I’m still on the fence about Xbox Game Pass being a good thing for video games, but I can’t deny it’s very nice to hear about an interesting-sounding game on a podcast (thanks, Get Played) and be able to play it within ten minutes.
Without Game Pass I’d probably have hovered my cursor over Citizen Sleeper, glanced at the teetering pile of games in my backlog, and decided to save my time and money. I’m glad I didn’t: this was an extremely chilled-out and thoughtful dystopian adventure.
The game revolves around a original and darkly plausible sci-fi premise. You are a Sleeper, a human worker who’s agreed to have their consciousness uploaded into a machine body to work for a corporation.
After discovering the true horror of this life you’ve hit da bricks and escaped to space station Erlin’s Eye. Pitted against you are corpo bounty hunters who consider you just wayward property and your robot body needing patented medicine to survive. With not even a pot to piss in (not that you need to piss anymore) you must scratch together a new life in the station.
Gameplay is a combination of dice rolls and text choices. In a nice twist Citizen Sleeper isn’t at all embarrassed that it’s powered by dice – you get a certain amount per day to ‘spend’ on activities (the better the roll the higher the chance of success). Gambling your way through the game and pulling off unlikely chances feels great, especially the consequences for failing a role just a hit of easily renewable energy and requiring a nice nap before trying again.
Though not strictly divided into acts, Citizen Sleeper also goes through a nicely narrative progression. On beginning the game you’re tossed into the deep end, low on money, food, and medicine. You accept the first job you find and begin scratching out subsistence life, counting the credits you need for your next hit of sweet corpo juice.
But as you learn the ropes of Erlin’s Eye you get a toehold in this community. You build friendships, learn how to spot opportunities, and begin delving into the underbelly of the station. By the final hours, the rat race for medicine becomes a secondary objective as you begin teasing out one of the story strands and head toward one of several endings.
It’s ridiculously satisfying, with Erlin’s Eye gradually turning from a confusing sprawl into a hometown populated by people you care about and who accept you. By the time the ending rolled around I was sad about the character arcs I didn’t resolve, but I guess just like real life not every relationship comes to a dramatically satisfying conclusion.
Perhaps you could nitpick the repetitive nature of grinding out the same old tasks for credits or that some of the map navigation elements are a teeny bit obtuse, but it’s very easy for me to write that friction off as benefiting the themes.
What’s left is a game that lives up to the indie hype. I can only echo the people who told me that if I have Game Pass I should set aside a few hours and check this out. It’s rad.
Pixel Hunted 