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. 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. 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.

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.

Actions beget opportunities for more actions. 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.Ĭitizen 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. 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. 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. 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.Ī few paths open up to you. You’ve been picked up out of deep space, and the technology that keeps your artificial body alive is hard to come by. 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. Citizen Sleeper takes place in the hinterlands.

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