Citizen Sleeper casts you as a consciousness in an artificial body, tasking you with doing what you can to keep that body running in a world in crisis.
You awaken in this body, but you know it’s not yours. Your consciousness has been sold be the original “you” to a corporation so they can have a cushy existence. You, on the other hand, get to toil forever. Or at least until your body breaks down. To keep you motivated, your new body needs food, shelter, and a chemical to keep your mind from rejecting your artificial body. Don’t want to die? Guess you’d better find some work. Which can be difficult, as your home, Erlin’s Eye, has been left to wither and rot by the corporate masters who want to punish the people there for daring to wish for a better life.
How you survive is up to you. You start each day with a set of dice, and these will dictate whether you succeed (or only have a CHANCE to succeed) at what you do. If you scour for salvageable parts, pick up an odd job at the bar, try to suss out valuable information through hacking, or just spend the day helping people out, the dice decide what your outcome is. It means no one day will be completely successful, but if you want to live, you have to try. However, a few bad days without your body’s needed chemical will start costing you dice. Which means more chances to fail. Which then causes you to get deeper in the hole and fail further.
Citizen Sleeper creates a stunning cyberpunk vision of the cruelties of capitalism brought to bear, especially in the artificial scarcity that’s been imposed on your machine form. That you can so easily start to slip into disrepair from a few bad days, and then start a spiral of decay that you can’t escape, drives home the cyclical experience of poverty and the inescapable vortex that can come from a single awful moment in your life.
Citizen Sleeper is available now on the Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store, Humble Store, Epic Games Store, GOG, and Steam.
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