Game Review: Citizen Sleeper

[dorchadas]

This is one of those indie games I saw people raving over for months. On a Cataclysm community discord I'm on, basically every single time anyone even mentions it people talk about how great it is. I remember aaron.hosek talking it up too in the bros game chat I'm part of, and when I saw it was for sale at 50% off as part of the Steam Autumn Sale, I bought it with the idea that I would play it as my final game for my twelve games in twelve months series, and that's what I did.

Not without some trepidation, since I have a bit of a rocky history with visual novels. Friends recommended 2064: Read Only Memories to me and I hated it because it only offered the illusion of choice and the further I went in, the deeper the cracks were. On the other hand, I absolutely loved Night in the Woods because it had a branching narrative and actually committed to letting you decide what to do. Which way would Citizen Sleeper fall?

Welcome to the Eye, Sleeper.

You are a Sleeper, and you are not real.

Legally, anyway.

The premise of Citizen Sleeper is that fully sapient artificial intelligence is illegal--this doesn't really make sense given the details we get about the setting, but it's necessary for the plot to work so we'll go along with it--and the megacorporation Essen-Arp gets around this through a bit of legal chicanery. A person who needs money signs up to work as a Sleeper for a certain period of time, and then they're put into cryogenic sleep (hence the name). While asleep, their mind is copied and downloaded into a robot body that performs whatever tasks Essen-Arp requires. Sleepers have basically no rights since they're not considered to be people, but thanks to the emulation and the original being in cryogenic sleep Essen-Arp can successfully argue in court that Sleepers are not full AIs either and thus their operation is legal.

Is this true? No, it's obviously nonsense if you think about it for even a moment. Once experiences start to diverge too much, a copied mind starts to attain its own identity, and since Essen-Arp surgically removes huge chunks of the Sleeper's memory to avoid the Sleeper being distracted while working, experiences diverge basically from the instantiation of the Sleeper. But the point of all this is not to ask question about whether Sleepers are a real boy are not, the point is to ask "What now?"

When the game begins, you've escaped your work assignment, stowing away on a ship that takes you to the Eye, a space station once controlled by the now-bankrupt megacorporation Solheim and now run by an ascended workers' cooperative. Your body slowly decaying without the drugs that Essen-Arp uses to keep Sleepers on a tight leash, you have to find work, find a home, and otherwise decide what you want to do with your newfound life. Within limits, of course--this is still a visual novel--but the reason I say "What now?" is the point and one of the reasons why I liked the game so much is that it never becomes a question about whether you should find that person in cryosleep and reunite with them, or tell them what happened while they were asleep, or anything. You don't even get to pick a name at the beginning of the game, and everyone just calls you "Sleeper," but the reason for this is that name would be easy to tie back to that sleeping original, but they don't have any connection to you at all anymore. It'd be easy for the player to say "Oh, John Smith, that's the original and I'm the copy" but you aren't a copy any more than a child is a copy of their parents. You're the Sleeper, and that's what matters.

The place where everyone knows your namecorporate designation.

As with a lot of visual novels, you spend most of your time in Citizen Sleeper following various people's story paths. Pictured above is Tala, who runs the Overlook bar where spacers come to drink some mushroom beer and let off steam. There's Sabine the doctor who works for the yakuzalocal gang/legitimate businessmen's association; Riko, a botanist in the Greenway where fungus and plants have taken over a large portion of the station, Ankhita the starship captain who's crew all took on better assignments when her ship had its shipmind core removed; Bliss the mechanic, trying to make it big as the go-to for ships who dock at the Eye; Feng the engineer who works for the Havenage, the organization that runs the Eye; Lem and Mina, a father trying to provide for his adopted daughter; to stranger things like the Gardener and NEOVEND. Whether you connect with these characters really determines what you'll think about the game.

For me, it worked. Especially Lem and Mina, for the most basic of reasons--that Lem is a father trying to do whatever he can to give his child a better life. I also have a little girl that we led through extreme peril--Lem pulled Mina out of a sealed weapons' locker on a depressurized ship, we caught Laila's infantile spasms in time to prevent them from causing permanent brain damage--and that I'm doing everything I can to give a good life to. Mina has a stuffed animal she calls "bun-bun," Laila has a stuffed animal she calls "bunny." Both of them are going through a phase where they're wary of strangers. This was tailor-made for me to latch on to and try to see through to the end, and I did.

There's not a lot of choice to be made, at least as far as I can tell. While you have dialogue options throughout the game, there were define points where I could tell that the follow-up option was written so that every single choice I made would have led to it. One thing I did really appreciate, though, was how often the dialogue option "Say Nothing" was available. When the Sleeper was taunted for not being real, or for was insulted, or when someone tried to pry too deeply into their inner thoughts, I generally just shut up and let the silent sit, and there were a few interactions later where I felt like that was the best possible choice. Just two drifters, sitting in silence, watching the stars whirl and spin and, for a moment, being at peace.

All of that together means that the Sleeper is a total blank slate at the beginning of the game, which made it very easy for me to identify with them. My biggest problem with 2064: ROM was that even though you're given customization options including dietary preferences at the beginning, none of it ends up mattering in the story and your choices are aggressively ignored. With Citizen Sleeper, the entire point is that the Sleeper is a copy of someone but with almost no memories, so it was easy for me to imagine that they were a copy of, say, someone like me, and that meant I could make the kind of choices that I would make without feeling a disconnect with the character.

Did that person out there sign up for time as a sleeper because they also had a little girl they had to provide for and that's why the Sleeper latched so hard on to Mina? Was there some bit of memory in there that Essen-Arp couldn't entirely purge? Maybe there was--I like to think so, anyway.

While some character's stories conclude with a nice epilogue and then allow you to move on, some of them lead to an ending, generally because you're leaving the Eye to ship off to some other system. I was offered this multiple times in various endings and I always turned it down, and the reason lies right in the name of the game. Citizen Sleeper. A citizen is someone who belongs, someone who is a member of the society they live in, and after all the work on the Eye that I had done, that's how I felt. I had my home I had made out of an abandoned shipping container. I had the bar where I picked up work, I had friends that I could go talk to, and I had escaped Essen-Arp's hunters. Why would I sign on with another corporation, or launch myself into the black with an uncertain future ahead when I had the future I made with my own hands right here?

And you stand together like that for a while, until the bright lights of the Sidereal Horizon's drives have faded into the dark, and it is time to go home.

I do love the ship names. Very Revelation Space-esque.

So the story is amazing, and the game systems made me think that this should have been an actual novel.

If you play tabletop RPGs that aren't D&D you might have heard of indie darling Blades in the Dark and the Forged in the Dark system. I played through a Scum and Villainy game, a derivative designed for the disreputable crews of patched-together starships, run by thosesocks a few years back. Citizen Sleeper is heavily inspired by the mechanics of Blades in the Dark, especially clocks. You can see three of them above, the circles with yellow or red bars on them. Yellow bars means it's a step clock, where you have to take actions to progress it. Red bars means it's a cycle clock, where at the end of every cycle it advances by one on its own. You receive a limited number of actions per cycle dictated by your body's condition, visible at the top of the screen. Below the dice that determine your actions' chance of success is your hunger bar, which you also have to manage--too low and you'll lose extra condition at the end of every day.

There are also five skills that range from +0 to +2--Engineer, Interface, Endure, Intuit, and Engage. In between each plus rating is a perk that you can take. The first Engineer perk, Efficient Extractor, gives you a chance to gain scrap on Engineer actions, and the second Intuit perk, Instant Karma, let you reroll all your dice once per cycle. And the inclusion of this perk is one of the reasons I don't like the mechanical parts of the game because it breaks everything.

The themes of Citizen Sleeper are hardscrabble survival at the edge of civilization, where you either prey on others or (hopefully) cooperate with them. The beginning of the game, all the mechanics fit this perfectly. You'll always be short of money or food, and have to use some of your actions just to live. When your condition meter goes down and you lose dice, you'll feel the effects. When you get your first dose of stabilizer and see your action count rocket up to five, you'll feel like you can take on the world, but then the next cycle your condition goes down by one, and then down by one, and you realize that despite your robot body you're still on the treadmill. And on top of that, some cycles you'll roll three 1s, a 2, and a 3, and your odds of actually getting anything useful out of your actions are minuscule.

And after about an hour of gameplay you unlock one of the game-breaking perks and it all falls apart.

The superior being.

It doesn't help that you can get nearly every single perk by the end, of course. But really once you get Instant Karma, the whole "you need to make hard choices about how to spend your dice" aspect is mostly gone. While there's often cycle clocks ticking somewhere, they only tick when you end a cycle, not when you spend an action, so you can use your high-pip dice first, reroll everything, and then hopefully get more high-pip dice to keep going. And the second Engineer perk, Self-Repair, throws the entire condition system out the window because as long as you use one of your actions per day to get one scrap metal, an easy task, then you have infinite condition and don't have to worry about ever scrabbling to get more stabilizer.

Not that you'll have to worry about that anyway, because you get several vials for free.

Maybe this is intended--that it at first seems like it's going to be a brutal existence on the very edge of constantly falling apart, but once you make friends life is so much easier than it is alone--but there's a lot of game you play through with mechanics that don't matter if that's the case. And what's more, there's no way to automate any actions or fast-forward through any time, so near the end when I was just waiting for clocks to wind down it was always forage for scrap and use it to repair my condition, work cooking noodles for money and food both, and every cycle I got a little further ahead from the place I had been before. When most of the characters who didn't work for Havenage were just scraping by, it was odd to get into a loop where I was making money hand over fist and had no need to do anything desperate to survive. No wonder Essen-Arp uses Sleepers if they're so good at working.

So that's my dilemma. I'm not sure I can actually recommend that you play Citizen Sleeper, because I don't think it's a very well-designed game. But just watching it won't give you the proper experience either, because you won't have the connection with the Sleeper that was a vital part of my play experience and you won't be able to make your own decisions at any of the important decision points. And early on, the gameplay did an excellent job of reinforcing the themes, it just almost immediately fell off the wheels once I completed a few drives. The language is amazing and I would love to read a novel, but it's delivered in paragraphs you see one at a time and it's obviously written for that format, so I'm not sure it would work if it's all on the page at once. Though imperfect, this may be the best way to experience the story.

With my skills at that level, I won't need to.

Do I agree with the hype? Somewhat. I'm happy I played it but I have no plans to play it again. It's not just all the downtime I encountered with the systems, it's also that I already made all my choices and to go through again would feel far too much like gamifying everything and ignoring the story I told. A lot of visual novels require playing through multiple times to get the entire story and as such have a fast-forward function so you can quickly get back to where you made some decision and pick a different fork. Citizen Sleeper doesn't have fast forward, but as far as I know it doesn't have forking points either. I'm happy with the story of the Sleeper as it was told to me.

But in further news, Citizen Sleeper 2 is coming out soon and the description of the gameplay loop--run a ship, hire a crew, take on jobs across an asteroid belt--makes me think that there will be a much greater opportunity to bring the hardscrabble survival themes to the fore. In Citizen Sleeper, you're not in charge of anything, but in the Havenage you see what happens when the rebels become the authority and how any responsibility means that difficult decisions have to be made. If you're a starship captain, you'll have to make difficult decisions every day.

See you out in the black, Sleeper.