Citizen Sleeper goes out with a whimper, a slow pan of the whole Eye crawling into view while its spacious soundtrack plays out its last song. Maybe The Eye meant more to you than it did to me in this moment. The stacatto release of Citizen Sleeper's DLC has an obvious impulse to imbue The Eye with real time, like comics and television, but, without reimagining the core systems, the gap mostly highlights the games biggest faults. The character writing and navigation remains the strongest element, but it all drowns without any return onramp. The ease at which you can absolutely steam roll every DLC episode with zero preparation just feels like such a massive oversight. I understand that it's free DLC, but making updates is an opportunity to revise and edit. The endgame pre-DLC already had this issue and tacking more frictionless tasks on to my level 1000 Sleeper makes the most interesting ludo-narrative synthesis eat shit. Even playing along with the continued individualist cynicism that sours most of the endings or the character arc twists, Purge is a really pathetic end to an otherwise compelling imagination space of a game.

Reviewed on May 29, 2023


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