Citizen Sleeper

or, where is my mind?

burrow down

My body is a cage

You let the little girl die. You didn’t mean to. Didn’t even want to. But you forgot. Got distracted. You’re always juggling a dozen different things, including keeping your body from literally falling apart. You forgot you needed to babysit her for her dad so that he could work on the ship preparing to launch, get a chance to enter the lottery to get a ticket to escape the broken station.

You wanted a chance out. That’s what you were working for too. You needed to get out. Knew you needed to help him too, but you were also ducking a bounty hunter, debt, trying to track down that idiot who said he could get the tracker out of your shell of a recycled body, and just so many other little things that kept piling up, so when you went to work on the ship, it felt almost therapeutic. An escape from everything else hanging like a milestone round your neck.

You worked and worked day after day while you avoided that bounty hunter and incrementally became friends with people by doing them favors at the expense of your health and wallet. But some of them even started to like you a bit. Stopped treating you like Frankenstein’s monster. Started seeing, for the first time, the human you once were—the human you still are, despite your body.

My body is a cage

When you finished getting that big colony ship ready, you felt satisfaction. Relief. Finally, you were escaping.

You had never felt a rug being pulled out from under your feet. Knew the expression, sure. But only that. Never thought of it as a physical sensation.

And then they told you and all the other workers—who had broken their bodies to get that ship back in space—that the lottery would include none of you. This ship wasn’t for you.

Thanks for the help, now kindly fuck off.

And then the girl and her father were there, starving. Dying.

You wanted to reach out, to make them whole, to tell them it was an accident, that you’d gotten distracted, that you meant to give him your place.

But did you?

Did you forget?

Or did you so desperately want to leave that you conveniently just kept not going to help them?

My body is a cage

Raise your Fist

Citizen Sleeper is a narrative game about choice. It’s both profoundly simple and surprisingly powerful.

Each day can be thought of as a turn, or a round. At the beginning of each day, you lose two of six health bars representing your hunger. You also lose a single space from a separate health bar representing the integrity of your body, which is designed to fail and fall apart. You also get a certain number of dice to roll. At full health, you get six. As your body deteriorates, you get fewer dice per day.

With these dice, you perform actions. The higher the number, the greater the chance for success. Low numbers are bad, unless you use them for a different system that may as well be called hacking, which requires specific numbers to perform the action. So rolling a One is bad, unless one of these hacking terminals requires a One.

You sold your body back on earth or were forced to sell it due to debt. Now you’re trapped in a body designed to fall apart and become obsolete, but you can work harder than most humans.

Some see a value in this. They hire you for almost no money to do mundane tasks for them. These people are not interested in you or the person you were. They just need something loading or unloaded, scrap metal dealt with, or maybe someone to wash dishes.

You need to do this menial drudgery because you need money or you’ll starve. More importantly, you need money so that you can pay for the medicine that keeps your body from falling apart. And it is expensive.

They may as well have just called it Insulin and set this in Appalachia today.

But this is the game loop. You roll dice and keep yourself alive. After you’ve performed a task enough time, you finish the job. Sometimes this means you' begin to form a sort of friendship with the person who hired you or the people working beside you. Sometimes it means the person who hired you no longer needs you and they send you away, never to speak to you again.

Sometimes it means you fixed a colony ship based on the promise that you’ll be one of the colonists. And then, when you finish, you find out that you’re too poor, too inhuman to be allowed aboard.

It really is a simple game, mechanically. You spend dice and either succeed or fail at a task. If you succeed or fail at the same task enough times, your relationship with someone will change. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

But the depth of this game is in the dialogue and its many branches. This is a game about talking to the NPCs. It’s a game about friendship and identity and political solidarity.

Who you become is up to you. And, too, the random rolls of dice that put limitations on your choices.

the ghost in the shell of it all

I have a complicated relationship to the cyberpunk genre. I have said previously that it’s more a fashion style than film, literature, or game genre. What I mean is that we use the aesthetics of cyberpunk as laid out by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner yet we rarely do anything else with the promise of the genre.

And I do see a lot of promise in it. It’s why I’ve written a few cyberpunk novels! All of them pretty distinctly un-cyberpunky by most people’s definitions. But it’s because this genre has, to me, become stale, and so I’ve tried to stretch it in various ways.

It has been very rare that I’ve loved a cyberpunk piece of media. I often love parts of them, but I often find the execution leaves me wanting something so much more than what I got.

Even the foundational text of the genre: Neuromancer.

Neuromancer sucks!

Maybe I’ll say more about it someday if I can ever get through it. But it’s also a perfect example of the problem I usually find in cyberpunk. It begins ecstatically with one of the best first chapters in any novel I’ve read. From there, it quickly begins to corrode and collapse in on itself.

I do like some cyberpunk. I’ll let you guess which famous examples are the ones I think are great. If you’ve been reading here for months, you probably already know.

But I have felt that cyberpunk is more promise than anything else.

And then I came across Citizen Sleeper. It is unequivocally cyberpunk. It wears the aesthetics and even the politics. But even though its dressed in a style defined forty years ago, it still manages to be something new.

Something exciting.

It manages to say something new in a genre known for trying to say a whole lot about a few very specific questions.

It’s definitely the best and maybe most important work of cyberpunk since The Matrix, which came out 23 years ago.

go not gently

Citizen Sleeper is a game about people. About relationships. The choices you make and even some of the choices you don’t make will change the relationships you have with people on this shattered station. Narratives will open up because you chose one direction over another. Some narratives will close because you chose to forgive someone who wants you dead while others will open.

I made my choices. I could have made different ones. At certain points, I almost wanted to reset and rewind or even start over. But I kept going. Kept choosing.

I watched a child die. I watched a man’s world collapse. I held the empty body of another Sleeper who had found love in the arms of a human and I wondered what this meant for me, as another sleeper struggling to stay alive, to escape bondage, to find friendship and meaning in a life made for toil.

A game about stories. It is full of stories. Simple stories. Complex stories.

Human stories.

Human lives.

After about six hours, I had come to my ending.

I say mine because it was mine. It was the ending I chose. It was the ending my many choices led me to. I could have had other ones. Maybe they would have been better ones. Maybe some of the characters I loved would have ended at happier places or done things that continued to surprise me.

But I didn’t make those choices. Didn’t know that the choices I kept making were leading me towards a place where I finally escaped the cage. Don’t even know if, at the point I got to in the game, if that was what my character even wanted anymore.

But I chose.

And that matters.

Part of me is interested in starting again. In making better choices. In seeing the conclusion of different storylines. But I also know I never will.

I am deeply satisfied with the experience of this game and the ending I made for myself. And that’s rare, though maybe it shouldn’t be.

Citizen Sleeper isn’t a perfect game by any means, but it is a profoundly interesting one. It tells a lot of stories in its relatively short runtime and almost all of those stories carry significant weight as you wander the labyrinth of choice.

I recommend not playing it with a guide or anything like that. Don’t even look up anything about it. Go in blind. Roll your dice. Make your choices. Stay alive. And find what meaning can be made in a digitized life.