I will not mention Disco Elysium in this post.

Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-adventure game much heavier in the way of narrative than adventure. From the outset, you're given a handful of six-sided dice per day and told that you're allowed to spend them however you want in order to find your place onboard this ringworld station. Your start is going to be appropriately alien and confused, with you getting lost, and making mistakes, and taking hits to your very limited resources. As time marches on and more of the station opens itself up to you, you'll be given the opportunity to spend your dice on an ever-growing list of activities under the threat of time pressure. You can only do so much, the game warns, and your time is the most valuable resource of all.

This isn't true. You can do everything in one playthrough without any real challenge.

In fact, there's so much to do that your struggle is mostly going to be figuring out how to spend your off-days, when all of the NPCs who can progress the story wind up gating you behind a timer of arbitrary length before you can speak with them again. To be frank, I can barely remember most of their names. They all fit a bit too neatly into their archetypes — Good Dad with Cute Daughter, Hackerman, Gold-Hearted Gang Member — and you can kind of see where all of these people are going to end up hours before they actually get there. The story as a whole is too obvious for its own good.

This is a world where that which is moral is that which is correct. It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies. You get a bounty hunter set upon you in the early stages of the game, and his entire deal is that he’s willing to not turn you in so long as you keep paying his bar tab. I was ready to dig in, pay up, and take the hits at the cost of buying my own freedom. However, you only need to pay once, because he gets so shitfaced after the first time you pay him off that he drops his gun the next time you see him.

You can give it back to him.

You can give the guy who has a price on your head his own gun back, and you suffer literally zero penalty for this because the bartender stole his bullets while neither of you were looking. He then gets kicked out and completely ceases to be a problem. In terms of pragmatism, giving a bounty hunter who’s coming after you a gun is a miraculously fucking stupid idea. But if you look at it idealistically, you’re refusing to point the gun at him because you’re not going to do violence unto violence, or something. The same thing happens again with the Killer AI; killing it results in your friend NeoVEND dying with it, while binding it eternally in a hellish loop from which it can never escape is the more difficult and thus more “moral” option, so NeoVEND gets to live.

There’s a long, long questline of exposing corruption on the station in the interest of getting your tracker disabled, and it seemed like the closest thing to a core path that the game was offering. There’s a timer constantly ticking down to warn of hunters being set upon you, with the final and most dangerous one taking something like 24 cycles to complete; an in-game “day” is counted as one cycle, so this is an absurd amount of time. I managed to get the tracker disabled with about 16 cycles to spare. And just like that, my body was no longer considered the property of my owners. They wouldn’t come looking for me, anymore. I was free. I could live out the rest of my days onboard this station in my little apartment that I made, hanging out with my stray cat and moving crates all day to buy fungus bowls and stabilizer shots while helping out at the greenhouse commune.

I was satisfied with that, but the game told me that I wasn’t. If I wanted to see credits, I was going to have to either figure out a way to leave the station right now, figure out a way to leave the station eventually, or destroy my body to live in the cloud. The credits rolled for every time I insisted on sticking around — three times in total, four with the DLC — and it wasn't hard to get the feeling that I was overstaying my welcome.

Uh. Why?

No, seriously, why? The Eye is a decent place with good people who I just sunk tons of time and resources into helping. Why leave? Why even think about leaving? Where am I gonna go? A different station, somewhere else, to do it all over again from scratch? Why should I forsake my body and go full computer when we’ve made the point time and again that Sleepers aren’t just programs, and are in fact the sum of their parts, tangible or otherwise? I know that the game needs to end, because a story can’t go on forever, but why like this?

I suppose this was a common complaint, because the DLC addresses the problem by tossing in what you could charitably call an actual endgame scenario, and what you could less charitably call rocks fall, everyone dies. I'm not sure how many people here have ever read a fanfiction as it's being published — don't be shy, I know it's a lot of you — and the conceit of the expansion has that same essence of someone on AO3 writing their responses to reader comments directly into the story. There's no impetus to ever actually want to leave the Eye? Add one in ex post facto! There are far worse things you can do with your narrative, but there's something about saving your actual ending for extra content that betrays some development struggles.

Speaking of, Fellow Traveller needed to get Gareth an editor. I know it's the absolute peak of being a Melvin to complain about a game having typos, but there are a lot of them in here. Like, grammar and spelling mistakes which are consistently wrong. Count the number of times that quotation marks close without punctuation at the end. Characters will use homonyms rather than the words they're actually shooting for to amusing effect, as seen in the phrase "make hole". It's sloppy. I get that writing this many words is hard, and it's just as hard to leaf back through it all to make changes, but I've seen way more people complaining about this than I haven't. Very few people care about spelling mistakes as much as I do, so imagine how rough it must be for them to notice.

But I did still like Citizen Sleeper, and maybe that's why I'm being harsh on it. There is something here that I think could have been outstanding, but it's a little half-baked. The DLC doesn't seem to have helped it much, if at all; when you're loaded to the gills with chits and meds and scrap, the game devolves into just slotting dice into the square hole until text appears. It drags. Ironically enough, for something that's "tabletop-inspired", this would probably work a bit better with a human GM and players at a table, rather than between one person and a computer that has no sense of whether or not its wasting your time. At least your game master has to keep to a human schedule and will thus hurry you along to the juicy bits.

The Sleeper is no Harry DuBois, but at least they're not Kay from fucking Norco.

Very similar to West of Loathing, with the same good writing and style of gameplay. The combat didn't feel great - most of the interesting things to do were on the first turn, and by the end of the game many encounters just were played out the same way over and over. I also felt that the over-abundance of equipment made it tricky to figure out the best equipment for any one time. One final issue was that the game dragged out in the end for me, there were a few places where the RNG caused some items I needed to advance to not spawn for a long time.

It feels like if the game was a bit tighter and shorter that it would have been better. The writing is fun - and that's the primary reason to play this one.