Good Morning Friends! I am dragging this morning because it is amazing just how far out of whack your sleep schedule can get during a three-day weekend. This weekend was a weird one because Friday and Saturday morning were devoted to trying to get an ending in Citizen Sleeper because we were planning on recording a “gameclub” style show on that game on Saturday night. Then the discussion was so compelling and I realized that I missed key elements of the game… which lead me Sunday morning to play the entire damned game from scratch. I’ve not finished the game a second time and I have to say, it is very much an experience worth having. The show we recorded should be considered a full spoiler experience, but this morning I am going to do my best to entice you in a spoiler-lite manner.
The world of Citizen Sleeper is that of a late capitalism dystopia similar to those familiar in the “mega-corporation” cyberpunk genre. In the future, truly sentient Artificial A.I. is outlawed, but there are ways to skirt the boundary and that is the emulation of a human brain. You play a “sleeper” or a robot frame that has the partial consciousness of a human brain being emulated on it and effectively sold into slavery… so that the original human can live a marginally happier life. The problem is that you escaped the bondage of the Essen-Arp corporation, but due to “planned obsolescence”, if you do not receive your regular dosage of stabilizer, your body will break down and die.
Mechanically Citizen Sleeper is a pen and paper roleplaying game lovingly presented as a single-player digital adventure. Essentially you have two resources Condition which determines how close to death you are, and Energy which is the equivalent of how well fed you are for lack of a better explanation. The game is divided into turns or “cycles” and at the beginning of each cycle, it takes two segments of energy to get up and move again. Upon the start of a new cycle, a number of D6 dice are rolled and that represents the scores that you can spend during that cycle on taking actions. As your condition depletes, it also reduces the total dice pool that you have available to you. Your character’s perks determine what bonuses you might have for any given action.
The game thrusts you into a world of poverty and stress, and the need to keep working to try and figure out a way to survive. You are cracked out of a cargo pod and given a place to stay, but not out of some sense of generosity. Turns out the person who finds you and gives you a place to sleep… needs you to help pay off debt and as a result asks you to get up and work almost immediately. So you spend the first few rounds rotating between the empty container you are sleeping in and the salvage yard as you encounter your first “clock”. “A Debt Called in” represents an 8 turn clock that starts counting down giving you that many turns to successfully pay off that debt before failing the action. These are essentially the actions that drive the course of the game as you are put under the gun to be able to take certain actions within a certain timeframe.
What sets this game apart from so many other games in the cyberpunk genre, is it is not hopeless. Sure this world is a bit of a shithole and you are encountering so many people living in abject poverty, but there are ways that you can make almost every life that you encounter better. The game is very “read-y” as Kodra called it on the show and there is copious amounts of text to sift through, but it is exceptionally well written and gives you a feeling for what these characters are like. The combination of artwork, narrative prose, and superb audio design come together to create what feels like the living breathing world of Erlin’s Eye, a space station that kicked the corporate overlords off of it and turned it into a haven for outcasts.
I have to admit I was not entirely certain about this game at first. It took me a number of turns before I really got into the flow of the experience. After that, I fell deeply into the “just one more turn” problem that you have with 4X games and maybe was up far later that first night than I had intended to be. It is a game with a large number of possible endings and as far as I can tell there is no real loss condition. Having played through it twice now, I am pretty happy with my choices in both cases and the remaining four achievements that I do not have… I am happy enough knowing they exist but not experiencing those specific endings. If you have a fondness for pen and paper roleplaying at all or the larger cyberpunk genre, then I suggest you give the game a closer look. Personally, I know that I will be watching anything that Jump Over The Age games creates from now on.