Citizen Sleeper
Adapt to life on Erlin’s Eye but don’t let your planned obsolescence come to pass
Citizen Sleeper is a rare gem, a video game that is built on tabletop RPG systems but without feeling clunky or unfair or swingy. In it, you are a Sleeper; a sort of low-budget android, emulating a personality but without the memories of the person being emulated, and with the ever-hanging sword of Damocles of your planned obsolescence.
Every day you roll a certain number of dice, and this dictates how many things you can do per day and how well you can do them. This is extremely resonant for me and for a while after playing this game I thought of my worst days, the days where getting out of bed or being civil to other people seemed like distant possibilities, as “low dice days”. I can’t bear to do the washing up? It takes two dice and I only got to roll three this morning and spent them going to a seminar. Similar to the spoon theory of disability and energy management, but more attuned to my nerd proclivities.
Despite the extremely unfamiliar setting of Erlin’s Eye, a decrepit, factional space station, there is a lot in Citizen Sleeper that is easy to relate to as someone living through late-stage capitalism. The overwhelming sense of things just won’t stop. Every cycle (a day, to us non-space-station denizens) you need to earn some money and spend it and some precious time on sustaining yourself. Every cycle there is a plurality of people who cross into your life, perhaps for just that encounter but perhaps for the rest of your time on The Eye.
The characters of the game feel distinct and real, represented by gorgeous and evocative images. I became friends with the man in the noodle shop and ingratiated myself with a group of isolated druid-types. I stopped sleeping in the empty shipping container that had served as home and moved into the druid’s shared, socialist hab. I helped a bar owner begin brewing her own beer, and a single dad provide a better future for his daughter, who I babysat when the need arose.
The Eye’s factions varied greatly. From traditional mercenary gangs to socialist druids, they have interesting stories and distinct motivations. In the Druid commune I ended up at, everyone was welcome as long as they contributed to the success of the group, which I did with gratitude, not enquiring as to the fate of anyone who could no longer pull their shifts in the mushroom fields. The amount of replayability in the game is astounding. There are factions and quest lines I hardly brushed up against that surely promise the same depth and intrigue as the ones I dived into more fully.
If pressed, I would say that the message I got from Citizen Sleeper is that kindness and generosity will prevail in the end. The most satisfying outcomes were the ones where I had sacrificed to aid others, and where they had done likewise for me. I suspect there is plenty of space in the game’s myriad quests for other players and other people to get a different message. Such is the joy of human experience – we are varied and bring our own lives and histories and personalities into all that we do, and that shapes and changes what we come out of each ordeal. Citizen Sleeper manages to capture this like lightning in a bottle.
In case it wasn’t clear, I really liked this game. I enjoyed the gameplay, liked the characters, and loved the story, particularly the details that emerged as I dived deeper into each specific arm of the plot. It feels both pertinent now, in 2024, and prescient - a glimpse into the world ahead. Even if we don’t ever invent sleepers and space stations and cryosleep, we will continue to nurture kindness and form relationships and engage in society. We will be selfish and selfless in different measures on different days. We will have the energy to organise some days and just enough to feed ourselves on others. Humans will be many and varied - as it was, so it shall be.
It’s not an unknown game by any means, but I truly believe that Citizen Sleeper deserves a larger audience than it got. There’s a sequel coming out (date as yet unannounced) and I am very much looking forward to seeing what they do next with this unique world. It’s a funny situation, they have so much scope to delight me, but likewise so much space for disappointment. I hope they commit to the message I found in the game, of kindness and generosity and humanity and community.
Game: Citizen Sleeper
Developer: Jump Over the Age
Publisher: Fellow Traveller
Platforms: PC
Absolutely loved this game and can't wait for the sequel! You are great at putting my own feelings on a game into actual words.
Interesting article, thanks.