completing an action.

Hacking, on the other hand, operates in a unique manner. Modules that accept specific dice numbers can be seen when viewing the Eye in hacking mode, once unlocked. You can get more bang for your buck by making use of your low-value dice in this manner.

Different timepieces in Citizen Sleeper’s world are filled with the results that are either good or bad. Taking another cue from TTRPGs, the clock system is one of many interesting and unique features of the game. To advance a clock, you may have to perform an action multiple times, but there are also clocks that count down. When the clock strikes zero, there is always a sense of dread and anxiety that permeates the proceedings.

Thematically and mechanically, the clocks in Citizen Sleeper are a part of the game’s design. The Working Class dread and fear that they will not be able to pay for the next medical emergency.. Yours if a dice roll goes your way, or when the final red tick appears on a clock that is counted down to “something” threatening.

The only issue I have with playing Citizen Sleeper on a PC is the inability to navigate the map and menus using a controller. In Citizen Sleeper, which is available on Xbox Game Pass, moving to the node you want isn’t always precise, resulting in a lot of fiddling between actions. The Drives and Skills menus take the brunt of this, as they were both designed with a mouse in mind. Bugs in these menus caused me to navigate both the menu and the map at the same time, making it difficult to understand what I was doing.

For the sake of progressing the many intriguing plot lines, Citizen Sleeper is an RPG with a heavy emphasis on dialogue. Even though Citizen Sleeper uses dice more creatively, comparisons to Disco Elysium already feel a little trite, but it’s not a bad point of comparison. As a result of their excellent writing, both games have mechanics built through player choice rather than traditional fail states.

In order to convey the cyberpunk imagery the prose often conjures up, the characters’ stunning artwork does a great job. The various people — er, sentient entities — are depicted in intricate and appealing portraits. Everyone has an air of effortless cool, but their individuality still shines through in their appearance. For some reason, I was compelled to see every storyline, even the ones I discovered late in the game.

With Amos Roddy’s killer synthwave soundtrack, the clean minimalist aesthetic is complete. When there is a lot of dialogue, music is also used to convey the same themes and emotions.

You can reach a variety of conclusions in many of the character-driven stories that develop and intertwine. Citizen Sleeper is more than the sum of its parts, some of which are simply sad. There is no overarching plot. Instead, the threads you see and the ending you see first are determined by what you decide to focus on and how you allocate your resources.

Sabine, a slum doctor, is in trouble with one of the local gangs on the Eye. As they battle poverty on the ring, you may come across Lem and his daughter Mina. While the idea of a sentient vending machine may seem silly at first, it develops into one of the game’s most thought-provoking plot points.

Each story arc develops its characters while also delving into global political issues. Local groups and galactic corporations are locked in a power struggle over Erlin’s Eye, leaving the working class high and dry. Citizen Sleeper’s dozen or so narrative threads cover a wide range of sub-genres. Each plot thread is memorable and meaningful, whether it’s a William-Gibson-inspired hacking odyssey or a more subdued personal narrative with sci-fi twists.

For Citizen Sleeper’s minimalist style to work, the writing has to do most of the heavy lifting in terms of character development and world-building. As a result, it does and is confident in its decisions. Fortunately

Seeing an ending took me about 40 cycles, and you can return to the world regardless of which one you choose or stumble into first. By the time I finished all my loose ends, I had played for nearly 60 cycles. You’ll be glad you did, too, because each story has a satisfying conclusion.