Citizen Sleeper

In Citizen Sleeper, you are a “sleeper,” an emulated human consciousness uploaded to a robot body that mimics the regular human body in various ways to prevent the copy/pasted brain from going insane. So, you have to breathe because if you don’t your emulated subconcious thinks you’re drowning, and you have to eat or else the hunger will drive you mad even though the amount of energy provided to your bio-mechanical body by the food is puny (and it’s not clear how diegetic the hunger mechanics are, but you certainly don’t seem to have to eat very often). Unfortunately, the only point of making emulated humans like this is to exploit some kind of legal loophole regarding AI – as long as the artificial intelligence is created by copy/pasting a human brain wholesale, then the resulting being doesn’t legally count as human and doesn’t have rights, but also doesn’t count as enough of an AI for nebulous other laws to apply. Some kind of AI safety laws, I think? It’s not clear, but the game’s not a legal drama, so that’s fine. Making emulated consciousnesses allows the corporations to circumvent some kind of legal problem, and that’s why you are a robot with a wifi connection in your brain and robot legal status and yet you think, feel, and act exactly like a human.

The inciting incident of the game is that you are pulled out of a freighter that you’d stowed away on after escaping your corporate masters on some pit of despair floating out in space, and you’ve arrived on a decaying ring station taken over by the workers in a string of riots after corporate control fell apart. Now your goal is to make good your escape, which you can do in one of three ways: Upload into the cloud, hop on a ship to a distant planet (you have two different ships to choose from, but the details don’t matter to the broad objective of escape), or break the corporation’s ability to track you down and decline either of the other two options so you can just hang out on the station forever.

It’s not clear why the corporation’s grip on the station was slipping to begin with, but the Collapse was triggered by large chunks of the station being physically destroyed, so the corporation bailed out and left their station-level executives to fend for themselves. A few decades later, the Havenage is a ruling body that evolved out of a union, vaguely social democratic although it’s not clear how many residents are in the union. Certainly you are not in the union, and the political details mostly don’t matter. The Havenage is in charge of the main sections of the station, but they don’t really tell you what to do or provide for your needs. They are doing an okay job of running things but you’re pretty much on your own for getting food and shelter, and they don’t have total control of the station.

The Yatagans are a street gang that controls some of the more dense residential areas, and the Hypha Commune are a bunch of botanist hippies living under communism out in the biosphere sections of the station, which have grown completely wild since the Collapse. The Havenage are the ones that outside polities contact to do business with the station and the Yatagans in particular seem to exist like a regular (if firmly established) gang, in the cracks between the limits of the Havenage’s resources rather than acting openly as a rival state. It’s hard to tell exactly what the relation is between the three because all three of them are pretty chill with each other during the plot – the Havenage will not help you with your Yatagan problems and the Yatagans will not help you with your Havenage problems, so whatever the exact situation between them is, there is a stable balance of power and you aren’t upsetting it.

So that’s where you are. What do you do? Every day you roll some number of six-sided dice based on the condition of your body. At full health, you roll five dice. At the minimum, you roll just one. You can assign the dice to various tasks, and each task results in another die roll for a negative, neutral, or positive result, with the odds based on the face of the die assigned to it. The “neutral” results are actually marginal successes while the “positive” results are more like critical hits, i.e. if you assign a die to work a shift at a dangerous job, a “neutral” result gives you money and avoids harm, a “positive” result gives you extra money, and only a “negative” result damages you. Once you’ve used all your dice, you can sleep to get them back.

Sleeping depletes a hunger bar, though, so you’ll need to buy food regularly or your health will deteriorate. It’s not totally clear how diegetic the rate at which you buy food is. You only have to buy food twice for every three days and you buy it from restaurants, not grocery stores, so taken literally your robot body only needs one meal every 1.5 days. That might just be a gameplay abstraction and you actually need three meals a day just like everyone else, though. On the other hand, there are other ways to fill your energy bar besides eating, which can be unlocked through perks, and some of them are things like being an extrovert and succeeding on checks using social skills. This suggests pretty strongly that your energy bar has basically nothing to do with your body’s actual energy reserves and is entirely an issue of sanity and various starvation-prevention self-eating mechanisms getting activated by your subconscious even though you don’t actually need food at all. If you’re having so much fun that you don’t notice you haven’t eaten in three days, then your body will not actually run out of energy and the need for food will never catch up with you.

But the main pressure on your health is that you lose some of it every night because your body is designed to slowly self-destruct if you aren’t fed a steady diet of “stabilizer,” a medicine for the mechanical bodies of emulated humans produced solely by the corporation that created you. The only purpose of the drug is to keep their own emulated workers enslaved, so there’s no reason to sell it, which means you have to pay a premium for it on the black market. Food is relatively cheap (a lot of other people seem to struggle with day-to-day bills on this station even as they work the same jobs you do, which I take as further evidence that your grocery bills are way lower than everyone else’s), and you’ll only struggle with it very early on when you’re still exploring the station and trying to figure out which sections you should assign dice to exploring in order to find a cheap restaurant and an entry-level job. Exploring the station goes very quickly, but when you have four dice to find food or else you’re going to take starvation damage tonight, wasting even one of them exploring a section that turns out not to have what you need can be anxiety-inducing.

It only takes like 30 minutes to find a decent restaurant and steady work, though, at which point that problem is solved forever. Your body’s self-destruction takes longer to rev up, but the steep cost of the medicine to reverse it means that medicine, not food, will be the dominant financial pressure through the mid-game (and possibly the late-game, too, depending on how long it takes you to find some of the longterm solutions). If you wake up in the morning and realize you’re out of food, then that means one of the day’s 3-5 dice will need to be dedicated to making money, maybe two if you’re unlucky. If you wake up in the morning and realize you’re out of medicine, then that means you need to dedicate the next 7-10 dice to buying it, at least two days’ worth, but likely three, and in the meantime your body is decaying and your dicepool is shrinking even further. Medicine is the only way to get HP and, thus, dice-per-day back. The game is generous enough with medicine early on that you can focus on it and get a buffer, and as long as you make a priority of maintaining the buffer, it’s easy to avoid being completely crippled – but you will have to make a priority of the buffer, which can mean letting other things slip.

Because, of course, it wouldn’t really make a difference how many days it takes you to do anything if the whole game sat around waiting for you to finish. But the game has a number of swords of Damocles it dangles over your head. When you first get pulled out of the freighter, you have to finish some early quests to help out the guy who revived you and gave you a place to stay before he gets cold feet about helping an escaped robo-person. Then a countdown starts to when a bounty hunter shows up, and it’s weird that your sense that the corporation has surely sent someone to track you down is so finely calibrated that you know the exact date they will arrive, but mechanically it is very useful to have a ticking clock saying “find a solution to this problem before day X or you’re fucked.”

Spoilers for how that questline goes in the below paragraph:

You can buy the first bounty hunter off for a while, but eventually a second in-house bounty hunter will show up, and that guy’s salaried, and you can either help a hacker out so he’ll hack your phone-home software to tell the corporation you died in an industrial accident and there’s no reason to come after you or you can steal that first bounty hunter’s gun and either keep it or trade it to him in exchange for fighting off the second bounty hunter, although in the latter case he double-crosses you but then gets shot by the second bounty hunter anyway, so no matter what exactly you choose to do with that gun, it ends up in your hands and you kill the second bounty hunter. It’s weirdly easy given how the game goes out of its way to make you feel helpless before the first bounty hunter, like, you’re just some random prole and this guy’s a professional violence-doer with a gun, but the second you get your hands on a pistol you can immediately gun down a guy with a rifle, so your player character violence-doing abilities appear to be wholly preserved from video games in general to this one in particular.

At some point all the swords of Damocles peter out, though. One specific ending does come with a countdown timer where, when the timer hits, your options are to either take a ride off the station and abandon all outstanding quests or stay behind and forgo that option for escape forever. It’s a colony ship making a decades-long journey to an uninhabited star system, it ain’t coming back for you, that’s the whole reason it works as an escape route – no bounty hunter is going to chase down an unexceptional escaped emulated human if the return trip is measured in decades. But if you decide you don’t want that ending, every other ending will wait around for you indefinitely, which does lead to a late-game where you’re basically just spinning plates. Without any more swords of Damocles hanging over your head, your victory is inevitable. This is especially the case since, by now, you’ve probably got a pretty optimized medicine setup (it took me about 5 dice on average to get a medicine dose at the end of the game compared to 7-10 at the start).

This is too bad, because the mechanics work quite well up until that point. You always have a bunch of stuff going on, and if you make poor decisions or get a bunch of bad rolls at exactly the wrong time, you don’t lose the game, but you are going to have to make some choices about what you need to take care of immediately, what can be put on hold, and possibly, what needs to be left to expire completely. The primary consequence for messing up is that specific side quests sometimes have timers and you might have to drop the ball on those and accept a bad ending for them in order to avoid dropping the ball on the corporate assassins hunting you down so you don’t get a bad ending for the whole game.

There are a couple of rough edges, mostly in how there are two countdown clocks related to ending the game, one that gives you a bad end and one that gives you a good end, and they’re unlinked from one another. This is so that you can evade the bad ending by reaching the good ending fast enough, which makes sense, but it does mean that after averting the bad ending through other means, you can just fuck around indefinitely before triggering the countdown to the good ending, except triggering that good ending countdown happens about halfway through that questline with no warning. You’re already at a point where you should be on a countdown but aren’t, and then you complete a step of the quest and suddenly the countdown is a real mechanical thing and not an affectation of the narrative. I like that I ultimately did not have enough time to get that good ending while wrapping up some important side quests and was thus forced to choose between joining a friend on a voyage to a better life or sending him on alone to stay behind and help the station thwart a plot by a megacorp to take over the station (a rival to the megacorp that built the station, who’s trying to muscle in on the star system). What I don’t like is that I was only in that situation because I blundered across a tripwire for a main plot countdown.

Also, this is such a minor thing, but I really liked the variety of different character voices available in the writing of your dialogue choices. There’s no specific list of personalities to pick from like a light side/dark side BioWare thing, but there’s a big difference in how reserved you can be, and although none of the dialogue choices mean anything mechanically (the story branches are all carried by other mechanics), I really appreciated that I was able to choose to play a very reserved character who frequently remained silent and let other people talk. It felt fitting for a robot fugitive, especially an emulated human – a human consciousness pushed into a robot body who, through a combination of strategic reasoning and life imitating art, ends up adopting some robot tropes.

The game drops this ball in a couple of specific conversations where I was required to express strong emotions, particularly galling since this tended to happen over issues that I wasn’t that emotionally invested in. The game assumes I am deeply invested in the fate of all emulated humans, but I was not actually that bothered when one of them got killed in the crossfire of some mercenary infighting. I never met that person, I have no idea how responsible they were for where they ended up, and I don’t particularly want to swear vengeance or offer forgiveness to the killer. The killer is a flat-out murderer but I have no personal connection to the victim and my primary superpower is that my grocery bill is about 20% of everyone else’s, which isn’t super helpful in bringing killers to justice, so I’m happy to let this one slide on the grounds that I’m not responsible for things I have no power over.

Overall, Citizen Sleeper has good (though not great) writing and worldbuilding, simple mechanics that can keep up the pressure and make it hard to absolutely ace the game on your first playthrough but are forgiving enough that you won’t be totally crushed by them, so you end up making a lot of interesting and emergent choices about what you care about. It’s a roleplaying game in the very literal sense that it focuses first and foremost on playing a role, and it’s mostly pretty good at that – dialogue choices let you express yourself line-by-line, and mechanical choices let you make decisions about what you do and don’t care about broadly. It’s a better rendition of what Cultist Simulator was going for, replacing the realtime plate-spinning with turn-based resource management and better balanced so that you don’t get the game’s designer telling you how to turn the console commands on and recommending you abuse them liberally any time you’re screwed by the dice or getting bored. I’m not singing its praises from the rooftops, but there’s so little competition in this genre that if this is something you want, Citizen Sleeper is one of the only places to get it.