To say I fell in love with the planet farmville presents could be an understatement – I’m obsessed. Here’s an authentic sci-fi adventure game packed with intrigue, drama and challenge, but one that eschews placing a stick in your submit favour of putting the world in your head. Or is it your mind on the planet? Citizen Sleeper tackles the heady subject matter from the coalescence of biological and artificial life and also the blurring of the lines between nature and knowledge. Then it imagines how we might fuck even that in the greed, putting your synthetic arse to work for scraps in the shell of a corporate space station like the>All of this is put together with the lens of the tabletop RPG, the planet around you barely more than a top-down map of Erlin’s Eye adorned with icons representing places, people and tasks. The game plays in Cycles that represent the passage of time – inside a Cycle, you’re in a position to explore the attention and take various actions, most of which need a roll of a dice to perform and see their degree of success. The amount of dice you've at your disposal each Cycle depends on the current condition of your physical form, which degrades as the progress time and also because of work done. You’ll have the ability to take measures to make sure your time levels stay high and your condition gets better before it worsens, but it’s a careful balancing act between keeping yourself alive and using your time and effort constructively.
The actions you’ll take aboard the Eye, such things as undertaking operate in a scrapyard, extracting data from terminals or navigating tricky social interactions, are all way to fulfil your Drives. Drives are the goals, they unlock as you make new friends and uncover new mysteries and they’re what's going to eventually call at your story through to some kind of conclusion. Some may be treatable having a certain degree of leisure, but other medication is at the mercy of Clocks – meters that total while you perform certain actions or just as Cycles pass. Between attempting to achieve your Drives and manage the various Clocks around Erline’s Eye it almost seems like juggling pins and spinning plates at the same time. The juggling part is fine on its own, but those plates are a constant, looming threat for your ability to keep the pins in the environment. Several of the plates will cause intergalactic bounty hunters to come and shoot you in the face if they stop spinning.
The result though is a game that relies upon a couple of things – hard choices and bold risks. Not only will you have to gripe with your own time management, forethought and conscience when deciding what to focus your limited efforts on each Cycle, but even once you’ve formulated an agenda there’s some chance that can completely undo everything. Actions that work on a dice roll can have positive, neutral or negative outcomes that are dictated by both the worth of the dice you choose to play for it and your character’s own affinities. At the outset of the sport you’ll be asked to choose one of three classes using their own stats and different buffs that can then be augmented with upgrade points earned from completing Drives.
The way that all of these different systems interweave and feed into the vast many narrative possibilities is definitely an incredibly slick feat of design, especially once you get within the initial feeling of being overwhelmed by them and begin to understand how to concentrate on the outcomes you really want to see. After that it’s only a matter of praying things work out – if you’re anything like me trying to leverage my Interface skill to score a job on a colony ship as a Junior Tech you’ll discover part the hard way. It may be quite stressful initially, but additionally just forgiving enough in early hours that the failings feel more like new forks on your road to success than genuine disasters.
Citizen Sleeper is another game that feels genuinely replayable. It can be easily carried out in around five hours or less if you can stomach leaving friends, enemies and answers behind for a quick getaway. Or you can push yourself, play the long game, explore deeper and deeper into the Eye and look for everything the game has to offer. Luckily, finishing the game creates a return point right beforehand so you can easily return and forge another path ahead if you want to, but it’s just like rewarding to start completely fresh and see how differently it may all go.
Life aboard Erlin’s Eye is given a clear and classy aesthetic that works far harder than its mixture of mostly static environments and text-based narrative would imply. For starters, the character portraits from acclaimed comic book artist Guillaume Singelin that accompany story beats are gorgeous and add incredible dimension towards the game’s already-fantastic writing. If this takes over, the game’s soundtrack from returning composer Amos Roddy swings deftly between ‘illicit underground fetish club around 2090’ and ‘metaphysical contemplations on a Korg MS20’ and it honestly slaps fucking ass. For any game in which the most important bits are delivered mostly in text and numbers, Citizen Sleeper is an absolute vibe
