2025-03-15

Citizen Sleeper

One of the biggest shocks when playing Steins;Gate was realizing how many decisions I had made without knowing. Its presentation as a linear VN is purposefully deceptive, probably helping with its (parody? satire? celebration?) of its own form. Throwing the player into a bad timeline for a choice they didn’t know they made, is a little mean, but extremely rewards roleplaying. Not all players will enjoy this, but these sorts of games are never for “all players”. What would it look like if they were trying to be?

Citizen Sleeper is what could be considered a “western VN”, the type of pseudo-RPG that adapts the non-gamey parts of tabletop roleplaying. This is its strongest attribute and the game presents it well. Your primary goal is to keep a health bar from reaching 0, which decreases every day, and can only be increased through spending valuable resources. It also affects how many moves you can take, so you directly feel the impact of a low meter. The whole system makes sense and looks cool on the interface, so I got hooked immediately. I ended up playing through the entire main story over a Friday night and Saturday afternoon, which left me very amused but with many many thoughts. I probably won’t get into spoiler story details, but if you already want to play the game, then I recommend just trying it out now instead of reading on. It’s a reading game, just read the game instead of this review, dummy.

I’m not sure if that Sid Meier quote about meaningful choices has been canonized as a catchy video essay buzzword, but I would like to apply it heavily in this review. Choices are a very favorite feature of Citizen Sleeper, and the developer really made it seem like you have to choose things wisely. There are time limits for certain events, and meters to fill before reaching these time limits. All the presentation points to you needing to balance every decision you make.

This is cool and makes me feel good when choices go right! A lot of actions are paid for with dice rolls, which determine a known percent chance to get a good/bad/neutral outcome. There’s a nice balance of randomness and player choice that is good and engaging. Your character’s stats can also give a -1/+1 to the roll, based on the type of action performed. Initially this gave the impression of roleplaying, avoiding paths that concern a stat you’re -1 on. Initially.

You can raise any of your stats by using stat points, and stat points are earned by completing quests. There is a hint of a puzzle here, completing one quest before another to earn enough points to complete the second quest with less resources. But I think I just imagined it, since the benefits from neutralizing that -1 ended up irrelevant. And the downsides from hitting one or two CRITICAL BAD outcomes resulted in 1/10th of a meter filling, or 2 out of the 20 health points decreasing. I can see how this could destroy your run if you had to make this sacrifice 4 times a day for multiple days, but by simple probability you’re going to be rolling 3.5 on average. Is it good that your rolls can’t give you a terrible day? If the game is all about choices, it should be about how you use your rolls, right?

Yeah, so about those choices. All the questlines are designed in the theme park style, where every one is a separate independent story that doesn’t really affect anything else. So the choices you make in one story (as far as I can tell), don’t affect your options in another story. There are 3 factions in the game, but any competition between them are purely lip service. Maybe it was a limitation of the writing, or the developer didn’t want to block off questlines from players. Either way, it makes formerly meaningful choices turn meaningless. By the end of the game, I was just checking off quests as their progression came available. No roleplaying in sight. Is this what they wanted?

Citizen Sleeper is a kiddie pool. Quests give you skill points, which make the game easier, plus a reward which also makes the game easier. The difficulty curve of Citizen Sleeper barely climbs an inch before diving below all expectations. Any resource that seems scarce, is renewable. Any timer that seems daunting, is quickly trivialized. The hardest part of most quests is waiting 3-6 days for the character to be ready to talk to you again (frequently lampshaded, rarely explained).

But it’s a VN, right? It’s about the story! Yeah, the story is certainly a story. You are a Sleeper, a former human who had your mind transferred to a robot body, under a work agreement. Escaping this agreement, you end up on an anarchic space station on the brink of collapse. Your robot body is also destroying itself, and you need a special stabilizer drug to keep it alive. This is a cool setup, but it doesn’t go anywhere from here. You get pursued by a bounty hunter, but that threat is quickly infantilized. You get pursued by a Really Really Good Bounty Hunter This Time, but the timer is like 50 days long and I completely cancelled it before it could even get 1/3 of the way.

The real story is about the power of friendship. On this every-man-for-himself cyberpunk nightmare world, every single person you meet is friendly and on your side and wants to help you out. Sometimes they use you for their own intentions but the game gaslights you into agreeing with them anyways. There is no decision made on the player’s part to side with any of these characters. This is very much NOT AN RPG!! NO ROLEPLAYING ALLOWED!!! Conversations with responses uses the classic Fallout 4 style of 2 different ways to say yes. Even if the option says “walk away” the character just says “okay you can do the quest if you change your mind anyways buddy!”

So for all these questlines, you can’t choose anything. For all the resources, none of them are valuable. For all the characters, they’re nice to you by default. There is no reason to not finish a quest, there is no reason to build a certain type of character, and there is no reason to put in any thought. The game is scared of itself! While the typical AAA game has smoothed all its edges to avoid difficulty, indies have flourished in keeping real punishing choice-based games alive. I am not disappointed that the game isn’t ultra hard, I am disappointed that the game presented its choices as meaningful. Presentation is more important for games than any other artform (this could have its own article), and Citizen Sleeper has completely fumbled here.

I like to stay oblivious to discourse concerning woke content in games. The arguments never go anywhere past surface level observations, it’s a field completely for idiots. But I’m bringing it up because Citizen Sleeper is definitely somewhere within the “woke game” region. There are characters with they/them pronouns, the story is openly anti-capitalist, and probably some other things my fluoridated mind can’t clock. I don’t really care about any of these things when I ingest art, this is merely an artstyle or dialect that wraps the whole story. Even the most wokest pronoun lecture won’t top Steins;Gate’s otaku culture lectures.

But Steins;Gate is good because the characters are good, and the story is good, and everything you do means something, and every arc bleeds into another, there is cohesion and planning and direction and momentum and stakes. What stakes are in Citizen Sleeper? All punishments are known well in advance. Each character exists in a vacuum, and your own character seems to exist in a vacuum since they can only say “yes” or “yes (sarcastic)”. There is so much potential to this game’s premise and gameplay, but every attempt at delivering is weak and not enough.

Score: 1/3. This may be fun if you are easily deceived by crappy writing.

Played on xbox gamepass, but I’m not sure if I should even try the sequel. It seems like there was an attempt to add difficulty, but every review cites that as a negative, and all the story and writing seems the same. So whatever, I’m glad some people like this trash.