A must-play game for cyberpunk fans: As an escaped replicant, you build a new life – but the shadows of your past soon catch up with you
What does it mean to be human? What does it take to be human? By a body, the soul, perhaps already our consciousness? These questions have made the heads of many philosophers and thinkers of the past and present spin.
Fortunately, you have it much easier than Descartes, for example, and tackle these questions practically in Citizen Sleeper: As a former corporate-owned replicant called Sleeper, you take refuge in a new robot body to escape an existence as a lawless slave. With other sleepers, you smuggle yourself into a cargo container and eventually end up on the scuffed space station Erlin”s Eye.
What follows is a great cyberpunk story that is second to none in 2022. The review clarifies (without spoilers, of course) why story fans should definitely not miss Citizen Sleeper.
Table of Contents
From survival to life
Erlin”s Eye somewhere in the arse end of the galaxy is a haven for crooks and driven men of all kinds, but also serves as a trading hub and offers a large shipyard where a colony ship will be built when you arrive. After a friendly worker has helped you survive the first few days, you are soon on your own.
However, there are several problems: As an anti-theft device, the corporation that originally owned your body has installed a mechanism that causes your new shell to deteriorate a little more each day. This process can only be stopped with a special drug – and then there”s the tracker built into your body, which the company uses to send a bounty hunter after you!
Story-wise, Citizen Sleeper draws from the full and confronts you with many profound, poignant moments in which the theme of being human comes up again and again. You do influence the direction in which your Sleeper develops.
However, you experience the most beautiful stories when you help the other people on the station: a shipyard worker urgently needs a babysitter for his daughter, you help a doctor escape from a gang of gangsters, then there is an AI stranded in a vending machine, an engineer on a revenge trip and much more.
However, it is also worthwhile from a gameplay point of view to complete all the missions called “Drive”, as you bag an extra ability point after each completed task.
Six cubes you shall have
At the beginning of the game, you choose one of three possible character classes, as is typical for role-playing games, and thus determine which ability you get a bonus and a malus for. With the points you collect, you increase one of the abilities or unlock helpful perks. An operator, for example, is technically gifted and can work excellently with digital interfaces. Work that requires stamina is much more difficult for an operator.
For profitable actions such as working, gambling or hacking, you use one of six maximum possible dice values that you receive per daily cycle on the station after waking up. The better the condition of the sleeper body and the higher the energy value increased by food before going to sleep, the higher your chances of getting better dice values. High values guarantee an automatic success with a six, or at least leave a good chance of a positive result with a five or four.
Low dice values such as three, two and one increase the possibility of negative consequences, but they are not useless either. Alternatively, use them to hack network nodes on the station to get access keys and valuable data to boost your bank balance.
If you use a low dice for an action and are unlucky, the result can cost you money, energy and body condition, and all of that is a scarce commodity, especially at the beginning of the game.
Every new cycle, you also lose body condition and energy, have to get money for food and save up for a new medicine. Without good planning, you will sometimes find yourself in a tailspin. So you have to think carefully about whether you would rather work another round and earn money or look for better opportunities in a new part of the station.
In the endgame, however, the system becomes almost too easy, as the perks make your life much easier and you can easily compensate for bad results with bonuses. New challenges would have been helpful here.
Everyday life, but exciting!
As you explore the space station, which is presented as a moving 3D model, you gradually unlock new locations, opportunities, people and also time-critical tasks that must be completed in a certain amount of cycles. For example, if you work long enough in the shipyard as a manual storekeeper, the people there will eventually offer you better and safer jobs. To help a friend pay his debts, you have to do a certain job as quickly as possible and as often as possible.
If you help the people of a commune, they will offer you a place to live and at the same time also a job, where you use a cube instead of money to replenish your energy – and so on. Yet the dice and cycle system is very fairly designed once you get used to it, and leaves room for the real star of Citizen Sleeper: the sweeping, melancholic and multi-layered story.
Be human despite a robot body
In the first few minutes of the game, you and your Sleeper are plunged into the still unknown world and you have to find out where the hope for a better life lies in it and what constitutes being human. This creates a special bond with the sleeper and will not let you go in a hurry.
Small successes and the friendships and security you gain motivate you all the more. The other ward residents and their problems are also really well designed, even the shady characters make you curious about the end of their story and only let you go when you have read the last (purely English) paragraph of text.
Due to the different classes, decision options and different endings, a second playthrough is also worthwhile. The only real drawback is the scarcity of graphic elements, as you only see a maximum of two different drawings for each character and key scenes are only described in writing. The excellent texts, written in English that is not too complex, create enough of a head-scratcher for you to experience a good ten exciting hours per playthrough.
Editor”s verdict
I was curious about the game as soon as Citizen Sleeper was released in May, time just wasn”t my friend. Clearly, the opportunity for a test knocked down open doors with me and made for a real end-of-year treat: Normally I get a bit over-saturated at some point when I have to read a lot of foreign-language texts, but Citizen Sleeper really managed to captivate me until I reached the end. By the end, I didn”t want the story to be over at all, and kept delaying the inevitable! After all, I had managed to make my own flat, make friends and gradually felt really at home in the station – even a stray cat dropped by regularly. In addition, there were always moments when I was stimulated to think.
It”s hard to imagine what it might be like to suddenly be in a new body, in a new place, all connections to your previous life severed, to really be completely alone – and then not completely: whenever I moved to a new city in my life, it was a bit like Citizen Sleeper, because I had to get to know the new environment and the people there first. This experience made Citizen Sleeper all the more captivating, and it made a lasting impression on me because of the few means used to tell a really good story. With Pentiment, I have already experienced a real story thriller this year, but Citizen Sleeper can keep up really well, at least in terms of storytelling.
