Citizen Sleeper Review

I spent a while playing citizen sleeper. Finished it. I wasn’t too impressed. It’s basically a very simple action economy game combined with a choose your own adventure.

The premise is interesting. You are robot that contains a copy of a human mind. You are owned by a corporation. You flee somehow, stowed away on a ship. Your close your eyes as your mechanical body puts piece after piece of itself to sleep. As your drift away to unconsciousness you wonder if you will ever wake up or if you will die. Sold for parts. Dead of energy depletion if the journey takes too long. Recaptured by your corporate owners.

After countless years in the darkness between stars. You wake up on a station in a scrap yard. You meet the owner, who offers you odd jobs. You also notice that over time your body decays. The corporation made sure it’s property couldn’t survive without specialized immunosuppressants that are almost impossible to find outside the core worlds.

That’s wheras the game beings. You’re on a station. You have a need to survive. To find meds and food. You don’t know almost anything. How big is the station? Who runs it? Are you safe? The mechanics are simple. You have 5 actions each “cycle”. You also have 5 stats. Each cycle your body deteriorates, eventually causing you to have less and less actions, and you get hungry. You can buy meds and food to help with both. As the game goes on you discover stories, choose how to act in the world and eventually find various better ways to do things (food, repairs, hacking, etc…). You go from a rat desperately scavenging in the gutter for one more credit, taking risks you know you shouldn’t to maybe find a new job or scrap of useful information to someone who is respected and connected and safe. Over time you also start to understand more about the station and to befriend and meet various individuals, each of who usually belongs to a faction or social role and gives you some perspective on how the station works.

The gameplay itself was not great, but that’s fine. It’s primary purpose was to serve as a vehicle to deliver the story. My thoughts on the gameplay are that it’s too easy and doesn’t provide enough meaningful choices. Being easy is a problem because it conflicts with the tone of the story and the position your character is meant to be in. Narratively you’re a broken robot with a decaying body, trying to scrape by and stay alive. The tension should from balancing your need for food/repairs with your desire to advance various side quests and, eventually, to stave off the timed threats that come after you and the station. Because it’s actually very easy to reach a point where food and repairs are trivial, this isn’t what you feel like. It’s more a matter of just dragging the right dice into an event to get the outcome you want and then sitting through X more cycles of working a random job and getting credits before you can do something useful again. In the first hour or so it works better for a few reasons. First, you are unskilled and struggle to get by. Second, there’s a bit more mystery. It’s not clear what certain actions do/mean or which story beats will open or close opportunities to you. Third, the world changes and those changes often throw you off. You found a clinic that sells the drugs you need? Great. Except a few cycles later the clinic closes when the doctor goes on the run from the gang that’s pressing them. A scrapyard you rely on for work shuts down. This stops fairly soon and very quickly you have a reliable job and enough credits to meet all your needs. At that point it becomes kinda a chore. Yes there are time pressure events eventually where you find yourself hunted and need to succeed at certain things to survive. But by that point doing so is trivial unless you willfully neglect them.

Speaking of the narrative, which is the main reason to play this, the story is initially interesting but I found myself loosing interest more and more as it went on. It opens with you being copied into a robot body, being locked in a transport and finding your way to the station. Discovering the world is interesting. The first section station is split between a union and a gang. Both have shades of black and white. You also pick up bits and pieces about the history of the station. Corporate control, anarchy as the corporation leaves, anarchist/syndicalist takeover. Etc… There are also a few interesting stories here and there. The gang enforcer who seems her people as a better alternative to the anarchist collective that smothers life elsewhere. The sentient vending machine on the run from leftover fragments of the station’s corporate AI systems. But there’s something missing. I think that as usually my complaint is:

• myopia. The game hits you over the head with over the top character drama. But like, you’re meant to symphasize with a couple having a breakup an then going to mope while you’re literally trying to (with them) organize food shipments to stop a bunch of refugees from starving.
• can’t pass the ideological turing test. If there’s one them that comes up again and again, it’s “CORPORATIONS BAD. CORE SYSTEMS BAD. ANARCHIST COMMUNES GOOD.”. That in itself is a bit grating but it’s okay. Art often imagines worlds which depict a certain view of reality.  Ayn Rand does this. Gene Wolf does this. So does Peter Watts and I like all of them. The problem with citizen sleeper is that it’s so one sided. Everyone who works for the corp is evil. Everyone who works for the anarchists is good. Later on when you reach the DLC, everyone on the main station who doesn’t want to let the refugees on (because they worry doing so will literally crash the life support systems and kill everyone) is just crazy and obviously evil. Everyone helping them is good. I guess it’s not just that on a meta level the authors assume their worldview is right (capitalism evil, communism great). It’s that every level down in every conflict that isn’t inter-personal there’s always a good side and an evil side. Every problem to be solved is a matter of doing the obviously right thing and not letting the bad people stop you. It’s never a matter of figuring out what the right thing is. That sits badly with me. I wrote about this before in The Wandering Inn and Intellectually Dishonest Worlds. It’s something I keep coming back to in stories of almost any kind.