In the beginning you are scrabbling around for work, sleeping in an empty shipping container, picking up odd-jobs for Chits, short for Cryo, short for something else that I gather is basically space-crypto. A rare game that knows how to get out of its own way. Elegance of the tabletop kind, a couple of systems at most, a character and then just empty space, room exclusively left for you - your choices, your imagination, your self. It's one of those games that actually appears a little thin and weightless at times, certainly during its somewhat slow start, pared back to a remarkably clean, paper-thin-lined UI, but what that really creates is a wonderful elegance.
This may sound clunky believe me when I tell you that's my fault. The higher the condition the more dice you have, and these dice are then assigned by you to… whatever you want. Citizen Sleeper is built on the principles of a tabletop RPG - deftly, I should say - and so depending on how full your condition bar is, you roll between one and six dice on waking up after each cycle's nap. Run out of energy and your condition will decrease much more rapidly run out of condition and it's game over (in theory - I haven't run out just yet, touch wood) - and they connect again with your other key resource of sorts: dice. Watch on YouTube Citizen Sleeper's release date trailer gives a quick look at what it's all about. Arriving here, post escape, on the space station called the Eye, you have two key resources to manage: your condition, a bar of 20 little blocks that decreases by one each time you end a turn, sleeping at the end of a day here referred to as completing a 'cycle' and your energy, made up of five bars that drops by two each time. You are a Sleeper, a corporate-owned, replicant-on-a-budget entity with a generic, robotic body and emulated mind, based on a real human but with reduced memories and even fewer rights, unsure of whether that's enough to even count as being alive (yes, a Descartes reference comes up - but it's a fun one). Walking it back for a second, initially, you are in a fight for survival - or, less of a two-way fight and more one-way struggle.
A low-intensity, minimalist kind of chillhop sci-fi game, set on a half-ruined space station floating between freedom and indenture, characters here are guarded at first, before, after an investment of little more than your time, dropping walls to reveal themselves as almost unanimously gentle, considerate, warm. Occasionally turning subtext into text, Citizen Sleeper's real magic is found in the boundless warmth of its characters - and the humanity of its own design.
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