Indie Citizen Sleeper - Narrative RPG set on a space station by the developer of In Other Waters

[cyborgboy95]

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[cyborgboy95]

the date announcement reveal trailer on Youtube

 

[Tyranicon]

So wait, is this a visual novel?

 

[Marat]

So wait, is this a visual novel?

I direct you to https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/are-text-adventures-rpgs.142555/

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1578650/view/3182366778711801739

Citizen Sleeper Reviews

Citizen Sleeper Review Round-Up

Only one day until Citizen Sleeper releases. The coverage embargo has lifted, and reviews are starting to come in. Here's what people are saying:

Waypoint[www.vice.com]: Citizen Sleeper stands out as one of the best games of the year, with great writing that avoids easy outs. - Renata Price

The Guardian[www.theguardian.com] - 4/5: There are far more stories to tell in this fascinating universe, and this is some of the finest video-game sci-fi writing out there. - Lewis Packwood

Inverse[www.inverse.com] - 8/10: The story of Citizen Sleeper is one of the most thoughtful and emotionally satisfying I’ve ever played. Your story will be different, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you find out what it is. - Bryan Lawler

Destructoid - 9/10: ...a sci-fi story that sticks. Some stories were good, and others hit me like a bag of bricks. - Eric Van Allen

Metro[metro.co.uk]: An absorbing mix of tabletop inspirations and sci-fi storytelling, that makes for one of the most unique and well-written games of the year. - Adam Starkey

Press Start[press-start.com.au] - 9/10: It's not often that a game grabs me in quite the way Citizen Sleeper has. Top-notch writing, impeccable narrative design and inviting tabletop mechanics accompanied by gorgeous art and music serve only to elevate it even more. Play this bloody game. - Kieron Verbrugge

Rock, Paper, Shotgun: A swish sci-fi RPG full of decent folk and just the right amount of scum. - Brendan Caldwell

https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/citizen-sleeper-review-nintendo-switch/: Citizen Sleeper has captured my imagination in a way that few video games do. - Rollin Bishop

Screen Rant[screenrant.com]: Citizen Sleeper is fantastic. It's a deep and well-crafted narrative experience with a fascinating setting, and is filled with plenty of challenging questions for players to ponder over. This is a game that gets cyberpunk right. - Rob Gordon

Polygon[www.polygon.com]: Capitalism is an endless bitch, but I quickly learn that even in the face of truly bleak choices, the game always allows the Sleeper to retain a soft, haunting sense of humanity through dialogue and actions. - Alexis Ong

 

[Grauken]

only 7 hours until this gets out

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/citizen_sleeper?as=1649904300

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/citizen-sleeper-review/

CITIZEN SLEEPER REVIEW
Wake up! Time to dice.

Citizen Sleeper is like Blade Runner, but you're a replicant. A synthetic being who has escaped from the corporation that built you, you hide on a space station that's become a rogue state—home to revolutionaries, refugees, and a pirate gang. While you're worrying whether you'll be hunted down and dramatically shot in the back, you're also worried about day-to-day survival.

Citizen Sleeper is great at encouraging you to live a routine. Where in Cyberpunk 2077 I only went to bed if I was trying to trigger a sidequest, here I lived a day-to-day cycle that included sleeping, eating, working, and feeding a stray cat. Some of it was mechanically necessary, and some of it was pure roleplay.

Each morning, your synthflesh body wakes up and a pool of dice are rolled, each of which you can spend performing an action. The higher the number, the better you'll do. I might spend a 6 on a job where I help a local mechanic clear a ship's tangled sunsails, but I didn't roll anything else higher than a 4 so I'll probably do a mediocre job clearing the section of the overgrown Greenway where I want to set up a mushroom farm.

Lower numbers aren't useless, as there's another side to the station. In the data cloud, where your consciousness floats free of the synthmeat that needs to eat and sleep, you hack systems by spending dice—only here it's about matching numbers rather than having high ones. I can spend a 1 seeing what this agent of the Yatagan gang is up to, or I could duck out of the data cloud and spend it working a shift at the noodle place, where even if I do a bad job at least I'll be allowed to eat a few noodles and get back some energy.

So it's not all Blade Runner. Citizen Sleeper ended up reminding me of Planetes, the series about blue-collar workers who collect garbage in space. Like Planetes, Citizen Sleeper is focused on ordinary people. Exploring each section of the station introduces new characters, who are depicted in expressive anime portraits superimposed on the station, beside which blocks of text tell their stories with choice-and-consequence moments of interaction.

Characters include a botanist studying the strange fungus that grows wild on the station, a bar-owner who wants to renovate, a shipyard worker trying to get off-station to find a better life for his daughter, and a mercenary whose 'shipmind' has been stolen. You never know who is going to be worth befriending. Some might abandon you, waste your time, or betray you. Who do you trust?

Their stories unfold over time. The UI tells you how many cycles before the next chapter begins, so while waiting you go back to work at the bar or the farm stacks, explore the Rotunda or the Hub, and try not to fall apart. Thanks to the corporation who planned your obsolescence, you've got a condition stat in constant decay. As it ticks down you get less dice to spend. Like a mobile phone or a lightbulb, you're not made to last. The stabilizer you need to refill your condition is expensive, and hard to source.

More pressure is provided by the hunters. The corporation or their freelancers will track you down eventually, and every hack you perform gives the bestial AI who patrols the station's cyberspace another whiff of your scent. Eventually, a reckoning will come.

As Citizen Sleeper goes on you get better at exploiting its systems, and find solutions to these problems. I made money playing a game called tavla at the Tambour Tearoom—like so many RPGs, gambling is the best way to get rich—and got my mushroom farm set up nicely. I even moved out of the shipping container I slept in.

It started to feel like I was sequence-breaking Citizen Sleeper when I'd find storylines I was clearly intended to have discovered sooner, which would assume I didn't have certain items or hadn't been to certain places. Even before that happened, I got a quest to build something before I had any need for it, stole shipments that never appeared in my inventory, and had an Upgrades Available message persist after I spent all my upgrade points.

A couple of typos and a fair few punctuation errors mark the text, though the writing itself is excellent. All that focus on the mundane, the scavenging and surviving, makes the occasional glimpse of something profound feel potent—perhaps a poetic description of the flowing cyberspace data cloud and the impossible entities who live in it, or the endless physical space the station spins in, and the tiny individuals who find hope there.

Citizen Sleeper has multiple endings, some of which let you continue playing to find others. By the time I was done I hadn't seen any attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glittering in the dark, but I had freed an AI from a vending machine, foiled a couple of corporate schemes to get toeholds on the station, and renovated a bar. I didn't want to leave, and I hit the credits three times finding multiple endings in one playthrough.

That's the best recommendation I can give Citizen Sleeper: it let me build a life I wanted to keep living. When I go, who'll harvest the mushrooms? Who'll feed that stray cat?

THE VERDICT
80

CITIZEN SLEEPER
An evocative life-sim RPG you won't want to wake up from.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/citizen-sleeper-review

Citizen Sleeper review: a stylish machine with a gooey human heart
Upspin girl, she's been living in her upspin world



Say hello to Feng. Feng is a zealous computers guy with less of an axe to grind and more of a guillotine to set up. He is not my favourite character in Citizen Sleeper but he is the one who best represents it. In one scene he explains his deep anti-capitalist reasoning to you. Systems should not govern people's behaviour, he says, the people are what matters.

Throwing off the shackles of a faceless process governing your life is a recurring theme in this blend of sci-fi RPG and interactive fiction, and it makes for a strong rags-to-ramen story of one robot on the run. Even when the game's own systems of dice and clocks clash with its stories of human interest, it is the people who come out on top.

Let's go over the basics. There are three starting classes. You can be a motor-kicking Machinist, a hardened mining Extractor, or an Operator who likes to hack the planet. Well, not planet. A space station. You arrive as a robotic refugee on Erlin's Eye, a rotating space station that has seen years of damage and disrepair. Huge chunks of its ring habitat are missing. As an asylum seeker you are here to make a new life of sorts, far from the corporate masters you've escaped from. Of course, the company has other plans. Imagine if the laser-cutting protagonist of Hardspace: Shipbreaker did a runner to another solar system while still in tremendous debt, and ended up making friends with a bunch of visual novel characters.

Citizen Sleeper isn't really a visual novel, but it borrows from that template as much as it does the RPG. Or maybe it could be called "turn-based storytelling". That means meters. You've got a health bar showing your deteriorating condition (the corp who built you did it with planned obsolescence in mind). You've got some dice to roll that determine the outcome of certain events (if you're in bad shape you get fewer dice). And you've got an energy meter to keep up, lest you starve. In this universe, even robots need noodles.

You spend each day (or "cycle") bouncing around a pretty 3D map of the station, doing jobs, meeting folks, and trading "chits" for the robo-insulin you need to stay alive. The dice limit how much you can do in a day, while little clocks count down all around, showing you other possibilities. How many cycles until a scrap ship will dock, or the countdown to the day on which that dirtbag bounty hunter expects another backhander for not turning you in.

New places to visit are unlocked by spending time (and dice) in hub zones. People-watching in the Rotunda might unlock a new bar where you can buy cheap rations. Working a few shifts hauling crates in the shipyard will open up the dock's assembly line where a better job awaits, alongside some new friends. The map expands, cycle by cycle, turn by turn, adding more and more choices, more places to spend your time.

Spoiler

There's also a cyberworld into which you can dip, where dice function in a slightly different way. Here, you match dice to various nodes to unlock keys or encrypted data. It's a clean and straightforward way of letting the player use up the low-numbered dice they might be afraid to spend on a risky action in the real world. This monochrome networld is also the place you encounter the Hunter, a creepy police cyberbeing with tentacles for heads and a doglike body. The Hunter periodically shows up to interrupt your hacking and mark you for deletion. He's a good boy. A good, terrifying boy.

Which brings me to the look and style of the game, which is as cool as a box of cool tools. The character art is detailed and vibrant, often bathed in the hues of some off-screen atmospheric light. The UI is a pretty sci-fi affair, all hard-edged fonts, minimalist colour-coding and circuit board angles. Fans of Alien Isolation's crunchy UI and geometric symbols will appreciate the effort. It looks great, except in moments where the background model of the space station shines brightly behind some yellow or white text, making it hard to read certain labels or descriptions. But you can just spin your view around, so it never feels truly obscured.

I've spoken mostly about the way it functions, rather than the people you'll meet, because I don't want to spoil your first jaunt through the ring's alleys. The space station is overwhelmingly host to gentle folks, sympathetic faces. With the exception of a few antagonistic scumbags, the humans of the Eye are mostly kind, even if their complexities sometimes suggest darker secrets. The future here is not a utopian ideal but plenty still fight for one. People are not cruel, but circumstances often are. It's a part-tragic and part-hopeful place.

It reminds me of Lancer, a pen and paper RPG where conflict simmers even when Earth has figured out how to feed everyone. In Citizen Sleeper, the space station exists away from the megacorps who run amok in the galaxy. But inequality is a weed. Factions stew. Hardship is rife. This is not a classic dystopian land of cyberpunk corpo-values, nor a Star Trek style universe with a menu of unusual global cultures. Instead, you get a kind of space ruin on the edge. A post-disaster Startopia where workers struggle on a daily basis, and hypercapitalist enterprises threaten to self-revive on the very station they once abandoned without a care. The Eye is a scrappy place, and not just because of the scrapyards.

Which could also be my polite way of saying there are bugs. There are a lot of typos too (at least in my press build) and characters will sometimes explain things you've already experienced as if they are news to you. Quests are multi-tiered and sometimes go on longer than feels necessary. For example, Feng, that vengeful man from IT, has a long quest of corpo-purging that I was following solely for ulterior motives (he said he'd remove a tracking bug from my cyberbod). Every time he explained an extra step in his plan, I wanted to write a third dialogue option over the screen that read: "I've done enough! Debug me already."


There are also moments of what I like to call "punching the reporter", a common pitfall in interactive fiction, where tersely described dialogue choices lead to unexpected results. During the outbreak of a riot, for example, I was talking to a workmate, trying to get his attention. One of my on-screen choices was to "leave alone", which I read as "don't speak to him anymore" (i.e. leave it alone, drop the subject, stop pestering). Of course, "leave alone" actually meant to physically leave the location, to leave this person by himself. As a result, I abandoned my friend to his fate in the ensuing unrest. Whoops. Whether this was an unfortunate subtlety of the English language or my own bad comprehension skills, it nevertheless spoiled a tense moment in one of the more heartfelt quests. (Did I mention I proofread games now? Hire me! I'm broke).

The game loses some heart in the odd times when no character events are firing and several cycles in a row pass without much colour. In this dry time you interact solely with the systems of push and pull underlying everything, levers of number-bumping and clock-tweaking. This is a weakness of systems-driven storytelling in general, the feeling that a story can be "gamed". There is often a point in works like this, when narrative is welded fast to numbers, where the story peels away and you end up pressing buttons speedily, ignoring the flavour text in menus because it is the system now telling the story, not the narrator.

Citizen Sleeper is not the worst offender for this, but it doesn't escape the trap completely. There were periods in which I zipped through cycles, feeling less impelled by the story of a self-driving personbot than by the grander machine underneath it all - the inventory swapping, the resource management, the clocks and meters that my borked human mind desires to see filled and blinking.

Luckily, it's easy to fill in cog-heavy blanks in the story when a game is this flavourful and atmospheric. (Quick shout out to the music. The character artist has drawn a studious lo-fi beats robot and you can probably summon an accurate idea of the game's music from this image alone). Some of my favourite interactive fiction drops you into a world without over-explaining it (see With Those We Love Alive; see Horse Master, and then never unsee). Don't get me wrong, Citizen Sleeper isn't as esoteric as a superpink Porpentine potboiler, but it isn't as straight-talking as Neo Cab or The Yawhg either. Its closest comparison in tone might be the minimal transhumanist tour of the solar system in Sun Dogs.

If you recognise and enjoy any of the choice buffets I've just listed, you'll probably like Citizen Sleeper. It has the feeling of playing through a Lancer sidestory without any of the convoluted hex-tile mech rules that make that tabletop RPG daunting for anyone who yearns for rules-lite role playing. Not bad for a game that was at least partially conceived to dull the pain of having sea urchin spines removed from the lead developer's foot.


I don't know how it holds up on a second playthrough, but I'm eager to find out. There was an entire farming community called the Greenway which I never even entered, a wasteland of scrap I never had the stats to explore, and a bunch of wiry characters whose storylines I did not delve into beyond a first meeting. I consciously left these areas aside, like reservedly eating only half your bag of sweets in the cinema, so you can have cola bottles for breakfast tomorrow.

Towards the end of my playthrough (probably eight hours) it became clear I was about to embark on a long overstars journey. The flavour of the world was enough to make me spend my last cycles working to save up a bag full of chit-monies and a stash of robodrugs. I did this even though I knew the ending sequence would roll as soon as I left for realms unknown. Mechanically, I could have slept for my last five turns. Or investigated a few characters I'd left waiting. Instead, I pushed buttons and pulled levers to get items I knew I would never use, that I would neither drag nor drop, purely out of a desire to not break character, to have my last few cycles fit the story I was building.

The fact I was invested enough to do this says everything about how attached I became to the denizens of this crumbling station, how invested I became in my role. It is not a perfect game but it has enough player freedom and likeable characters to earn my commitment to the bit. Which is the exact strength of a good tabletop RPG. Ultimately, it's not the machinery of Citizen Sleeper I'll remember, not the ticking clocks and the rerolls, but the hackers and the mercs, the drunks and the shipyard workers. Because like Feng once said: systems aren't important, people are.

 

[Urthor]

I've never been so interested in a game because of the ASMR trailer.

Will play I think.

 

[Absinthe]

This guy is pretentious: https://www.pcgamesn.com/citizen-sleeper/cyberpunk-2077-feels-dated

That doesn't strike me as pretentious really. He's right that a lot of cyberpunk is shallow as shit superficial aesthetic crap, like a coat of paint you just slap on some urban setting. And it's usually the same shit too.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

This guy is pretentious: https://www.pcgamesn.com/citizen-sleeper/cyberpunk-2077-feels-dated

That doesn't strike me as pretentious really. He's right that a lot of cyberpunk is shallow as shit superficial aesthetic crap, like a coat of paint you just slap on some urban setting. And it's usually the same shit too.

cyberpunk is a libtard power fantasy genre, what were you expecting?
the entire basis for it is being a strawman for libtards to beat up.

to further hammer the point home, look at how even the most minor cyberpunk games get reviews from major outlets -- because they're ran by libtards who religiously jerk off to this kind of shit

 

[Absinthe]

Just because retards do retarded things with cyberpunk doesn't mean cyberpunk itself is a retarded genre. By that logic science fiction is total trash too.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Just because retards do retarded things with cyberpunk doesn't mean cyberpunk itself is a retarded genre. By that logic science fiction is total trash too.

It's the entire basis of the genre.

They're total wankers and losers who indulge in Messianic fantasies about someday getting even with the world through almost-magical computer skills, but whose actual use of the Net amounts to dialing up the scatophilia forum and downloading a few disgusting pictures. You know, cyberpunks.

 

[Absinthe]

It's not. That's just what happens when cyberpunk gets turned into some kind of mary sue power fantasy trash, but damn near any genre can get that treatment. That quote is just shitting on people making really shitty stories and calling it cyberpunk, which was a consequence of cyberpunk getting very popular and thus being flooded with shit.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's not. That's just what happens when cyberpunk gets turned into some kind of mary sue power fantasy trash, but damn near any genre can get that treatment. That quote is just shitting on people making really shitty stories and calling it cyberpunk, which was a consequence of cyberpunk getting very popular and thus being flooded with shit.

That quote is the guy who coined the word 'cyberpunk' shitting on people who like the genre.
Not my fault you like a libtard power fantasy genre.

 

[Grauken]

That quote is the guy who coined the word 'cyberpunk' shitting on people who like the genre.

Apart from coining the term Bethke's influence on cyberpunk was completely irrelevant. Would make more sense to dig up some quotes from Gibson or Sterling if you want to make a point.

That said, Citizen Sleeper isn't cyberpunk, its transhumanist science fiction

 

[rusty_shackleford]

That quote is the guy who coined the word 'cyberpunk' shitting on people who like the genre.

Apart from coining the term Bethke's influence on cyberpunk was completely irrelevant. Would make more sense to dig up some quotes from Gibson or Sterling if you want to make a point.

That said, Citizen Sleeper isn't cyberpunk, its transhumanist science fiction

reminder that book won multiple awards by libtards who thought it was genius not realizing he was making fun of them(you)

 

[Grauken]

I never read Bethke, he wasn't and isn't really all that relevant to cyberpunk. Like I said, Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan and others had a much bigger influence

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I never read Bethke, he wasn't and isn't really all that relevant to cyberpunk. Like I said, Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan and others had a much bigger influence

Bunch of limpwristed libtards writing limpwristed libtard powerfantasies.

The reason there's no good cyberpunk games is because it's a shit genre.

 

[Grauken]

libtard powerfantasies

That would be Star Trek, cyberpunk would be a lolbertarian powerfantasy

 

[rusty_shackleford]

libtard powerfantasies

That would be Star Trek, cyberpunk would be a lolbertarian powerfantasy

Might want to doublecheck that
libtard sci-fi: I will get back at everyone!!!
lolbertarian sci-fi: LEAVE ME ALONE!!!

 

[Grauken]

I see its pointless to discuss science fiction with somebody as clueless as you

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I see its pointless to discuss science fiction with somebody as clueless as you

"n-n-no ur wrong!!!"
typical butthurt libtard reply when they get called out for creating nothing but garbage as per usual

 

[Absinthe]

Transhumanism and cyberpunk have often been at odds with each other. Transhumanism is about how technology will uplift mankind. Cyberpunk is about how it will fail to do so and will lend itself to new dystopias.