#citizen sleeper

it's weird i never noticed before how... comfortable it is, to play a game that speaks your language

a game that treats hating corporations, capitalism and imperialism not as a position you can choose to take but as the baseline. i mean it makes sense, you play as an escapee, litteral corporate property escaping far, far away. and in this place everyone is a refugee, no one here comes from here, and you're the most recently arrived immigrant until far into the game. by that point you are part of this place, you belong ; the roles have shifted and you find yourself making the same choices those who helped you when you arrived did. and you get to witness these refugees, not just as political or logistical problems, but as people, bundles of history and culture and future that they have brought with them

and it's damn good about disability too. i'm not an immigrant, not a refugee. i can't understand these things viscerally, i know them. but i immediately understood when the game said "your body is failing and no corporation will help you. you will have to seek regular medical assistance and buy your medicine at whatever price it is available at or you will die". and then i saw that "your body is failing" had very real and immediate consequences, and it felt almost too on the nose. the more you deteriorate, the less you can do in a day. the worse a shape your body is in, the more urgent medical care is. and the worse a shape your body is in, the harder it is to make money. and your body degrades fast. symptoms reappear mere days after getting fixed up and it doesn't take very long to be reduced to half of your base operationnal capacities. keeping yourself alive is a chore, sure, but keeping yourself healthy ? almost impossible to do for more than a few days. it's wildly inefficient, between twice and thrice the money you need to just scrape by. at the start you'll oscilate between the good days and the bad, living short days doing close to nothing just so you can stretch the medicine a bit further. at some point these gameplay element fade away, the game becoming trivially easy about halfway through. but even so, even when you have in your pockets 10 times the money you'll ever need, it stays at the back of your mind. that you require constant upkeep

and the game doesn't let you forget that you're disabled. some of that can also be understood as a representation of queerness. or blackness. whatever the case, you are Other. you are different, and you are different even from those who are different, in a way that "marks you" as one npc says. you are always available as a beacon for people to hate you without needing a reason to, and it is brought up several times. yes, you belong here, but not in the eyes of everyone. and you always remain different, even from the downcast around you. some navigate it elegantly, some less. the drifter originating from a military town tiptoes around the subject, torn by their curiosity and unsure how to talk to you about it. the food worker sees you eyeing his scars as you talk about the condition that affects you, and he recounts his old factory life, how most of his crew faded away from arthritis and osteoporosis. the gang member missing an arm treats you with the same detachment and normalcy as she does her prosthetic arm. the small child calls you something that in another's mouth could have been a slur, but in hers it sounds like the moniker of a cartoon character. the refugee leader studies you from inside his suit, the only thing that allows him to leave the bed and move around, an iron lung on two legs that looks like a cage. he doesn't like to talk about it

my favorite scene is one that happens towards the end of the game. many people might not have understood this scene in that way, but to me it was so obvious i didn't even register the artifice it was wrapped in. the game, in very simple terms, asked me if i wanted to die. gave me the choice. the game doesn't stop you. you can choose to give up and dissolve away, what happens next you never know because you are dead. but if you chose to live, to continue despite how tiring it all is, despite that deep fatigue of the soul that drags you down, to continue to inhabit that failing decrepit body and struggle day after day in that hellhole, what you awake to is warmth. an old woman, eyes glossy and smile radiant as the sun, a friend, propping herself up with her clutch with one hand, squeezing your hand with the other. she understands death closely, she isn't affraid. she has long accepted her death, and yours, and she is happy that you will live another day. later, she tells you of her death. she doesn't have long. she doesn't try to bargain. you don't either. she already knows how she wants to die. you tell her you'll miss her. the feeling is mutual. you say goodbye

i can't not love a character like that, like you love a friend, a mentor, a soul that understands you deeply because you have taken the same path in life. i don't know if it is noble or grim to have accepted death like this. what is more stupid, to fear it or not to? all i know is that as an ex-suicidal person, very few can understand death like that. people always say that "death is just a part of life", but they still don't want to talk about it. it's tiring. only the fools and the priviledged can afford not to think of their own mortality

My first thought is that it was easier than I expected. I expected that managing Condition, Energy, money, and other resources would be difficult, requiring a careful balancing act to just scrape by. In reality, the closest I came to danger was almost running out of Condition before I figured out that W and S scrolled the map, giving me access to the doctor who you can buy fixes from.

After that, I slowly got more and more careless with my resources. I occasionally let myself fall below half condition, but only when I was trying to be miserly with my cash and stabilizer. After that, I could keep myself close to max condition almost freely and waste dice on whatever tasks felt compelling at the moment.

There are some time limits, but most of them are pretty lenient. You have to accumulate cash and scrap and other resources at various points, but you don't have to go that far out of your way. You constantly spend cash on food and stabilizer, until you find other ways to get energy and better ways to make money.

What peril there was came from my unfamiliarity with the game. What happens when this timer runs out? Where can I find the resource this character needs? Who is that mysterious thing that shows up whenever I hack six times? How much will this cost? Now that I know the answers to many of these questions, my second playthrough will be much less suspenseful.

Luckily, the cast makes up for this deficiency. I found it easy to care about the characters. The shady street doctor who helps you source the proprietary drugs you need to live; the ex-PMC shipwright and his adopted daughter; the mechanic in the hub who cannot catch a break. Even the street vendor selling fried fungus has a bit of endearing personality.

Now, this is part of what makes the game feel lacking in peril. Every character has a sympathetic edge to them, or at least an angle that's supposed to make them sympathetic. (Even the bounty hunter who extorts you in exchange for not immediately dragging you to Essen-Arp, I think; I mostly ignored him after he stopped being a threat, but the last bit of his subplot I saw was him asking you to help pay off debt he accrued by being a drunk asshole with a gun.) (Okay, there are some characters I don't care for.)

Anyways. The characters are consistently nice, aside from a few telegraphed as assholes. When someone asks me to give her the cost of a shiny new stabilizer vial for an opportunity to help her repair it, I should not feel so comfortable handing it over. But Bliss seems like a good egg, so either I'll get my money back with interest, or I'll get a storyline and probably some other reward.

I do like their stories, at least. They have a lot of heart, and a fair bit to say. Citizen Sleeper doesn't really have one overarching narrative; it's a bunch of stories, mixed messily (affectionate), which the Sleeper wanders into, and usually solves more or less single-handedly because they're the one with all the dice.

One criticism I have of the stories is that they all feel like the player is the only person driving them. That's trivially true, of course; the player's decisions are what determines success or failure. But no effort is taken to obscure this fact. There are clocks telling you exactly how much you need to do to solve problem X, and they only move when you do things.

Which ties into a broader problem. The Sleeper is supposed to be lost in an unfamiliar world, uncertain of their path forward, and the narrative mostly supports this. But the mechanics are extremely transparent. You might not know what happens if that clock fills (if you haven't played before), but you know exactly how long you have before it fills, and usually what you have to do to prevent it.

Also, no matter what task you're doing, you know that you'll get the best outcome if you plug in a 6, and that you won't get a bad outcome if you plug in a 5. Playing the not-stock market and gambling should feel like...well, a gamble. But they don't. It's a great source of cash, if you have a 6 to burn. (And if you have 4-5 dice, you have 50-60% odds of getting at least one six.)

This is not a universally bad thing. It's a trade-off, and it makes my strategy brain go brr. But it does shift my mindset from "desperately hoping to survive in a harsh world" to "calculating the best path to accomplish my numerous goals". And I do like calculating that path; figuring out how to best use my resources to babysit so Mina's dad can work, and hack data the whistle-blower needs to expose a capitalist collaborator, and figure out where to find those mushrooms that the street vendor wants, and also scrape together enough cash for my next stabilizer shot.

...shit, I forgot my estradiol this morning.

Um, one last quick-fire criticism. I like the story and characters, but some of the implicit moral judgments seem off to me? The story expects you to be suspicious of Sabine because they used to work for Essen-Arp in an unspecified (but presumably medical) capacity, but Lem casually mentions that he used to be part of Conway's private military, and no one bats an eye at that. And it's not like Conway Extractions is suggested to be a "good megacorp" or anything, they have shady business plans in Feng's subplot.

A garden among the stars

TMBD is about Murderbot, a bot/organic construct being bought from its owner company, and leaving to figure out who it is and what it wants while being a snarky asshole who saves people anyway.

Citizen Sleeper is about the Sleeper, a biomechanical construct with an emulated human mind who just escaped its company, and has to figure out who it is and what it wants while delving into the bizarre systems of the station its on, avoiding being caught, and getting enough stabilizer so its body doesn't reject its organs.