These dice dictate everything – to do almost any action, you roll a dice. The worse your artificial body’s status, the worse dice you’re dealt at the start of each cycle. As a Sleeper, your body is constantly deteriorating, and it’s supposed to – the corporation that owns you built that drawback to keep you coming back to them because only they sell what you need to restore your health. The game unfolds over cycles aboard Erlin’s Eye, the circular space station I mentioned earlier. How could you do this to yourself? Why did you do this to yourself? Would you care about an artificial body with a copy of your conscious, seemingly lightyears away, or are you fine pawning off your mind for a quick buck? These are the questions Citizen Sleeper has racking around in my brain, and it’s what drives the narrative of this tabletop RPG-turned-video game. You contain the feelings and sensations of the human body and mind that gave you away. By design, you’re forced to despise the real you. Except you don’t know what a human should be you only have an idea about the experience. Instead, you’re a robot possessing memories that feel like yours, but you know aren't yours at all. Imagine waking up, cold and void of real life, just a shell of what you know a human to be. That escape scenario is fine, and it sets up the stakes of Citizen Sleeper quite well, but the idea that you are a copy of your real self, who sold you to work for a mega-corp, is a concept I can’t get out of my head. However, you’ve escaped, and now the suits want you back. The real you sold their consciousness to a mega-corporation (we’re talking a Blade Runner cyberpunk corporation here) so that they could use it, in an artificial body, to work for them. You are a Sleeper, a digitized consciousness implanted into an artificial body – basically a robot with someone else's mind. last night, and I grouchily put myself to bed, desperate to play more, because I’m a responsible adult sometimes. Instead of trying to sell you on all that right now, let me tell you the premise of Citizen Sleeper, which damn near sent me into an existential spiral and immediately captured my interest. Instead it felt like I was just completing a ton of side quests, without a truly satisfying ending.None of this adds up to something you can picture in your head, right? That’s what I went through when I read the description of it on Game Pass, and the curious confusion you’re (hopefully) feeling is what I was feeling after reading various tweets calling Citizen Sleeper a great game. These could’ve been used to change the game into one to two hour runs, allowing a difficulty scale to be introduced and introducing more replayability. I would’ve preferred having set plots that had meaningful endings that created a unique outcome for the world. These two things together just eliminate any sense of replayability. This makes it feel like a bit of a pointless choice since the only effect it seems to have on the game can be overcome fairly easily. However, as the game progresses you can level up your character and eliminate those debuffs. Each offers buffs or debuffs for certain actions which are explained as part of their background. Choice just doesn’t seem to matter.įor example, at the beginning of the game you can choose between three characters. Every subplot can be followed through to completion in the same playthrough. This seems like a missed opportunity to introduce replayability into the game. The last main criticism I have is that the story can all be accomplished in one run. I had to quit and load up my last save, but thankfully Citizen Sleeper is generous with the auto saves. There were also a couple of times when I was trying to complete actions too fast, causing the game to soft lock.
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