Citizen Sleeper

Citizen Sleeper is a narrative game desguised as a RPG based on Random Number Generator. Narratively the idea of a real human sell himself to a company that clone his conscience to be imprinted in a machine is really grim. That human simulation is sold only to work for this dystopian intergalatic company, as a machine slave with a glimpse of conscience. The game begins when this machine, called a sleeper, run aways to live a better life than slavery. Its life begin in a spacial station called the Eye. There is when hope begin. The game itself rolls several die each turn, and you can use it to perform actions in the world. Higher the dice, higher the chances the actions will succeed. Meanwhile, the game puts several event clocks running to add anxiety in your decision making - you will work for money, repair itself, eat or try to discover something about the world? Perhaps help others or help yourself, the game leaves you to choose. Straight from the beggining, the game expands itself in several plotlines, with arrays of decisions to make in a time-based "choose wisely because things will happens independently of your choices". So the start of your life as immigrant will be pretty gnarly. In the first half, you can feel that time is urgent and your decisions matter to which people you will address, help or attack. In later half, including the expansion, you be so overpowered that the game pratically turns itself in its Visual Novel part. Don't get me wrong, if you played half the game you are already hooked by its story, universe and characters - that have a relatable personality in sweet moments of self-discovery. Is a visually compenent game with pretty story lines, that will make you wholeheartly begin to wonder about its inhabitants and their stories. May be simplistic somethings, but the love and sweetness are there - and they persist with you for sometime after. Making you wonder where this universe will go in the next game. It was a pleasure to play it.

The combination of elements behind this games quality are its soundtrack, sound design, visuals, themes and stories, not to mention its accessible and satisfying gamplay loop. For those who aren't very experienced with RPG's or TTRPG's, this is a great entry point if you can give it the bit of patience it deserves. For those with a lot of experience, I reccomend doing a limited or no upgrade run, only leveling things to avoid softlocks or pursue your desired path, as this makes the resource management stricter and thus makes decisions more difficult and meaningful. This game is very cerebral, with well written and complicated descriptions, not to mention music and sound design that perfectly complement its setting and themes. You can play it once in a night and move on, or half a dozen times to see the outcomes of all the possible choices. I'm very glad the game has found success, and I hope the sequel builds on the lore and mechanics of this game.

I bought the game alongside Roadwarden and Suzerain after playing and loving Disco Elysium and hearing these three games are very similar to it. Overall I will say that Citizen Sleeper managed to reached the high expectations that Disco Elysium set. It is a beautifully done rpg that managed to be extremely exciting and thought-provoking while being mainly text-based. Both the story, universe, and characters are able to be fully realised just with still images and a few blocks of texts. My only problem with the game is that it feels aimless from the half-way through onwards 'til the last fifth or so of the game, although the quality of the writing makes you want to continue. After an specific event in the story you're basically left without a cleat objective and left to lived in the world, with a few story-lines making you continue onwards (although many of them end far sooner than the game ending). You do get some storylines that end up in some of the endings, but it does take a while for them to get some steam. Either way. Citizen Sleeper is still one of the best rpgs that I've played. And I highly recomend it to anyone who wants to get inmersed into some fantastic story and world.

The story is excellently written, is emotive, harsh at times, the first ending I got left me feeling sad but whole in a sense. The gameplay is also very well planned, there is a very well balanced level of tension throughout the whole story, the twists and cliffhangers are cool. And the artwork is gorgeous.

This game isn't for everyone as there's a significant (as in 99% of what you do) reading. In reality it seems like someone wrote a story and THEN decided to try and make a game out of it, and somehow it worked. The resource management aspect is based around your (up to) 5 dice (d6). Your decisions regarding where to use each die, and which die to use, is where the gameplay comes in - in addition to this, there is an energy/food and sleep/repair mechanic. I haven't seen mechanics quite like this in a game before and was impressed with how well tuned they were. At the time of action, it feels like you have to hit everything just right to survive, but in hindsight, your character was always going down that path, and although the story will end differently based on your choice, the narrative branches don't go out very far from the preset path(s). I had one play through, it was quite interesting, fun and the story was well done (cyberpunk-ish imperfect future space story). I assume you can fail/die, but I didn't encounter that, so not the hardest game (as long as you understand the mechanics). There are 3 characters, but it seems they are simply slightly different starting-off points, so not much need for a second run through. Game crashed a couple of times, but boots up quickly, and frequent auto-saves (and easy story skipping) didn't affect my playthrough. Unfortunately the save file surpassed the GOG cloud max of 200MB halfway through. You don't need the cloud save, but going into the file to see what was wrong and then having to turn it off so you don't keep getting reminded, was a bit annoying.