In one moment, you’re reading about a riot of exploited spaceship engineers, while another passage will capture the immaterial sensations of being caught up in a wave of pure data. Cyberpunk literature can often feel more playfully disorienting than plainly descriptive when describing aspects of its worlds, and Martin’s writing manages an appropriate balance throughout the game.
Fortunately, the evocative cyberpunk prose manages to pull the player right into its world and quest scenarios. The player engages in plentiful, lengthy conversations with single NPCs-represented as beautifully drawn still images-while the story’s events are told in text rather than shown.
“Roleplaying in the Ruins of Interplanetary Capitalism”įrom just looking at certain screenshots, it would be easy to mistake Citizen Sleeper for a visual novel. This nuanced avatar characterization colors most of the game’s storylines and interactions.Ĭharacter building is simple, but each skill cleverly reflects the actions your Sleeper can take. Sleepers are thus neither quite human nor machine, navigating an awkward and uncertain liminal position between the two types of being. The Sleeper has only flickers of memory of their past life and is generally regarded as a non-human other by the different human and data-comprised NPCs you encounter throughout the game. You play as a “Sleeper,” a corporate-owned body running a digitized emulation of a person’s mind after your previous self signed away their autonomy and humanity. Despite being similarly text-driven, it feels much breezier to play yet still maintains a satisfying sense of personal roleplaying and narrative weight.Ĭitizen Sleeper is authentic, original cyberpunk fiction in a compellingly interactive videogame form. But while peeling back Disco Elysium reveals layers upon layers of discoverable interactions, locations, and dialogue variations that most players will probably never see, Citizen Sleeper is much more modest and streamlined in its approach. It’s hard not to compare the two games in terms of their thoughtful incorporation of character-building systems, explicitly political narrative themes, and adamant lack of combat as a core player mechanic. Building off the legacy of games like Disco Elysium, it plays like a single-player, digitized tabletop RPG. Citizen Sleeper is the second game from indie studio Jump Over the Age, which is (for the most part) a one-person show run by designer/writer/developer Gareth Damian Martin. Now, it’s recently finished a run of three free DLC episodes that expand on the core game in a narratively interesting and fulfilling way. Citizen Sleeper was one of last year’s most memorable sleeper hits.
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