A simple and enjoyable game system with a well written and interesting setting, but a lack of real threat and waiting can hurt the pace and ability to do and to excel at everything with lack of consequence can hurt the themes.
Citizen Sleeper combines a tabletop RPG style system with visual novel aesthetics that has some minor survival elements. You play as an escaped Sleeper, a sentient robot body with a mind emulated from a scan taken from a live human body. Your rights to be seen as a human signed away, memories of your life as a human fragmented, and the Essen-Arp corporation views your body as their property and wants you back and if they can't get you back your lack of access to the supplements now required by you will see you drained of power soon enough. You and many other Sleepers attempt to escape your poor treatment by stuffing themselves into cargo container, the one you were in landing on the run down and partly lawless space station of Erlin's Eye.
You have a choice in character creation where you will start with a negative one when using one of the five skills but a positive one in another skill, as well as a passive perk associated with your positive skill. Every day will be given 1-5 dice that are rolled on the start of each day valuing from 1-6. Attempting to complete tasks will either require you to assign an item or money or to assign one of your dice to a challenge, any positive modifiers based on your skills (from -1 to +2) will be added to the die and that will decide on your percentage chance of positive, neutral (a weaker success or a success with additional bad effects), or negative results. The number of dice your receive each day is based on your current condition level that will drain each time you sleep or if you are damaged in some way, finding or buying food is also necessary as reaching a low enough energy state will cause you to lose additional condition each day. Exploring the setting is a large part of the game as meeting certain characters, traveling and opening up new paths on the station, and performing tasks like asking for directions or searching a new location will unlock new points of interest. Your skills are Engineer (fixing mechanical devices), Interface (hacking and remotely controlling things), Endure (withstanding harsher conditions or repetitive labor), Intuit (awareness and consideration of problems), and Engage (more direct and physical solutions to problems) and their associated passive skills will allow you to more easily manage your decaying condition, haggle better when spending money, reroll your daily dice rolls once a day, etc.
Your goal is going to be to get yourself to a point where you become self sufficient enough to manage your condition and energy needs while also being able to complete the game's tasks and quests (called drives). When a drive is complete you will gain an upgrade point which can be used to increase your five skills enough to get up to a +2 in rolls associated with them and each skills two passive perks. You might decide a life on the station is freedom enough for you going through all the tasks you can while living day to day, especially if you have been making friends, working to improve the place, and feeding a stray cat each night, or you might find people that you can travel off of the station with or an entirely different way to leave your current existence behind. Deciding if the life you've managed to build is enough or if surviving day to day isn't as interesting as the possibility to find something more is a large part of each of the game's endings (choosing to leave will allow you to then reload your save right before you left so you can instead choose to stay allowing you to continue with your other goals without needing to go through the entire game again, also nice since the free DLC requires you to be on the station).
It's a simple and enjoyable game system, very well written, a nice art style, and gives an interesting setting to explore but a lack of real threat and waiting for things to happen can hurt the pacing. When you start the game your failing condition is a threat, you don't know what's going on at the station, events are constantly happening, and there seem to be more branching paths to minor events as even one of your first jobs can take a more negative route for your relationship with the first person you meet if you keep failing or putting work off with the limited starting dice you have. What will soon happen though is that you will get to a point where money is no longer an issue and fully repairing your condition and raising your energy is also easily taken care of once you have more locations unlocked, with those threats gone you will also frequently have multiple events where you are either waiting a few days for timers to run out so they can continue or you will just slowly pick away at the ones you want to do first as almost none of the events have any kind of real time or failure state.
Early on you learn you have a tracker installed on you and someone is coming to the station to find you, this would get you to think you might die or have some large penalty if that happens. Instead it has to happen, you meet a bounty hunter who ends up letting you stay if you pay the bar tab he runs up over the next week, and if you don't pay the tab he will just show up to steal all your money with no penalty if it was less than what the tab was anyway. The events and the characters you meet through that situation are all written well and enjoyable to go through but the constant ability to do everything in the game and to never be in any real danger seems to be a bit at odds with the feel and themes of the game. Nearing the end you can even come close to maxing out every single skill so it's not even a game where you are forced to specialize for certain tasks in a particular playthrough, there are a couple tasks that you can't do without having a +1 in the skill but by the time you reach them that's not much of an issue. On the other hand, there are multiple people having tantrums about their inability to complete the first part of the DLC successfully in the 12 or so days the event gives them after they start it, and as I completed the event without really trying (because, even though you are locked to one save, you can definitely make use quits to the main menu before the auto save triggers on skill checks or dice rerolls) of in six days I suppose I can't really say what in the world other people do in games like this to cause themselves so many problems.
It's a great game, just a little odd and feels a bit against message when technically in one playthrough your character is a savant in all areas, is basically every factions friend and the friend of an AI now influencing major station systems, inherits a ship repair business, improves the food quality of the station, joins a commune but also has three other places to live, etc, etc, etc. Is the daily grind of life enough is an easier question to answer when you are rolling in money, friends, and allies.
Screenshots:
Citizen Sleeper combines a tabletop RPG style system with visual novel aesthetics that has some minor survival elements. You play as an escaped Sleeper, a sentient robot body with a mind emulated from a scan taken from a live human body. Your rights to be seen as a human signed away, memories of your life as a human fragmented, and the Essen-Arp corporation views your body as their property and wants you back and if they can't get you back your lack of access to the supplements now required by you will see you drained of power soon enough. You and many other Sleepers attempt to escape your poor treatment by stuffing themselves into cargo container, the one you were in landing on the run down and partly lawless space station of Erlin's Eye.
You have a choice in character creation where you will start with a negative one when using one of the five skills but a positive one in another skill, as well as a passive perk associated with your positive skill. Every day will be given 1-5 dice that are rolled on the start of each day valuing from 1-6. Attempting to complete tasks will either require you to assign an item or money or to assign one of your dice to a challenge, any positive modifiers based on your skills (from -1 to +2) will be added to the die and that will decide on your percentage chance of positive, neutral (a weaker success or a success with additional bad effects), or negative results. The number of dice your receive each day is based on your current condition level that will drain each time you sleep or if you are damaged in some way, finding or buying food is also necessary as reaching a low enough energy state will cause you to lose additional condition each day. Exploring the setting is a large part of the game as meeting certain characters, traveling and opening up new paths on the station, and performing tasks like asking for directions or searching a new location will unlock new points of interest. Your skills are Engineer (fixing mechanical devices), Interface (hacking and remotely controlling things), Endure (withstanding harsher conditions or repetitive labor), Intuit (awareness and consideration of problems), and Engage (more direct and physical solutions to problems) and their associated passive skills will allow you to more easily manage your decaying condition, haggle better when spending money, reroll your daily dice rolls once a day, etc.
Your goal is going to be to get yourself to a point where you become self sufficient enough to manage your condition and energy needs while also being able to complete the game's tasks and quests (called drives). When a drive is complete you will gain an upgrade point which can be used to increase your five skills enough to get up to a +2 in rolls associated with them and each skills two passive perks. You might decide a life on the station is freedom enough for you going through all the tasks you can while living day to day, especially if you have been making friends, working to improve the place, and feeding a stray cat each night, or you might find people that you can travel off of the station with or an entirely different way to leave your current existence behind. Deciding if the life you've managed to build is enough or if surviving day to day isn't as interesting as the possibility to find something more is a large part of each of the game's endings (choosing to leave will allow you to then reload your save right before you left so you can instead choose to stay allowing you to continue with your other goals without needing to go through the entire game again, also nice since the free DLC requires you to be on the station).
It's a simple and enjoyable game system, very well written, a nice art style, and gives an interesting setting to explore but a lack of real threat and waiting for things to happen can hurt the pacing. When you start the game your failing condition is a threat, you don't know what's going on at the station, events are constantly happening, and there seem to be more branching paths to minor events as even one of your first jobs can take a more negative route for your relationship with the first person you meet if you keep failing or putting work off with the limited starting dice you have. What will soon happen though is that you will get to a point where money is no longer an issue and fully repairing your condition and raising your energy is also easily taken care of once you have more locations unlocked, with those threats gone you will also frequently have multiple events where you are either waiting a few days for timers to run out so they can continue or you will just slowly pick away at the ones you want to do first as almost none of the events have any kind of real time or failure state.
Early on you learn you have a tracker installed on you and someone is coming to the station to find you, this would get you to think you might die or have some large penalty if that happens. Instead it has to happen, you meet a bounty hunter who ends up letting you stay if you pay the bar tab he runs up over the next week, and if you don't pay the tab he will just show up to steal all your money with no penalty if it was less than what the tab was anyway. The events and the characters you meet through that situation are all written well and enjoyable to go through but the constant ability to do everything in the game and to never be in any real danger seems to be a bit at odds with the feel and themes of the game. Nearing the end you can even come close to maxing out every single skill so it's not even a game where you are forced to specialize for certain tasks in a particular playthrough, there are a couple tasks that you can't do without having a +1 in the skill but by the time you reach them that's not much of an issue. On the other hand, there are multiple people having tantrums about their inability to complete the first part of the DLC successfully in the 12 or so days the event gives them after they start it, and as I completed the event without really trying (because, even though you are locked to one save, you can definitely make use quits to the main menu before the auto save triggers on skill checks or dice rerolls) of in six days I suppose I can't really say what in the world other people do in games like this to cause themselves so many problems.
It's a great game, just a little odd and feels a bit against message when technically in one playthrough your character is a savant in all areas, is basically every factions friend and the friend of an AI now influencing major station systems, inherits a ship repair business, improves the food quality of the station, joins a commune but also has three other places to live, etc, etc, etc. Is the daily grind of life enough is an easier question to answer when you are rolling in money, friends, and allies.
Screenshots: