The Melancholy Realism of Citizen Sleeper
Citizen Sleeper takes place in the hinterlands. Playing as a Sleeper, a robotic emulated clone of the mind of someone in cryogenic sleep, somewhere else, the game tasks you with navigating a new kind of life. You’ve been picked up out of deep space, and the technology that keeps your artificial body alive is hard to come by. Here on the cold frontier, in the middle of space on a station overrun by the needs and desires of a diverse array of humanity, you have to try to make some kind of unlife.
A few paths open up to you. There are crime bosses who are running things behind the scenes and can make daily struggles a little less hard if you’re willing to play ball. There’s a space-faring nature commune. An IT manager wants to understand the deep secrets of the data systems that make up the backbone of this old-and-growing-older station. A guy has a kid who has never seen rain, and he wants to change that by working on a generation ship that’s about to launch out into the furthest reaches.
Citizen Sleeper is built around clocks and drives, which are borrowed from the tabletop gaming space to express the passage of time and the fulfillment of goals. Actions beget opportunities for more actions. Costs and benefits present themselves. The capability to do things in this world is represented by dice, and placing those dice into actions (a six might represent a success at finding matsutake mushrooms; a one might allow you to fail at unloading scrap at the dry dock) is the key decision-making process at the heart of the game.
This all works, and is compelling. Citizen Sleeper is fundamentally about managing UI, and it has the clicky draw of a mobile game—meters fill up with a subtle pop, clocks slowly count up as anticipation builds, and augmentations for your artificial body allow you to know hidden information, like the actual results of a dice placement, or to reroll those dice entirely. It is a beautiful science fiction game that has passed through the operating logics of the Facebook game systematization, which I say here not to take it down a peg but to be clear about how much that generation of games ate up design space and corralled it into specific forms.
These clocks and timers and actions all funnel into what sets Citizen Sleeper apart from other games, and neatly places it into a lineage with both In Other Waters, the developer’s previous game, and the stable of story-focused games that publisher Fellow Traveler is known for. All of these systems are there to help get a player invested into the story of this artificial person, what they have lost, and the new things they find on the station that give their life meaning.
Our main character, the sleeper, could be anyone. They’re mostly an amnesiac. They emerge from the cold heart of space and are introduced to the denizens of the space station one-by-one, slowly becoming acclimated to the human kindness that appears along the way. There is cruelty, too, although less about the social difference of the automated human and more around the corporate systems that control them. The bounty hunter Ethan, here to collect a contract on the sleeper’s head and to return them to their corporate creator, or the domineering corporate controller Harrdin, who has hidden in the shadows since the space station was wrestled from the hands of its previous controllers, both show the hard, controlling powers that lay in wait for innocent people.
This fixation on living in a ruin, hounded by power, struggling in bounds for a better tomorrow did solidify some thoughts I have been having about game narrative over the past few years. Citizen Sleeper makes a tight conceptual trilogy with recent standout Norco and the now-canonized Disco Elysium, if only because the former two are some of the only narrative games to capture the narrative vibes and moods of the latter.
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