Citizen Sleeper review: Dice roll to survive a cyberpunk future

When I played the Westwood Blade Runner game, I always wondered how it would feel to play a game that allowed us to play as replicants. Fortunately, Citizen Sleeper will enable me to live those dreams, except set in an original universe.

Developed by Jump Over The Age, Citizen Sleeper allows players to control an on-the-run Sleeper and ensure his survival on a human-occupied ship.

Blending narrative and roleplaying gameplay along with chill-pop art style, Citizen Sleeper will enable players to survive their day-to-day life on the ship, one dice roll at a time.

Living on a ship at the unknown fringes

Players get to play as Sleepers, a synthetic being who escaped the corporation responsible for building them, hiding inside a space station that has gained a reputation for becoming a refuge for pirate gangs, refugees, and more.

Hunted by Essen-Arp, the company responsible for creating and disposing of Sleepers when their de-commission time arrives, the players get to survive their day-to-day life on the ship.

They meet various sorts of people and do tasks to survive and hide from the people hunting them as per the orders. What happens from here onwards is up to the player to explore and find.

The story blends the classic CRPG elements and puts its own twist (Image via Citizen Sleeper)

Citizen Sleeper’s story is told through a barrage of texts, written with details on what is happening around the players, with no voice acting accompanying it. Gameplay is similar to Computer Role Play Games, or CRPG, where reading is necessary to understand the story.

Apart from the main story, players will encounter various personalities who play a significant role in the player’s journey and day-to-day life throughout the ship.

Each character is well written and is, for the most part, tied to the quests given to the players, unlockable by conversing with them. For example, the cook gave me the task of finding mushrooms from a part of the ship for him to cook after buying food from him regularly.

Dragos, one of the many characters players will meet in the game (Image via Citizen Sleeper)

In another instance, the player will stumble upon a character who offers to hide the player from the people out to apprehend him in exchange for help. Depending on the outcome, the story will change.

There are many instances where depending on what path the player takes, the story of the game changes, essentially providing multiple playthroughs for the storyline.

Overall, the story is captivating, well-written, and mysterious during the initial hours, where I fumbled around the ship trying to figure out what was happening.

Choose your class to be efficient

Before starting the game, Citizen Sleeper asks players to select one of the three different classes in the game:

Machinist, who excels in engineering, but are scared to engage. Sleepers assigned to this class are diligent, careful, and structured.
Operator, who excels in digital interfaces, but has lousy endurance. Operators are great with drones and remote machines and do their tasks with them.
Extractor, who have great endurance, but a low intuition. This class generally works in resource extraction and has a high level of endurance.

Extractor, one of the three classes in the game (Image via Citizen Sleeper)

Depending on what class the player picks, some tasks will be easier to do compared to others. Extractors will be able to do heavy lifting jobs much more efficiently during skill checks than Machinist or Operator classes because of being efficient in endurance.

Class selection also decides how well the initial few hours of grind work goes. I preferred using Extractor for its positive skill-checks in heavy manual tasks. It helped a lot in stacking up the cryptocurrency and the in-game credit used to purchase services and items.

Wake up, dice roll, and pray for a good skill-check

The gameplay of Citizen Sleeper is an interesting one, where it emulates the CRPG formula of reading and dice rolls, deciding the outcome of actions, but adds its quirk to it. Each cycle, which is one day in the game, the player will wake up with a bunch of dice.

Erlin's Eye, a spaceship where the game takes place (Image via Citizen Sleeper)

The values on rolling the dice are randomized in every cycle and are spent acting on the ship. The higher the number, the better the chances of doing something better. Using a high numbered dice to do work that requires endurance will help perform that better.

The lower numbers can be used to perform actions on the data cloud, in which players let their consciousness run afloat in the digital space, going around hacking systems. In this portion of the game, players need to spend dice to hack, matching the required numbers.

The Data Cluster (Image via Citizen Sleeper)

In both instances, taking damage or an unsuccessful skill check will reduce players' energy, which will make them hungry. This is where taking care of players' hunger comes into play, where they need to keep themselves well-fed.

Players are also required to keep their health in check, as being a damaged Sleeper has its downsides, so periodic doctor visits are necessary for survival.

To complete both of the tasks mentioned above, credits are required, which players can earn by doing various tasks on the ship. Doing tasks requires the dice, and once again, depending on their skill, and dice number will determine the efficiency of the work.

One of the many tasks players can do in the game (Image via Citizen Sleeper)

All of the above tasks go hand in hand with the game's storyline, which will give players drive, which are the upgrade points used to improve their skills required to do tasks.

The game, however, has one major gripe that would’ve been a great addition to the game, a save system. Citizen Sleeper has autosave, which saves the game when players complete a cycle.

The skill tree (Image via Citizen Sleeper)

Unfortunately, the game excludes manual saves, so if players want to save their game in particular points, they wouldn’t be able to.

Regardless, the game is an excellent example of where developers want their players to sit back, relax, and enjoy the minimalist, chillhop cyberpunk story.

Graphics and music

Citizen Sleeper is one of those games with no graphic settings and will run effortlessly in any system out there. The ship as a whole is rendered 3D with an isometric camera angle.

The unique art style of Citizen Sleeper (Image via Citizen Sleeper)

The characters are hand-drawn and worked on by the talented Guillaume Singelin. There is not much to talk about regarding graphics, except that it is pretty, and the chill-hop art style helps set the tone of the game and its cyberpunk backdrop.

Another place where this game excels a lot is the music. Created by Amos Roddy, the music blends cyberpunk themes with soothing tunes, giving a futuristic touch to the game and emulating the distant cyberpunk future feel.

In Conclusion

Citizen Sleeper is a great example of letting players have the freedom on how they want to do things. Featuring multiple endings, some of which require additional playthroughs, beautiful art, and an exciting gameplay system to make it stand out from the crowd.

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Heavy reading, however, can be off-putting for people who do not enjoy it. Regardless, if one looks past that, they can expect an excellent indie cyberpunk experience that is bound to get them roped in till the end.

Citizen Sleeper allowed me to live my life of being a replicant in the Blade Runner universe while not being a Blade Runner game.