CITIZEN SLEEPER
Using dice to escape Deckard in this cyberpunk RPG.
$28.95 | PC, XB1/S/X, Mac, Switch | bit.ly/3x58PhC
Citizen Sleeper is like Blade Runner, but you’re the replicant on the run. A synthetic being who has escaped from the corporation that built you, you hide on a space station that’s become a rogue state – home to revolutionaries, refugees, and a pirate gang. While you’re worrying about whether you’ll be hunted down and dramatically shot in the back, you’re also worried about day-to-day survival.
The game is great at encouraging you to live a routine. Here I lived a day-to-day cycle that included sleeping, eating, working, and feeding a stray cat. Some of it was mechanically necessary, some was pure roleplay. Every morning you roll a pool of action dice, each of which can be spent on a task, like working a shift at the shipyard or exploring a new area of the station. The higher the number, the better you’ll do.
Citizen Sleeper is focused on ordinary people. Exploring the station introduces new characters, telling their stories with choice-and-consequence moments of interaction. Those stories unfold over time. The UI tells you how many cycles before their next chapter begins, so while waiting you go back to work at the bar or the farmstacks, and try not to fall apart. Thanks to planned obsolescence, your condition stat constantly decays. As it ticks down you get less dice. The stabiliser you need to refill your condition is expensive, and hard to source. You’re not made to last.
Additional pressure is provided by the hunters. The corporation or their freelancers will track you down eventually, and every hack you perform gives the bestial artificial intelligence that patrols cyberspace another whiff of your scent.
The game has multiple endings, and you can continue playing to find others. By the time I was done I had freed an AI from a vending machine, foiled a couple of corporate schemes to get toeholds on the station, and renovated a bar. I didn’t want to leave, and I hit the credits three times finding multiple endings in one playthrough.
An incredibly evocative life-sim RPG, and one that you won’t want to wake up from.
Jody Macgregor
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