Citizen Sleeper

You have good days and bad days. In advance, it’s hard to know which is going to be which. While the likelihood of a bad day can be mitigated – by eating well, by taking the right medicine – even that isn’t a guarantee. These help to set the ceiling higher, but the floor is still the floor. Some mornings you’re faced with a bad roll of the dice, and have to accept that not much is going to get achieved today. Which is a problem, when you rely on work to pay for that food and medicine. Try to push on, though, and failure can push you deeper into a spiral, draining the energy you have left and ensuring tomorrow will be harder still.

So, yes: Citizen Sleeper might be set in the Helion system, but its greatest strength has always been knowing how to hit considerably closer to home. That’s just as true of its trilogy of DLC episodes, which introduce to Erlin’s Eye (the space station you’ve learned to call home) a flotilla of refugees from the ruined moons of a distant planet, kept at arm’s length for processing while the Eye’s authorities decide their fate. As we begin the final chapter, Purge, the UK government is boasting about its latest cruelties towards immigrants. It’s not hard to imagine where Gareth Damian Martin – the game’s solo designer and writer, and a fellow Brit – gets their crazy ideas from.

But it would do this story a disservice to suggest it’s simply ripped from the headlines. Things are more nuanced than that, rooted in the authentic, messy humanity that Citizen Sleeper has always done so well. These refugees aren’t a huddled mass. They come from three distinct cultures, all rubbing up against one another, and the representatives that you meet from each are sharply drawn individuals, frequently selfish, rude, ungrateful. Of course, they needn’t play the role of ‘the good immigrant’ to deserve your help, even if you have to earn their trust before they’ll take it. There might be a reward for doing so – after spending a good roll on a repair crew shift, they take a liking to you and share a homebrewed spirit that lends much-needed inner warmth – but once more, there’s no guarantee.

The plot of these episodes is the closest Citizen Sleeper comes to a classic hero narrative: worldthreatening stakes, with you in the saviour role, and a big decision to round it all off. It’s the logical conclusion of the game’s overall narrative arc, where you go from finding your feet to being in a position where you can do the same for others. Finding a way to not only survive but contribute, even on your bad days, not knowing if you’ll get anything back – now that’s something to aspire to. ■