Citizen Sleeper Review: A Soulful Sci-Fi RPG

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All too often cyberpunk is a misunderstood genre, even by those who tell stories within it. Alongside the neon lights and noir-esque plots, many creators focus on fancy technology and visual excitement rather than the gritty, human impact of what a world like that could cause. That's certainly not the case with Citizen Sleeper, a narrative RPG from developer Jump Over The Age.

In Citizen Sleeper, the player is cast as a sleeper — an android who has been given a digitized human consciousness, and is now on the run from the Essen-Arp corporation that owns its existence. This sleeper ends up on Erlin’s Eye, a worn out space station on the edge of civilization, and must try to find a way to stay alive and keep their journey going. However, Essen-Arp want their property back, and it's only a matter of time before the corporation finds this escapee.

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Thematically, Citizen Sleeper is extremely strong, and understands cyberpunk better than most other games available. Essen-Arp is a stand-in for rampant, unrestricted capitalism, and the corporation essentially feels like the natural end point of Elon Musk’s Mars indentured servitude made real. People sign off their consciousness to Essen-Arp for cash due to limited life options, and then this consciousness is used as a slave by the corporation using sleeper bodies, in a horrifying betrayal of human rights using technology as its means to do so.

Citizen Sleeper goes deeper than this, though, looking at a dark picture of what the future may hold in the stars. The existential crisis of the sleepers, feeling human while being a copy of a copy, feels reminiscent of the philosophical questions of