![]() At first it's the people of Citizen Sleeper. As with much of Citizen Sleeper the allegory is obvious and overly memed - tag yourself if you, too, can't find the time to go to the gym, cook healthy meals, excel at work, see your friends, care for family members, go on date nights, read more books, and heaven forbid maintain a hobby or two or more pertinently to Citizen Sleeper's point, if you can't afford to pay for both insulin and rent.īut what shines, and what drags your drowning self up from under a sea of busywork and base survival, is that relentless, unyielding human warmth. Quickly it evolves into favours for potential friends, but for each of those there's an obligation to a potential partner, a debt to someone else.īeyond that there's another race against time, as bounty hunters arrive seeking to claim back the company property that you are, as new acquaintances unravel mysteries that might save you from the endless hunt - as another hunter stalks you in the cloud, a kind of digital subconscious, a Matrix connecting you to the mainframe of all the machines and quasi-minds of the station and allowing you to hack others to your benefit, at the risk of being marked for deletion by whatever lurks there in the fog.Īll these things stack and stack and stack, a purposefully overwhelming to-do list of social contracts that purposefully cannot be crossed off at once. It's a lot to juggle, for a thing that seems so simple at a glance. It's money, which as ever turns the world of the Eye, and which at first, along with your precious dice, is what you need to buy some not-inexpensive noodles for energy, to get scrap or parts or recurring, ever-expensive, illegal medicine to stave off the 'planned obsolescence' of your built-in condition decay. 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.
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