I've never managed to lucid dream; to realize a mirror's not a mirror and to grasp at reality's curtains. For all I know, all dreams were actual realities, truly inhabited, their illusion of free will laid bare for the farce that they are.

When Sleeper woke up on Erlin's Eye, so did I - a new dream, a new reality. Citizen Sleeper has this entrancing, hypnotizing quality - in no small part due to its soundtrack - that wraps around you, integrates you in its environment, convinces you that it is real.

For you look at them through an interface, and they look at you through an android. They're not real to us, and we're not real to them. But even despite these obstacles of synthetic cables and electric signals, there's still warmth in there. In the sharing of stories.

And with this warmth comes intimacy, and with this intimacy comes belonging. When Sleepers first arrive, they're aliens, refugees, neighbors by necessity. You need this labor, I need this drug. Dependency is a shackle, and as such, we're forced together.

For a long time, I resented dependency. Ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes, I've resented depending on drugs produced by corporations. The struggle to obtain it. The looming dread of knowing that, if they wanted, they could just stop production one day, and I couldn't to do anything about it.

We're all part of society, sure, but with medical dependence, you're truly unable to even function away from industrialization. Technology is your savior. Technology is your curse. Self-sufficience will never be in your grasp.
So you latch onto others. Despite the alienation, you smile. You open up. And you hope for the best.

That's the beautiful contradiction at the core of Citizen Sleeper. How much do you open up? How dependent should you be on others? How fragile is this connection, how breakable is this community?

Lem's trust in you to take care of Mina. The Gardener's offer to untether yourself from pain. Moritz' second chance with Bliss. The Singers breaking away from the Hearth.

We all want connection. We all want freedom. You gain one, you lose the other. A careful dance. An uneasy navigation. But as the Sleeper, you'll never truly have both - your android nature creates a wedge between you and any human. And your dependence on Essen-Arp shackles you to a provider.

...I don't think there is a definite answer to this question. It doesn't even make sense for one to exist. But I think this game made me understand better my feelings on the matter.

Independence is nice, but... I don't mind depending on a community. On connecting with others, even for a brief period. Even if we never see each other again.

We're all floating in this beautiful sidereal ocean we call life, ocasionally bumping into each other, orbiting one another. This game, it just, it really makes me want to believe we're all trying our best. That we can do this. That I should persist.

"To persist is to believe that a future, any future at all, is possible."

There's a lot I could say about this game. It's good, gameplay's good, scenarios look good...

But listen, the first time I said 'I love you' to my boyfriend was while we were playing this game. It was something innocuous, a slip of the tongue - he helped me cross a bridge, and in an almost jocose tone, I whispered... 'Thanks, I love you'.

That's what this game allows. Actual cooperation. Actual banter. Actual fun between partners. That's its premise, that's its goal.
And it fucking nails it.

I get the appeal, but this is not for me. For context, I was absolutely hooked on '20 Minutes Till Dawn' - another Bullet Heaven - but this game doesn't have the charm that game has.

Collecting these items, walking around aimlessly... There's no juice to it, no aspiration of creating a new build, no personality to attach myself. And granted, it's not like 20MTD is a Hugo-award winning piece of literature - but just the artstyle alone is something for my imagination to envision a quest against evil. I guess I just don't get what Brotato is aiming at - is it humor? A tongue-in-cheek vibe? Nothing here astounded me, unfortunately.

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't find it in me to keep playing this game. The trailer hooked me, both with its artstyle and gameplay premise, but the gameplay experience is sadly very different.
Put simply, the enemies are wack. Level design is wack. Platforming is wack. There's nothing too egregious, but these small little things keep nibbling at your patience until you just give up from frustration. There's not enough here to press me to keep persisting.

This is not a hopeless game, nor a sterile one - it has charm, and it has promise... but it just didn't stick the landing.

Top-notch soundtrack and artstyle, both dripping with personality. To express this more concretely, I liked this game enough to learn how to create beat tracks on it and give it to a close friend as a birthday gift.

Despite most of the songs being about insecurities and mental difficulties, I just feel... safe(?) while playing it. Nothing else to care about but these white little monsters, endlessly creeping towards me with the sole purpose of signaling the next note to hit. It's escapism, I know. I guess I just like feeling comfortable, never letting myself become tense.

This game is good, there's no doubt about that - from the moment I first opened it, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen or my mind off its narrative. My phone kept running out of battery and I absolutely refused to let go of it, even having to contort myself to stay near the electrical plug.

I'm not a movie buff or anything like that, but I am a fan of getting to know how the sausage gets made. Telling the narrative through this documentary-esque medium, blending finished movie scenes with behind-the-scenes cuts and interviews... this dance around the fourth wall is just very entertaining. Like I'm there with the characters, as a part of the crew.

There's also the secret scenes. Ominous, tricky to find at first, very confusing. The underlying narrative surrounding them is very intriguing, though even without the actual story, just the inclusion of these scenes in the game turns this slightly mundane collection of clips into a haunted house. It's a carrot on a stick, something to look forward to, to piece together.

I liked this game.

It's personally not my vibe, but my boyfriend loved it. It's very trope-y, but for a horror movie fan, just the experience of being able to control the narrative really enthralled him. The totems are a good design idea to make the game fairer while not being so on-the-nose with foreshadowing, though sometimes I did disagree with the scenes they reveal, as some don't help much.

It's a good experience for sure, though I'm not sure how much it will hold up in subsequent playthroughs, as the narrative doesn't change as much as it implies to change. As much as Detroit Become Human's race allegory fails, I do think that that game excels at actually giving the player choices that matter, and as such, Until Dawn kinda pales in comparison.