Citizen Sleeper Review: Under Pressure

Citizen Sleeper works very hard to ensure that it remains a story of perseverance rather than failure.

Citizen Sleeper
Photo: Fellow Traveller

Jump Over the Age’s Citizen Sleeper has you assume the role of a person who, as a Sleeper, has no rights. Except, legally, you’re not a person so much as a copy of one: a digital human whose corporate-owned consciousness has been jammed into an artificial shell. Sentience is what makes a Sleeper an efficient worker, but that very sentience is also what drives your character to escape the corporation that birthed you, the ruthless Essen-Arp.

After choosing one of three classes (Machinist, Extractor, or Operator), Citizen Sleeper finds your Sleeper on Erlin’s Eye, a space station with a long history of corporate malfeasance and rebellion. That the place is remote is convenient since your makers contract bounty hunters to fetch renegade company property like yourself. And if they can’t get you back, they’ve built in a nasty little fail-safe: A Sleeper’s body decays quickly without a proprietary serum, which is only available under Essen-Arp’s employ or, if you’re lucky, on the black market.

Life in Citizen Sleeper is thus a game of resource and time management. Health ticks down alongside hunger, which makes health tick down faster when empty. Each day, you roll a set of dice to spend on actions around the Eye, with positive or negative outcomes determined by the number on the die, which is further boosted or subtracted according to your current skills.

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Many of these tasks are menial, a way to earn cash or keep yourself fed; one especially useful one is a food assembly line, where screwing up still gets you a meal (albeit less filling and with docked pay). Other actions, though, are risky and plot-critical, the kind you won’t want to attempt without a high dice roll. It’s an elegant system realized through a clean, economical interface, conveying the tension of hanging by a thread in an unforgiving environment.

Can you afford to wait a little longer to pay an unsavory character’s protection money? Is it worth spending one die on working for a meal so that you don’t have to dip into the limited funds that you’re saving for something else, or is it better to skip food altogether with the hopes of eking out the most progress toward a prospective reward? These decisions flavor what’s essentially a richly imagined visual novel, illustrated by some gorgeous character art and a 3D overhead view of the Eye that doubles as your navigation screen.

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Though Citizen Sleeper isn’t quite as open-ended as it initially seems, there are plenty of moment-to-moment decisions to be made. Gareth Damian Martin, the one-person developer behind Jump Over the Edge, guides you along the broader story path while leaving enough blanks unfilled so that you can imagine your own motivations. The results and rewards aren’t always clear or straightforward, so you’ll end up going in unexpected directions, learning about new options simply by experimenting with new actions and exploring new places.

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At one point, you might prioritize working for an intimidating character because she seems like a viable source of protection. At another, you might grow weary of someone who promised to remove your tracking device but keeps finding new objectives for you to accomplish before he does so. Citizen Sleeper is evocative in its etching of such trade-offs, leaving you acutely aware of your own vulnerability and your dependence on others.

But like a lot of games about hard choices, Citizen Sleeper doesn’t work as well when the pressure flags. If you achieve a certain level of comfort and certainty, it trivializes some of the questlines into simple waiting games. Similar to Martin’s previous game, In Other Waters, the apparently disconnected nature of the space station dovetails into a very tidy series of connections. Though you make a class choice at the start of it, Citizen Sleeper largely accommodates your attempts to see, experiment with, and upgrade just about everything, tying most of the loose ends into bows. As a result, Erlin’s Eye seems like more and more of a clockwork diorama as the game goes on, undercutting the initially vivid sense of a large world that feels so much more authentically dispassionate toward your presence.

On some level, the way that your struggles subside over time is consistent with the game’s overriding optimism. The story and the setting may be cut from a plainly dystopian cloth, but Citizen Sleeper works very hard to ensure that it remains a story of perseverance rather than failure. If there is a “game over” state at all, it can only be reached by actively trying to lose.

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Most of the characters in a position to take advantage of you eventually come around, revealing sympathetic motivations or genuine desires to make amends. The villains are exposed as neatly tied to corporations, and the predominant mindset among the downtrodden is one of solidarity as the workers elevate you into a position as a pivotal figure on the Eye. Certainly it’s a nice thought, but the way that Citizen Sleeper breaks down the mystery of your initial hardship may just be what marks the difference between a great game and a good one.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by Fellow Traveller.

Score: 
 Developer: Jump Over the Age  Publisher: Fellow Traveller  Platform: Xbox Series X  Release Date: May 4, 2022  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence, Language, Use of Alcohol  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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