Citizen Sleeper’s first DLC recontextualizes the RPG’s tough decisions

polygon.com:

If you loved Citizen Sleeper, the text-heavy sci-fi RPG, then the game’s new free DLC, Episode One: Flux, will be a welcome addition; it adds tough new story decisions while also deepening the well of wonderful world-building and vivid characters. But it’s also a great excuse to start this melancholic game for the first time — it left an impression on me and is still one of the best releases of the year.

In Citizen Sleeper, you role-play as a Sleeper, a character who’s not quite human and not quite machine, but entirely owned by the megacorp Essen-Arp. Your body is designed with “planned obsolescence,” and you must take a proprietary kind of medicine to stay alive. The game unfolds across Erlin’s Eye, a ramshackle space station that’s the victim of late-late-stage capitalism. The station has been abandoned, and a number of the remaining people on it have organized across political factions — others simply attempt to live another day or find a way out. Among these denizens, you build a life. You must take jobs and help out where you can, finding ways to afford your meds in order to fight another day.

The Flux update kicks off in the Greenway, a mid-to-late-game location less densely packed than the rest of the station, and an excellent spot to park new storylines. The DLC introduces a new variable: refugees living on a flotilla who seek a home on The Eye, but are trapped in limbo thanks to station bureaucracy. It’s a sharp addition that changed the way I approached my entire playthrough — far from feeling appended, Flux wove itself naturally into the existing tapestry of gameplay. In an unsettling paradigm shift, it forces you to think of influencing The Eye in a magnitude large enough to handle an influx of human life.