Navigating a vast abandoned space station as a controllable character would be too much for the Unity engine to handle, let alone for any game developer. The lack of a controllable player avatar might be a complaint for some people, but it actually makes sense for Citizen Sleeper.
Despite being set in the blackness of space, the game’s aesthetic is easy on the eyes thanks to the smattering of cool blues, yellows, and pinks on its color palette. It goes without saying that the character designs look great, and pair well with the cel-shaded look of the Eye’s 3D model. The graphics are above-average for a game using the Unity engine, and it’s smartly presented. A typical cycle in the world of Citizen Sleeper goes like this: get your dice, pursue one of your Drives, gather resources, discover unexplored areas, spend all of your dice on required Skill checks, make sure your Condition and Energy are high before you sleep, and end your cycle. Your Condition, by the way, drains faster whenever you have low Energy. Fewer dice are rolled for you every cycle for each time your Condition drops a stage. Not only will you have to get a job, but you’d also need to find a way to stay alive by properly managing your Condition and Energy. You are then thrust into the game’s unskippable tutorial, which would make you realize that your Sleeper’s artificial body is built to die through planned obsolescence. Whichever archetype you choose depends on how you would prefer to approach the world during the early parts of the game. Each of these archetypes has one Skill that’s already upgraded, and another one that’s downgraded. At the start of the game, you’re given the option to choose between three archetypes: the Machinist, the Operator, and the Extractor. You have five Skills: Engineer, Interface, Endure, Intuit, and Engage. Every game day (called a “cycle”), the game pre-rolls a number of six-sided dice for you, which you could then spend on Skill checks in order to interact with the world in pursuit of your goals (or “Drives” as the game calls them).
It’s inevitable for the two to be compared as their similarities extend beyond the base premise.Ĭitizen Sleeper plays like a dice-based tabletop RPG. They both feature an amnesiac protagonist with a deteriorating body, both set in a town with political problems, and both have roots in tabletop RPG mechanics. If all this sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve probably played a very similar well-known game that seems like a larger-scale version of this one: Disco Elysium. This is the kind of world that your Sleeper needs to navigate in order to survive. This anarchic space town is populated with blue-collar workers, small-time businessmen, and mercenaries alike, each with their own personal or idealistic goal. You are in Erlin’s Eye, an abandoned space station that is now the home of several factions and alliances seeking freedom from corporate evil. Having escaped from an evil organization that created your kind and with very little resources on your person, you find yourself stranded on a massive space station with several factions and citizens trying to either survive everyday… or escape forever. In Citizen Sleeper, you play as the titular Sleeper, a digital consciousness residing inside an artificial humanoid body that’s slowly dying. NOTE: This game was played and reviewed by Adam Cartel
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