Backlog Bingo 2025: Citizen Sleeper

Citizen Sleeper is a 2022 RPG from Gareth Martin (as "Jump Over The Age"), his second game. It has a sequel now, which was part of why this ended up on my card, but also one of my partners said it "absolutely fucked" and I tend to respect eir opinions on more narrative games. Also, the dev cites a few TTRPG systems I've been intrigued by as direct inspiration, and that's cool.

I usually don't jive with games with hard time gates alongside hard time limits, but I think that Citizen Sleeper displays a level of expertise at ludonarrative resonance that many of the other games that I disliked could barely aspire to. So it's probably best to hit the mechanics first. The short short version is that, at any point, you have a set of actions you can attempt: talk to this guy, buy this thing, do this job. Doing this involves placing a d6 on that action and getting the "positive", "neutral", or "negative" result: a 6 guarantees the positive result, and numbers descending from there have progressively worse ratios (a 5 is 50/50/0, a 4 is 25/50/25, ...) At the beginning of a day, the game rolls up to 5d6 based on how healthy you are, and those are all you get for that day. Maybe some days you roll well, and you can do a bunch of hard or risky things. Maybe some days you roll poorly, and you don't get much done that day. That's life~

Compounding this is the fact that you, the player character, are a Sleeper: basically a human consciousness implanted into a robot and enslaved by a company. (Very cyberpunk, mmhm mmhm.) You managed to flee your slavers, but a) there's a bounty hunter after you, b) all of their robots suffer from planned obsolescence, so you will slowly die if you can't find a supply of the space drugs that keep you alive. This gives you an immediate clock, because you start the game already a bit diminished, and the longer you go without finding a drug source, the more you'll deteriorate, the fewer dice you'll start a day with, the worse your life gets.

This sounds like pure Ammy Poison™, but I ended up loving it, because it's executed masterfully. Lastly, the game has a series of "clocks" (this is the official in-game term): yellow ones are time gates with no further context (think "this person needs three days to do the thing"), red ones are time gates for undesirable things (think "in twelve days the ship this guy needs to be on will leave forever"). But the game is very explicit about how long you have, even when that wouldn't really make narrative sense, and I think that this bit of fudging helps the game work a lot more mechanically smoothly. Being occasionally forced into waiting on something prevents you from hyperfocusing any particular objective, and the time pressure of things like "oh, I need this thing to happen before I get tracked down but the guy who can help me is taking so loooooong", or "starting tomorrow I'm going to need to find another source of drugs or everything is going to start getting harder" really helps the game feel tense but never quite at a rate that feels overwhelming. I'm reminded of Disco Elysium, and that's probably intentional, as both that and this have a lot of the same DNA.

The writing here is quite excellent, at turns heartbreaking and anger-inducing and inspiring. I vibe heavily with the core theme of "you've been abandoned by an oppressor, and now you have to make a life for yourself, and life can look like whatever, can be shaped however you're able to shape it, can involve whoever you want and not involve who you don't, but there are forces in the world that are going to keep trying to make your life hell anyway and we can only craft a life worth living together". There are eight endings, but many are mutually exclusive, and it is possible to brick a save by exhausting every possible escape option (though this is exceedingly unlikely from a roleplaying standpoint). I ended up taking a deal that screwed me, personally, in exchange for giving young child a future, and that ending felt...bad, honestly, but I'm going to treat it as "canon" for the playthrough even though I can easily just load my save and grab an alternate version of the same ending.

I just really enjoyed this! All of the DLC is free, so I'll probably hit that up soon honestly. I could use more of this universe.