Citizen Sleeper

Grabbed me instantly with the art direction, flashy cyberpunk-y UI, cool character designs, resource management, tension, initial plot intrigue, but about halfway through the tension and resource management evaporates entirely, there's quite literally no choice, not even ilusion of choice, and unless you're just bad at the game you can essentially do every objective there is to do, a lot of the secondary cast ends up being mediocre, half the endings are extremely underwritten and the Greenway/Bliss ones didn't even really feel like resolutions at all.
Definitely one of those games that went from a solid 8/10 start to a 6-7/10 towards the end, not sticking the landing whatsoever, where something like Disco Elysium is pretty fantastic and far more emotionally evocative throughout.
Lem & Mina, Emphis, Tala and, I guess, Feng are the only characters I cared about, a lot of the others felt emotionally forced or had some godawful almost formulaic resolutions. The sequel has the potential to fix most of the issues, improve the writing and make the endgame far more interesting story/gameplay wise, the parts where this game failed the most.

Literally a perfect game.

Citizen Sleeper fills a unique niche. It is a cyberpunk game that aims to create a comfortable and inviting atmosphere for the player. This contradicts the class struggle, existentialism, dystopian economies, and flawed hierarchical social orders that typically define the genre. All of these things are present, of course, and the game maintains a cyberpunk angst for its entire runtime. However, at the center of the game there is a distinct theme of hope and community. The main character of this game is its setting: a complex and rotting space station that has lived through economic collapse and tragedy. It has been revitalized through the efforts of its inhabitants and the refugees that made it their home, and those stories are the focus of the game. The Eye could have easily been portrayed as a lawless and deadly place, but instead Jump Over The Age opted to show us tales of hope. For every story of corporate exploitation in and around The Eye, there is a person who is carving a life for themselves in this expansive, artificial world. The player’s own story is just one of the dozen or so simplistic narratives that you experience on The Eye, expressed through dice-based time management and simple dialogue options. The methodical gameplay is punctuated by moments of tension and drama, culminating into a beautifully paced and comfortable ride through a beacon of hope in the dark abyss of space.

Citizen sleeper is a beautiful and concise tabletop-inspired CRPG in the same vein as Disco Elysium, but with an interesting cyberpunk setting and a set of survival mechanics that keep narrative and gameplay tension high. You play an escapee android on the run from their corporation and wind up on a large space station with a city-sized population of characters and cultures. Survival is the main goal as you scrounge for a serum to keep your body from rejecting itself that only the company you’re running from produces. In your quest to survive you encounter a host of interesting characters from different backgrounds, all with their own drives and goals and this is where the world-building occurs in Citizen Sleeper. Underpinned by a hauntingly beautiful ambient electronic OST, Citizen Sleeper beautifully touches on themes of AI, self-actualization, what it means to be human and the constant tug-of-war between corporations and workers without ever feeling too preachy. All this is told via interesting characterization and atmospheric moments rather than bloated exposition.

mann i wish i liked this one more.

the core dice-based gameplay system feels very engaging and tense until you realize that the game has no real timers except for very obvious moments (with a lot of time to complete them, and no reason NOT to focus purely on those objectives). it makes the second half of the game feel more like mindless cleanup of quests rather than a climax, especially when there are so many story threads going on at different stages.

the dice start to feel less like a mechanic and more like an awkward means to an end, having to manage them to get to the next scene rather than for survival. by the end of the game, i just had copious amounts of money and resources and nothing to do with it, with my final quest just being me completing what i needed to do in two cycles and then sleeping in my bed for the following six waiting for a timer to tick down.

the writing is... well, it's alright! it seems pretty typical for this kind of cyberpunk setting. a lot of well-meaning and generally likable characters, but i think i'll struggle to remember any of them in a few days... they just start to boil down to the archetypes they represent (rude and sarcastic bounty hunter with a drinking problem, single dad with a perfect child who's just trying his best, etc.)

the little stories you go through feel similar, they're things i've seen before and they're done here just fine, though they all end up feeling a bit disconnected from each other (even when characters from one are referenced in another). i don't think the writing is particularly bad anywhere, but.. i just can't find any reason why i would want to learn more about this world and these characters compared to any other science fiction story.

and the small stuff? it's fine too!.. the music has its moments, sometimes it fades in right when it needs to, and sometimes it's a bit out of place. the art style wasn't quite for me but i think the characters were all designed and rendered with a lot of detail–i liked the look of the player character in particular. the ui all looks very pretty, as does the "eye" hub world you move along, though it can get pretty cumbersome when you have twenty or more little icons and most of them are just for useless small jobs to get money without progressing questlines.

everything's fine, it's just...

i dunno. as of writing, this is my GOTY mostly because i didn't play many games this year and those that i did aren't worthy of that spot either. it's really not bad, like, 6/10 is a positive score, but... god, it's just not special, you know?

anyways, i'll forget this game in a week. might forget this review too!

Old school adventure games and visual novels for the most part are videogame genres that struggle to hold my attention for too long. The gameplay itself tends to be very static, and that combined with the usual long playtimes, I must say that its a genre were i havent found many titles to love. Citizen Sleeper is not a game in those genres, but it does feel like its core owes a lot to those genre. What distinguished it is a cycle mechanic, that essencially acts like a day/ night cycle, in which every new day you are given 1 to 5 dice rolls (according to our overall condition), that you use to beat the game properly. In comes what the games is genious, since there is a clear element of survival, in which you must juggle the very limited dice rolls and figure if you are going to progress one of the multiple open quest lines, get money, get energy or improve your condition.

Early on the struggle is real, its only through ending certain quest lines that things get gradually easier. When it comes to that point however the rotine of the game has already set in, and I must say that its really satisfying to just handle its survival mechanics, considering how rought the early game feels.

On top of that, the game has a great cyberpunk universe, great visuals, a lot of likeable and diverse NPCs, interesting quest lines, and ultimatly a huge amount of possible endings. Another gem for 2022