Being compassionate is cool in Citizen Sleeper. The characters in this low-key, minimalist chillhop sci-fi game are initially guarded, but after spending little more than your time, they eventually drop walls to reveal themselves as nearly all of them are kind, considerate, and warm. The game is set on a half-ruined space station that hovers between freedom and indenture. The way that Citizen Sleeper itself reflects this is what truly strikes you, though.
To take a step back, at first, you are fighting for your life; it’s more of a one-way battle at this point. You are a Sleeper, a corporately owned, replicant-on-a-budget entity with an emulated mind and a generic, robotic body based on a real human but with even fewer rights and less memories, and you don’t know if that’s even enough to qualify as a living being (yes, that is a fun allusion to Descartes!). After your escape, you find yourself on the space station known as the Eye. Here, you have two main resources to manage: your condition, which is represented by a bar of twenty tiny blocks that gets smaller every time you finish a turn and go to sleep at the end of the day—a process known as finishing a “cycle”—and your energy, which is represented by five bars that get smaller every time.
These fit together well. When your energy runs out, your condition will deteriorate much more quickly; when your condition runs out, the game is theoretically ended (I haven’t ran out yet, touch wood), and they re-connect with your other important resource: dice. Because Citizen Sleeper is cleverly designed to resemble a tabletop role-playing game, you roll one to six dice when you wake up after each cycle’s snooze, depending on how full your condition bar is. The more conditions you meet, the more dice you get. You can then use these dice for whichever purpose you like.
I know this seems awkward, but trust me when I say that’s my fault. In contrast is Citizen Sleeper. It’s one of those games that, when stripped down to an incredibly simple, paper-thin-lined user interface, does look a touch thin and weightless at points, especially during its relatively sluggish start. However, this really contributes to the game’s amazing beauty. Tabletop elegance with a few systems at most, a character, and then just empty space with room reserved just for you—your decisions, your ideas, and who you are. An uncommon game that can navigate its own path.
Now, let’s return to its essence. You are first scrounging around for employment, staying in an abandoned shipping container, and taking on odd jobs for Chits, which is short for Cryo, which is short for something else that sounds like space crypto. It’s money, as always, that makes all the difference in the world. With your precious dice, you’ll need it initially to buy some energy-boosting noodles, scrap metal or parts, or recurrent, outrageously expensive, illegal medication to ward off the ‘planned obsolescence’ of your inevitable condition degradation. For something that looks so easy at first appearance, there are a lot of moving parts. It quickly turns into doing favors for possible friends, but each of them has a debt to someone else and a duty to a future partner.
Beyond that, there’s another race against time as new acquaintances solve mysteries that could help you escape the never-ending hunt, and bounty hunters arrive to try and reclaim the company property that you are. Meanwhile, another hunter follows you in the cloud, a sort of digital subconscious that connects you to the mainframe of all the station’s machines and quasi-minds, allowing you to hack others for your own gain at the risk of being flagged for deletion by whatever lurks there in the mist.
These tasks are intentionally onerous and interminable, creating a to-do list of social obligations that is intentionally impossible to do all at once. Like a lot of Citizen Sleeper, the allegory is overt and obvious: if you, too, struggle to find time for exercise, healthy cooking, studying, socializing, taking care of family members, going on date nights, reading more books, and, heaven forbid, engaging in a few hobbies, tag yourself. Or, more directly related to Citizen Sleeper’s argument, if you can’t afford to pay for both insulin and rent.
But that unwavering, persistent human kindness is what shines through and pulls your drowning self out from under a sea of busywork and basic survival. Initially, it is the citizens of Citizen Sleeper. People of the Eye, if you put in the effort, will grow from initial caricatures into thoughtful, capricious, resentful, protective, generous, loyal, and treacherous humans—all the wrinkles and creases of humanity written with fine strokes of real expertise. Quiet, sheltered, guarded types, desperate for a deep connection if only the other person could do a bit more of the social legwork. At times, it feels like the entire world is made up of these terminally introverted people wrapped in cozy jumpers and surrounded by monstera plants (guilty). All that’s needed to complete a game is a deft heel-turn or a stab in the back.
This is when Citizen Sleeper’s generosity appears to come in handy, as it frequently seems to bring you back to life from the verge of the end of the world. The game creates a world that appears to be nasty and challenging, but it’s also desperately trying to save you from failing, always pulling you back from what may feel like a negative choice in dialogue or decisions.
When you eventually reach the end of a character’s questline and expand your skill tree, you may pierce through the layer of survival, the race against time, the rat race, the systemic struggle, and suddenly there’s equilibrium. In other words, the ‘game’ is over just as the post-game – the real game – begins. This is similar to tearing the lid off a tin of sardines. Each of the three classes you start with has a +1 modifier to one of the five skills in the skill tree and a -1 modifier to another. Tasks, which are cleverly referred to in Citizen Sleeper as Drives—a reminder of how much of the game is really played in the mind—earn upgrade points that you can put into the tree. These points can then be used to unlock passive buffs that provide self-sustenance, such as the capacity to repair oneself from scrap—or more direct increases to the value of a die you insert into tasks that correspond with them.
(Short example: I started off with +1 engineering since I was a machinist. Thus, for example, if I rolled a 3 on a die for a job related to the Engineering skill, it would have counted as a 4 instead; higher dice numbers indicate more favorable outcomes, while lower dice numbers indicate more neutral or unfavorable outcomes that could cost you money or other forms of sustenance. Enhancements to dice applied to a particular ability then turn into a sort of self-fulfilling character class, where activities frequently have two possible outcomes and you are automatically guided toward the one that best fits your expertise).
By completing sufficient Drives and using your money, dice, and other resources wisely, you may essentially break through Citizen Sleeper’s upper cloud layer with remarkable ease. When you stop to think about it, it becomes rather clear what is happening: in a post-capitalist post-game where the goal is to live under capitalism, the post-game is a tranquil existence. Now that you are free of your bonds, do as you like. Create a more compassionate and deeply meaningful existence for yourself.
Its greatest strength—and, therefore, its worst issue—is that Citizen Sleeper is nothing if not didactic. Being didactic when creating a creative piece has the drawback of turning the work into a thesis—a debate you have with your audience, reader, or player. When you set out to prove anything, you have to fortify yourself, prepare for rebuttals, and prepare responses to counterarguments. Because it’s seeking to persuade rather than to arouse, to force rather than to encourage, it attempts to convince, which penned in the object in issue and made it feel more rigid. Fear stems from the fact that, unless one is preaching to the choir, most people simply want to push back and very few get converted.
One “gotcha” is the capacity to use force of will and ability alone, as well as manipulating the system to your advantage, to bootstrap oneself to a large amount of money and comfort—the capitalist’s dream—in order to escape Citizen Sleeper’s cycle of existence. It’s enjoyable, therefore this shouldn’t matter! More significantly, however, is a completely different understanding of how games may function, integrating intrinsic delight into the feeling of static post-game attentiveness and the transcendental joy of living free rather than relying only on the grind for extrinsic incentive. This is all true while you’re arguing, though. All of a sudden, I feel like saying, “This kind of says the opposite of what you’re trying to say.” And that’s when I get all knotted up, thinking how on earth a forced failure could be possible—after all, one of the messages here is that the system is stacked against you. However, it was unable to. Similarly, its relationships—which Citizen Sleeper views as objectives in and of themselves—are all essentially transactional, awarding you with different incentives or upgrade points for saving your fellow citizens from difficult situations.
Here, there is genuine closeness and suffering as well as genuine gentleness, thoughtfulness, and intricacy of thinking.
Here, it would be easy to draw the conclusion that the game is unworkable. It’s impossible to count all of its metaphors—private medicine, rent-seeking, the impossibility of choosing between human connection and survival, corporate ownership, communes, abusive cycles, poverty traps, slavery, planned obsolescence, and the numerous instances in which all of this subtext is presented as literal text—completely justified and flawlessly rationalized as they are, with the game they want to be.
However, it’s a trap, and you can choose to jump straight over it to the pure power that lies beyond. Indeed, Citizen Sleeper may be rather persuasive at times. However, in many others, it does excite, it does seek for something, and most importantly, it feels completely human during every moment of play. The misty, fuzzy Neuromancer Matrix defies easy comprehension. The characters in it, including botanists, AIs, criminals, cooks, dock workers, and bartenders, are all essentially alive.
From the incredibly intelligent, perfectly balanced systems to the incredibly well-realized art, which consists of static drawings of those characters that each feel like a glossy, coffee table magazine cover of their own due to the incredible texture, color, posture, and pain behind the eyes, there is real anguish and intimacy here. Although Citizen Sleeper is speaking to you in this instance, I strongly advise that you just pay attention—not least because there is significance in your own quiet and because what it does have to say is priceless.