Citizen Sleeper is a indie cyberpunk survival RPG set on an abandoned space station. The player takes on the role of a sleeper, a human consciousness that has been digitized and put into an artificial body by the Essen-Arp corporation. Essen-Arp sees sleepers as property, just another asset to exploit until they eventually fall apart.
Having escaped Essen-Arp and found refuge on the abandoned space station Erlin's Eye, the player must make choices and navigate a precarious existence in an attempt to survive in "the ruins of interplanetary capitalism." Citizen Sleeper has a huge focus on narrative, and its expansive story has plenty of NPCs to meet and befriend. In a game that's inspired by tabletop RPGs, the player's choices drive the entire experience. The player picks their actions every cycle, choosing how to best spend their time.
Citizen Sleeper lets the player choose their path and gives them free rein to do just about anything, something that's inspired by tabletop RPGs. Like most tabletop RPGs, Citizen Sleeper has multiple different classes to choose from at the start of the game and five different skills that are affected by the class the player picks. The skills also influence the various actions a player can choose to take each cycle.
Like in Dungeons & Dragons, a die roll, combined with the player's stats, determines the likelihood of success for an action. However, Citizen Sleeper doesn't make the player roll when they choose to perform an action. Instead, each cycle, the player receives a limited pool of dice that can be spent on actions. The player can then pick which dice to spend on any given action, making this aspect of the game more akin to digital dice board games like Tharsis or Elder Sign: Omens. The number of dice a player has access to is based on their character's overall wellbeing. In other words, the healthier the character is, the more actions they can do each cycle.
Actions aren't completed immediately. Instead, each success progresses a clock mechanic, like in the TTRPG Blades in the Dark. Once the clock is full, the action will fully resolve, and the better a result, the more the clock progresses. A positive outcome progresses clocks by two points, a neutral outcome progresses clocks by one, and negative outcomes progress the clock by zero. Higher numbers equal a higher chance of a positive outcome, with a six being a guaranteed positive outcome.
As the player progresses through the game, they pursue and complete drives. Instead of quests, the player advances the plot through the stories and activities that are important to them. The drives that players pursue will shape their skills and unlock new abilities, representing the player character's growth. This is somewhat similar to Disco Elysium, but the real similarities come from how the game relies on dialog and text to tell its story.
What sets Citizen Sleeper apart from other survival games is its emphasis on story. This is not a game about being stranded in the wilderness, crafting tools, and fighting monsters to survive. Instead, the player needs to earn the necessary money to keep themselves alive. Citizen Sleeper is a very modern story of survival, one that focuses on community, self-identity, freedom, and economic precarity. There are opportunities for the player to help other struggling characters, all of whom are just trying to get by. Despite being set on the fringes of capitalist and corporate dystopia, it's not ruthless individualism that leads to survival but friendship and community.
In many ways, Citizen Sleeper is a visual novel with additional RPG elements. It emphasizes the story as well as the relationships formed between the player and the characters inhabiting Erlin's Eye. Citizen Sleeper subverts common narratives in both survival and science fiction, including the narrative that the single competent man can set the world right again by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Citizen Sleeper instead offers a far more realistic and touching story of someone getting through each new day and finding joy in the community and people around them.
