Citizen Sleeper, a light RPG with dice-based gameplay, feels like a classic sci-fi story with contemporary ideas and worries. It’s tight gameplay; I felt on edge most of my time in this decaying space station, always a sense of urgency maintaining my body and getting enough scrip for my greater goals.

All this is underpinned by some great prose. It’s not quite on the level of Disco Elysium or Planescape: Torment, but even after taking in positive initial impressions, Citizen Sleeper has a surprising amount to say. The developer said they wanted to tell a story about those on the fringes of capitalism, where many of us have had to learn to survive. I think they nailed it.

The player is a sleeper, a human-machine hybrid detached from the corporate network, having to start from zero. An interesting concept itself, the story is that sleepers came about as a loophole in AI prohibition: put a human to sleep and copy them into an artificial body for indentured servitude. The means of corporate control is a built-in body deficiency. You’ll degrade without a very specific chemical. The sociological concerns presented by these concepts and putting these kinds of escapees in a “normal” society are also interesting. I never know who to trust as I try to survive, knowing that merely being off the corporate leash puts me at the mercy of someone looking for a cut of the bounty. Or, I might be taken advantage of by someone that knows I can’t survive without stabilizer. That’s just the start of it.

Very cool experience, and refreshingly compact (I was through the main story in under 10 hours). There’s a sequel coming, and I’m eager to get more of a taste of the game world.