Citizen Sleeper Offers Hope In the Midst of a Capitalist Space Hellscape
I’ve had a bad case of the post-Elden Ring blues lately. After 130 hours of non-stop FromSoft adventure, I was struggling to find another game that compelled me enough to do more than pick it up for an hour or two before sighing and putting it back down again. Then I played Citizen Sleeper, and ravenously devoured the entire thing in two days.
Citizen Sleeper scratches the parts of my brain that loved Disco Elysium, but it’s both shorter and (despite its dystopia premise) gentler overall. You play as a Sleeper, an artificial vessel created by a mega corporation to work off a debt for a human being. While the human lies frozen in stasis somewhere else in the universe, their consciousness was transplanted into the Sleeper and forced to do awful manual labor under grim conditions. But that life massively sucked, so the Sleeper fled, arriving on a space station called the Eye in hopes of building a life of their own.
Though not fully tabletop in the way, say, Divinity: Original Sin or Disco Elysium are, Citizen Sleeper embraces the spirit of dice-drizen storytelling in a simplified, accessible way. At the start of each day (or “cycle”) you’ll be given a number of six-sided dice based on how much energy your Sleeper has, which are rolled automatically and can then be allocated to take actions of your choice around the space station. These actions result in rewards or penalties depending on their outcomes, so there’s a level of strategy involved in choosing to spend higher-valued dice on riskier or more important actions, while throwing away weaker roles on trivial tasks. There are character classes and a stat tree that impact all this, but it’s all introduced slowly and gently, giving you time to get used to what activities are
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