Recently, I ran into a bad case of post-Elden Ring blues. After 130 hours of non-stop adventures from FromSoft, I struggled to find another game that appealed to me more than picking it up for an hour or two before sighing and putting it back. Then I play Citizen Sleeperand devoured the whole thing in two days.
The Citizen Sleeper scratched my Disco Elysium favorite parts of my brain, but it’s overall shorter and (despite the astigmatism premise) softer. You play as a Sleeper, an artificial ship created by a large corporation to pay a debt to a human. While humans lay frozen to death elsewhere in the universe, their consciousness was implanted in the Sleeper and forced to do gruesome manual labor under extreme conditions. But that life was massively sucked away, so the Sleeper fled, to a space station called the Eye in hopes of building a life of their own.
While not quite table-top in the way, like Divinity: Original Sin or Disco Elysium, Citizen Sleeper embraces the spirit of dice-based storytelling in a simple and accessible way. At the beginning of each day (or “cycle”), you will receive a number of six-sided dice based on the amount of energy your Sleeper has, which is rolled automatically and can then be allocated to perform Action you choose around the space station. These actions lead to rewards or punishments depending on their outcome, so there is a level of strategy involved in choosing to spend the higher value dice on risky actions. more or more important, while eliminating weaker roles for trivial tasks. There are character classes and stats trees that affect all of this, but it’s all introduced slowly and gently, giving you time to get used to what activities are available and which ones. important.
Citizen Sleeper is primarily the work of one person: Gareth Damian Martin, who started the project shortly after their previous game, In Other Waters. They told me that on the day of In Other Waters’ release in 2020, they suddenly realized that they only had funding for it until that day and would need to get to work on something else right away. Luckily, they came up with an idea for a real-life sci-fi project. Inspired by the success of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, Damian Martin received the support of Fellow Traveler and started working.
The tablet influence came naturally, as Damian Martin became interested in running tablet games while they were working on In Other Waters, specifically Blades in the Dark. They liked the way Blades in the Dark focused on the consequences of each roll of the dice and found they wanted to avoid the traps of other table-like videogames that force players to re-roll the same action until they can overcome a certain obstacle. This ultimately influenced the direction of Citizen Sleeper.
“I immediately came up with the idea of getting people to roll the dice first so they wouldn’t have that horrible moment of ‘I rolled a terrible dice. I hate this game because it’s just random. ‘ That very quickly became very important to me, because I have this feeling, we roll the dice every morning when we wake up… One day you roll five, another day you roll six.
“I wanted to try to make a role-playing video game where you choose what you do, where you go, where you go every day, and that affects how the story progresses. That’s how I like to run RPGs. I want to see what players care about and build around them as they move on. ”
Like any good board game, Citizen Sleeper’s excellence depends on its storytelling. The story it tells is often unsettling at first, as Sleeper struggles to shake the people pursuing their company, find the drug they need to stave off planned obsolescence, and make a living. In some ways, its early hours were more manageable than immersive, but that quickly changed as Sleeper began docking and exploring the dark corners of the space station.
Of course, in a tabletop campaign, players are constantly discussing and negotiating with the DM, and the story is constantly changing rapidly based on their actions. A video game like Citizen Sleeper is always sure to have the desired outcome. But Damian Martin says that the storytelling element on the table still permeates their thinking in how they develop the story, even if players ultimately see a fixed outcome.
They said, “I tried to think about the story I wanted to necessarily tell, instead of thinking about the topics I wanted to explore and then all the kinds of characters that might exist in relation to those subjects. that subject in that world. “I just started by putting them all in their place and then I would write a little story for one of them and then I would go ahead and write a little story for another and then follow the implications of those stories. To me, it feels more like GMing. You don’t have time to write The Lord of the Rings and then instruct people [it]. You just have time to make the ring and Frodo and Mordor or whatever, and then you just pick it up as you go. I tried to capture that as I worked on the game, even though I know that, that’s not how players will experience it. ”
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Although it takes place in an outdated space future aboard an abandoned space station and features the equivalent of a sentient AI on the run, Citizen Sleeper isn’t an epic space adventure. coated. That comes from Damian Martin’s own relationship with science fiction, and his struggle to relate to major space hero characters like Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard. They’re more related to stories like Cowboy Bebop, which they describe as “a group of freelancers who are space companions.”
“I think my generation experienced a lot of precariousness… The Sleeper is just a sci-fi version of precariousness. You have this debt and you must settle it. And so you go to sleep and you get copied and this other version of you works and works for you, but what is it like for them? How does it feel to be someone who doesn’t even qualify as one? Society does it for us too. We see that some people are citizens and some are not citizens.
“It was the sci-fi movie I wanted to do… When I watch Star Wars, I always look over the shoulders of the characters, trying to see the people at the market stalls or what’s going on. – I was looking at The Book of Boba Fett recently and there’s a bit where they just introduced this super cool ringer style setting. And there are these factions and they spend like five minutes there and then they just say, ‘Anyway, let’s go back to Tatooine.’ And I just said, ‘No, leave me here, please. Leave me behind to find out what these people’s lives are like. ‘”
Citizen Sleeper, then, is a smaller story about individuals struggling under the thumbs of big money and great power, banding together to support each other and fight back, and eventually find their life’s meaning even when around them is cold and uncaring. I won’t spoil much of the ending, but there’s a lot of hope hidden behind Citizen Sleeper’s ferocious exterior. I was surprised to leave a story about struggling in a contract-poor economy that oversees capitalist hell feeling rejuvenated and alive.
Rebekah Valentine is an IGN news reporter. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
This article has been revised after publication to include Damian Martin’s exact pronouns.
